CFR: Roadmap to Leapfrogging China on CMs

[Deven]

Council on Foreign Relations Report:
Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance

How Innovation Can Secure U.S. Supply Chains
February 2026

www.cfr.org/reports/leapfrogging-chinas-critical-minerals-dominance
www.youtube.com/live/kLKnmrXS0Do

Highlights:

• "The United States cannot out-mine and out-process China. Instead, it should leapfrog China’s dominance by scaling disruptive innovation, recovery, and recycling."
• "Beyond the timing challenge, expanding traditional mining and processing is unlikely to overcome the scale of China’s dominance, which spans the entire critical minerals ecosystem."
• "Make innovation a centerpiece of U.S. critical minerals strategy."
• "Use materials engineering to bypass, not replicate, China’s choke points."
• "Scale waste-based recovery as a strategic supply source."
• "Close the scale-up financing gap for frontier mineral technologies."
• "Embed innovation-led mineral security into allied frameworks."
• "Catching up to China is a daunting challenge. Even at warp speed and with significant government support, it will take the United States and its allies years to compensate for past neglect."
• Newly established National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), and DoE's Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
• "China is rapidly expanding its market advantage into the recovery and recycling spaces ... China plans to recycle battery and other e-waste and refine 75 percent of global battery materials by 2030."
• "China’s push to dominate global recycling underscores the urgency for the United States and its allies to control their own waste exports and build their own capacity."
• "Private capital alone cannot reliably bridge the multiple gaps facing frontier mineral technologies, particularly when timelines are long, the risks are greater, and returns depend on system-wide adoption rather than firm-level success. Government support is therefore not a substitute for markets but a necessary catalyst to spur private investment, reduce risk, and shorten scaling timelines."

 

[Deven]

An insightful discussion well worth watching...

How Innovation Can Secure U.S. Supply Chains​

www.youtube.com/live/kLKnmrXS0Do?si=9ODNEFKZG2ln9pFy&t=2190

• 36:30 Heidi Crebo-Rediker - Senior Fellow, Center for Geoeconomic Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Coauthor, Council Special Report, Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance: How Innovation Can Secure U.S. Supply Chains
  
• 39:34 Mahnaz KhanVice - President of Policy for Critical Supply Chains, Silverado Policy Accelerator; Coauthor, Council Special Report, Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance: How Innovation Can Secure U.S. Supply Chains
• 43:25 Nathan Ratledge - Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alta Resource Technologies
• 46:50 Sarah Sewall - Executive Vice President, National Innovation Strategy, In-Q-Tel

• The US can not out-mine, out-process, or outspend China.
• China will continue to attempt to ensure that the Western world does not control its own critical materials needs.
• The depth and the breadth of the problem is not recognized by most people.
• There is a enormous supply chain problem as well. Equipment, parts, supplies.
• MK: "Let me be really clear when I say, the problem is worse than you think. ... The problem is worse than you think."
• "Speed is key. Everything being said should have been done three years ago."
• Sovereign Wealth Fund, Catalyzing private sector involvement on behalf of national objectives ... you need a government demand signal, strategic mission focus, and with independent operation.
• Proposal: A temporary ban on the export of eWaste from the US until the resource can be better understood and documented, to incentivize domestic processing, and to prevent it from flowing back into Chinese supply chains and control. We are exporting the very resources that China is coercing us with.
• Funding research is important to innovating and to establishing intellectual property claims which fortify competitive advantages and bootstrap further technological progression.
• By 2035, the US must innovate to become the technology leader across this space and have immunity from singular or coercive supply chains.