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An Interview with Gracelin Baskaran About Rare Earths

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Good morning,

This week’s Stratechery Interview is with Dr. Gracelin Baskaran. Baskaran is the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Baskaran started her career in the platinum mines of South Africa, worked on mineral-related issues for the World Bank, and started the Critical Minerals Security Program at CSIS. Baskaran has written a number of books and papers about the mineral industry, including an excellent primer earlier this year on the rare earths issue entitled Developing Rare Earth Processing Hubs: An Analytical Approach.

In this interview Baskaran teaches me Minerals 101, with a special focus on rare earths. We cover why the economics of these industries are so challenging in general, and how China has moved aggressively to dominate the sector. That context is critical for figuring out how to fix the problems, and why Baskaran believes there will need to be a global solution. We also discuss how the U.S. makes things so much harder on ourselves than geology alone dictates, and why this issue is yet another story that is ultimately about energy. I thought this interview was very educational, and a bit daunting in terms of laying out the challenges the U.S. faces with regards to China in particular.

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Gracelin Baskaran About Rare Earths

This interview is lightly edited for content and clarity.

Topics:

Mining Economics

Gracelin Baskaran, welcome to Stratechery.

Gracelin Baskaran: Thanks so much for having me.

You are, I think, a very popular subject expert these days, the context of which I want to get into, we’re here to talk about rare earth metals. But before we get to that, I always like to learn more about the people I’m talking to, their background. Where’d you grow up, what’d you study? What was your path to the Center for Strategic International Studies and being here on this podcast, which I’m sure was your lifelong goal, so congratulations on achieving that. But what’s the story from there to here as it were?

GB: So I grew up in an auto manufacturing town in suburban Detroit, and I grew up about five minutes from a Ford plant and five minutes from a GM plant. And from there, the road to ending up in a mining town in Africa was all but linear.

But when I was 21 years old and I finished college, I got a Fulbright and the Fulbright took me to Rustenburg, South Africa. And Rustenburg, besides being an intensely lonely place, is where 70% of the world’s platinum sits — the biggest use for platinum is the catalytic converter in your car, and it was really fascinating because it’s really where you started seeing a transition where in 2008 platinum prices were $2,200 an ounce, and then 10 years later they were about $600 an ounce because we assumed that the EV transition would take off.

After my Fulbright, I spent some time traveling the world, worked in Australia, and then I went to the University of Cambridge, I moved to the UK and I did a PhD on the platinum sector because I just thought it was so fascinating the way that the metal sector brings together economics, geopolitics, tech, innovation, and it all collides into one world, and the beauty of a PhD, or at least mine, is in the course of four years, you can be desperately wrong. So when I started I was like, “The platinum sector is really booming”, and by the end I was like, “Oh no, it’s a dead industry at this point”, and that’s really where I started in the mining industry, so I come very much at this from a mining economics point of view.

And then when I spent another six years working in Africa and primarily really broadened working on other metals — copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel. So by the time I moved to Washington, D.C, I now spent 10 years working on critical minerals, that’s all I knew, and I got to CSIS and I started working in our energy security program as our research director and what I quickly realized is that my heart didn’t really beat for hydrogen, oil, or gas, what really kind of kept me going was the minerals. So I went to our CSIS leadership and I said, “I’d love to start a critical minerals program”, and they very graciously were like, “All right, let’s do it”. Really in 18 months seeing how minerals have blown up has been the most fascinating thing, and it’s not just an energy story, it’s a national security imperative, it’s an economic competitiveness story, so really being at the forefront of that.

That’s a great foresight. It’s like you planned it all, whether on purpose or not. You mentioned something, a “mining economics point of view”. What does that mean? What is the key factor about mining economics that makes it unique from just general economics?

GB: Commodities have such unique variables, and there’s a reason that capital markets don’t work efficiently when it comes to critical minerals, and it is that you have so many risks. So you have geopolitical risks, which is a world that we are living in now. You have innovation risks, all of that cobalt that I thought I needed 10 years from now when battery chemistry is fully changed, I don’t need that, but I’ve sunk a 50 to a 100-year investment in which could be $500 million to billions of dollars. The third thing is if minerals were all the things we say they are, why are we not investing in them? Why do we have this bottleneck? And a lot of it is because there’s a disequilibrium in the world right now with supply and demand.

Which direction is the disequilibrium? Is there too much supply, too little supply or where does that tip?

GB: We have so much supply on the market right now, and that’s really coming from China, they keep overproducing and it’s actually forcing western companies out of operation. So to put this into context for you, in the last three years, lithium prices have fallen by 85%, nickel prices by 80%, and cobalt by 60%. So companies are struggling to operate at a time when we know we need a lot of these materials because the economics of it aren’t checking out.

And is this overproduction on purpose? Is it to knock out all these western companies to result in China dependence?

GB: I can tell you one thing is Chinese companies aren’t operating profitably by-and-large either, but they are willing to absorb long-term losses in order to gain a strategic monopoly on a lot of these sectors.

I’ll give you an example: Chinese companies in Indonesia five years ago were producing about 500,000 tons of nickel a year, now they’re producing over 2.5 million tons a year, and what’s happened is nickel prices have fallen so much that BHP, an Australian company, has closed their operations in Australia and Glencore, a Swiss company, has closed theirs in New Caledonia.

So that dominance, that willingness to absorb loss, has given them a dominance and the ability to weaponize minerals and cut us off.

Rare Earth Primer

I’m going to conduct this interview, I think you’re already touching on a lot of key points, but as sort of a total newbie to this space, a stand-in for everyone in the tech industry who I think is suddenly very worried, arguably, they should have been worried before, but they’re very worried now. But let’s start with the story you are telling about — you haven’t even mentioned rare earths yet — but is rare earths just one of the examples of an attempt to dominate mineral production generally? Because I think it’s interesting, you just mentioned nickel, you mentioned platinum, you mentioned cobalt, is this actually a much more widespread issue than just the rare earths that came up this week?

GB: If you think about the last two-and-a-half years, China has weaponized. Before they got to rare earths, they did germanium and gallium, which we need for our chips. They did tungsten and antimony, which are super important for defense technology, and then they got to rare earths, it’s part of a larger strategy to cut us off and weaponize minerals.

But I want to go back to your question about rare earths, there’s two things that are important. First of all, rare earths are not actually rare, they’re everywhere, but finding them in these large scale quantities that are again economically viable is actually much harder, number one.

Number two is you can mine rare earths in a lot of places, but we don’t actually process rare earths or we historically have not, which it means that no matter where the rare earths are mined — I mean, even this year until February, the rare earths that we mined in California still went to China for that processing phase, so that allowed them to build that dominance. But it’s a very small market. I need a ton of lithium, I need a ton of cobalt, rare earths are actually a small market.

Right. Walk me through the history of rare earths. When were these discovered? When do we realize these applications? Are the applications by and large technological in nature? Whether that be military hardware, whether it be the trace elements, they’re using chips or whatever, I know the US dominated this sector until 1980 or so. What’s the genesis of this entire sector? And then I guess part two, what happened after that? But let’s start at the top.

GB: So rare earths have been around for a very long time. We’re talking, they’re not a new commodity, they’ve been around for hundreds of years.

When did we realize they were useful though?

GB: Really what happened in starting about the 1950s, which is, really the United States, as you mentioned, was actually the top rare earths producer in the world we used, our laboratories, Ames Laboratory, to build an incredible advantage. So from the ’50s to the late ’80s, we were the biggest producer and we had this dominance in rare earths.

Was that military applications that were driving that investment and research and all those sorts of things?

GB: Primarily defense technologies. But really, honestly, if it turns on it probably has rare earths in it.

Got it.

GB: Not even if it turns on. If you look at a car, some people are like, “Oh, rare earths are for EVs” — nope, they’re in your seatbelt, they’re in your stereo, they’re in your door. Rare earths are actually this commodity that we take for granted, but they’re used in everything.

What is it about them that makes them so useful?

GB: They are the most powerful permanent magnet, which is actually really important. If you put a really good permanent magnet next to a fridge, you would basically pull the fridge off, so for defense technologies in particular, there’s nothing really that you can substitute at this point.

Got it. So is it just the magnetic properties or are there — for example, what’s their use in chips? I know particularly as chips have become more advanced, there’s questions about rare earths in there. Is that a magnetic thing or are there other properties as well?

GB: Rare earths are actually used in advanced semiconductors including memory chips and logic chips and actually when you look at the most recent export restrictions that China has applied, they’re actually reviewing the semiconductor end use on a case by case basis.

And it’s like 14 nanometer or under. So basically, “They’re really important”, is a sufficient thing to say. What happened in the ’80s to the 2000s, what’s the story there? What happened?

GB: I want to actually take you to the larger mining story because actually a story that replicated itself across commodities. For example, the United States used to be the biggest uranium producer in the world, and now we are almost entirely import-dependent.

So in 1910, we opened a Bureau of Mines in the United States, and its job was to facilitate this research and development to coordinate our mining activities, to do the exploration, to hold the geological data. But in 1996, what happened was we actually closed our Bureau of Mines and we cut a lot of our budgets, we decentralized some of the responsibilities, and we really began ceding a lot of our ground to China because at this time, China really started prioritizing the sector.

What China did, and this was inclusive of rare earths, is they weren’t just trying to mine it, they weren’t just trying to process it — when you and I were kids, we saw that everything was made in China when you opened it, they nailed the mine-to-manufactured-goods supply chain. So whether it was your TV’s, it was your Walkman, whether it was your stereo, all of that used rare earths but China had the minerals, they processed them and they manufactured them and in that time, the United States didn’t.

Like many things in life, it wasn’t a problem until it became a problem, the first time it became a problem, and sadly the United States did not wake up, was in 2010.

Yeah, I was going to about that, when they cut off rare earths to Japan?

GB: Yeah, they got into an argument about a fishing trawler and in a very dramatic nuclear move, cut them off, which is why Japan was a first mover in a lot of these ways. It’s so funny because our big mine now, Mountain Pass out in California, it was pretty much completely abandoned in the late 2000s and early 2010 to the point that it nearly became a national park. It was just so removed from our priority list because we had China.

How much awareness was there that this was happening? Was it a matter of, “China is taking all this over, but it’s fine because they’re joining the global trading system, they’re going to be a good actor, etc”? Or was this just completely out of mind and no one was even aware of the extent that it had happened until, like you said, maybe 2010 when this issue with Japan arose?

GB: It was really 2010 that we first paid attention to it, and if we had done something about it in 2010, our world would be much better today, but we really didn’t do anything about it for at least another seven years. Minerals are very interesting, and rare earths included, are a pretty bipartisan area of work. In 2017, President Trump passed the first executive order really looking at our critical vulnerabilities when it came to minerals and we’re like, “Wow, we’re really dependent on a foreign adversary for a lot of these minerals”. In 2021, President Biden passed another executive order, pretty much the same findings, and it was actually during the Biden Administration that we began investing in our rare earth processing capabilities so that we would not have to send them all to China.

China’s Chokehold

You were saying China did the same thing for minerals generally. I’ve read about Deng Xiaoping’s actual direct interest in rare earth, specifically, I believe it was his family was part of the consortium that bought that magnet plant in Indiana [Magnequench]. Was there an awareness from China’s perspective that actually this is going to be a choke point we can control? Or was this a general, “We need to control minerals broadly”, and rare earths came along for the ride? Or was there a very clear focus on rare earths from the Chinese perspective?

GB: So the minerals for China, their dominant strategy is more broad. Until about two years ago, they processed 100% of the world’s graphite. There are a number of commodities that China just basically had 90 to 100% control.

Was this strategic that, “We can control this”, or was it just a matter of the traditional Chinese story, lower cost, more willingness to tolerate environmental impacts? You can’t get inside the Chinese mind in this regard, but from your perspective, was this strategic all along?

GB: I’d be a millionaire if I could get inside the government, inside the head of the Chinese government.

(laughing) Probably more than a millionaire, be honest, but yes.

GB: Yeah, to be fair. But let’s think of it this way, I think they’re both true. I think on one hand, China wanted to be a leader economically. A lot of their economic success in these double-digit growth rates were on the back of really developing an industrialized economy and they realized that if they wanted to manufacture all of these goods, they needed the critical inputs, they needed to be able to get the minerals they need to process it. You know what they say, “If you don’t grow it, you mine it”, you can’t manufacture almost anything without mineral input, so it was part of a broader industrial strategy.

However, that being said, what they also strategically did was they linked their foreign policy and their domestic industrial strategy. China has a huge piece of land, but they actually don’t have a lot of minerals. They mine less than 10% of the world’s lithium, nickel, cobalt. Even a lot of their rare earths, they get from Myanmar. But what they did is they developed contracts, they got the minerals, they developed the infrastructure in these countries, but then all of that processing happened in China, which they built through very aggressive domestic industrial strategy. So no matter where the minerals came from, they came back to China for processing, which gave them that dominance that nobody could compete with on economic grounds or security grounds.

Right. And to your point, the mining economics bit, they actually are in the better position because if someone has built out a mine, you mentioned the 50 to 100-year time horizon, if China’s going to buy, they’re going to sell to China because they have to sell to someone.

GB: Absolutely. And to this day, the Chinese are willing to outpay. If you talk to the capital markets, they will tell you that Chinese firms will often pay three to seven times what any western firm will pay for it, and we live in a capitalistic world, you go to the highest bidder.

So what could we have done in retrospect to avoid getting to this point? I built a time machine, what year do I have to put in the time machine? Is it 1979? Is it 1989? Was this unavoidable given this willingness to invest in this regard? What could have been done?

GB: Everything is avoidable if you have foresight and you want to put money behind the problem.

So the year we need to go back to is no later than the year 2000, Y2K is what we should have gone back and thought about this. The reason is this — on average globally it takes 18 years to build a mine, from the time that I identify a deposit to the time that I am in production. In the United States, it’s even worse, it’s actually 29 years, and that’s because we take a long time to permit a mine. You have up to 30 permits, often duplicative between local, state, national. Also, Americans love suing people so our mining projects end up in court sometimes for decades, so it’s a longterm endeavor to build a mine. You really want minerals in 2025? You needed to start building that mine in the year 2000, that’s how you develop a project, and then I’ve also got to build my processing facilities, which is where we really failed.

Right. So what’s the trade-off there? Because you see numbers and you reference this before, I think China actually mines 60 to 70% of rare earths, but the actual processing is well over 90%. So what’s the bigger hole for us here? Is it the actual acquiring the rare earths or is it the processing/refining?

GB: Our big chokehold is processing because I can get rare earths from other places. So for example, now we are putting US government financial support, not just at mines, for example, Mountain Pass here in the United States, but we’re also providing financing to a project in Brazil that has rare earths. You can source feedstock from a variety of places, but it doesn’t actually matter when it goes back to China because then China can cut us off and we don’t have any of it. So we’ve got to build those processing capabilities here or else it’s like we never have access to them anyway.

Fixing the Problem

So how does that happen? Is this an issue where basically there needs to be some combination of tariffs? Does China imports need to be blocked? There need to be a guaranteed price floor? How do you make the economics work? And you mentioned that these massive permitting issues when it comes to mines, is it better or worse when it comes to building these processing facilities?

GB: So really what we need is an all-of-the-above approach, and here’s what I mean by that. Again, it varies by commodity, the reason you need a price floor is this is when that US, the Department of Defense and MP Materials deal was signed earlier this year, which had a lot of support mechanisms. NdPr, neodymium-praseodymium oxide, which is one of our key rare earth compounds, was about $54 a kilogram. So at that price point, by 2030, there would only be eight projects outside of China that could even break even with their production costs because it was so commercially unviable. What you need in that case is you do need a price floor because what I don’t want is I don’t want my Western companies to go bankrupt or have to stop operating because prices are so low, and we’ve already seen it happen. In 2023, the United States opened its only cobalt mine and it closed it in the same year because prices had fallen so much. So we complained, we’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to lean into the Congo”, but we couldn’t keep our own mine open. We don’t want that to replicate for rare earths, so part of the story is a price floor story and the reality is you shouldn’t need a price floor forever.

What we saw after that deal, General Motors signed offtake, you saw Apple sign offtake, and already those prices have gone from $54 to about $84 or $85, the price floor is $110. So I’ve already closed what my fiscal responsibility by over 50%. As there’s more demand for a reliable supply chain and companies are now willing to pay that premium. I’m a Midwesterner, and what we saw after the rare earth export restrictions in April was that Ford actually had to stop manufacturing its Explorer model in Chicago because it couldn’t access these materials, so of course now we’re willing to pay a bit more to know that I won’t have to stop producing. Price floor is one part, but I need more than that.

So other mechanisms that become really important is I need concessional financing. Capital markets, because a lot of the risks that we’ve talked about, often tend to view this sector as too risky to lend to, but when the US government provides cheaper financing, we also see that banks are more willing to invest in that because they see it as a key de-risking mechanism.

The third thing I would add is government offtake helps because you’re not going to be able to sell everything to an American firm and so what we’ve seen this government do is say, “Okay, well we want a stockpile”. The recent budget in the US included $2 billion for a stockpile because if there is a supply chain disruption, I want to have enough to cover our national and economic security insurance, so they can backstop that by buying some of it.

Where does the responsibility split happen between the government and private companies? You mentioned Ford in contrast to GM. GM signs this deal to secure supply, Ford is hand-to-mouth and they’re like, “The US is building a stockpile”, which I presume Ford will then want to tap into. Is there an issue here where these companies really should have thought about this more and done a better job and now we’re just going to bail them out?

GB: I applaud General Motors because they’ve been the first mover when it comes to OEMs on minerals. They have invested into MP Materials, they’ve invested into Thacker Pass.

It’s so funny how Ford has fallen. Ford was building rubber plants in Brazil famously like 100 years ago and now they’re like — it’s like the meme with the big strong dog and then the little dog that’s like, “Oh, can I please get some neo…?”, I can’t even say the name, it’s very sad.

GB: Yeah, can I have some neodymium? Literally, right? And General Motors, Thacker Pass lithium. They have continuously played the first mover and I think the markets reward that from a supply chain stability perspective, whereas Ford is in a much more precarious position because they haven’t moved. So General Motors, again, across the board, have done extremely well by prioritizing the sourcing of their inputs.

When you talk about an approach is going forward, you mentioned having the price for, you haven’t mentioned the government buying the excess. What do private companies need to do generally? Is it just mimic General Motors? Does there need to be some government mandate for companies to stockpile or to insure themselves so we don’t get into this moral hazard trap where the government’s basically ensuring the entire industry? It’s $2 billion. I have this issue, and I talked to Greg [Allen], which is he talks about, “Oh, it’s a huge program, it was like $6 billion”, I’m like, “$6 billion? That’s like Apple’s revenue in three minutes”. The numbers seem so small, it’s frustrating we’re in this position.

GB: Yeah, $2 billion is not a lot is the short answer. Look, I think we have a lot to learn from Japan because they were the earliest hit by these export restrictions, Japanese firms are required to hold a stockpile and then the Japanese government also holds a stockpile.

Got it.

GB: The whole burden does not sit on the government. And in a way, Ben, I think some companies have had to do this. The reason that semiconductor firms have been able to continue production even with disruptions to gallium and germanium is because they’ve had their own stockpiles and making that a more systemic effort is really only coming to the attention of the private sector now, it’s been a really hard year for the private sector.

I’ve made the analogy of insurance in the context of Intel and chips and things along those lines, this sounds similar. We have mandates on citizens of the minimum level of auto insurance they have to have, it’s almost like a similar concept for private companies of XYZ critical materials you have to have a certain amount of stockpiling to save you from yourself in many respects.

GB: Yeah, it’s good for you, I want you to help you here! And remember ultimately, most of us still believe that government debt is a real concern, so expecting the government to come in over and over and bail you out is a totally untenable strategy.

But the second thing I want to add is there’s been this perception that the last administration only cared about minerals for energy and this one only cares about it from defense and the reality from a minerals perspective, everybody should be stockpiling. The reason is this: the defense industry is very bespoke, I might build 50 satellites a year or I build some a few F-35s, a few warships, but I don’t build 50,000 satellites. If I want these big mineral investments, I need to know that I’ve got a robust offtake market and the easiest front line of that is the automotive industry, they drive economies of scale and then the defense industry is going to be a really key offtaker. The chips industry is going to become a really important offtaker. But we have to stop looking at the economics of this in a fragmented way of, “I’m just doing this for defense”, they’re all so interconnected, they all need the same minerals.

If you are in charge and you could by magic, I know this is the biggest fable possible in Washington, DC, but you could get a bill passed tomorrow that was signed by the President, what would be in this to establish this going forward? Again, is it the price floor issue? Is it tariffs? Is it a straight up blocking to drive the economics in the long run to have this structural buy-in by private industry to make sure these are viable investments going forward?

GB: So I think there’s a few things we need to do. We have focused so much on the supply side of the equation. More minerals, more places.

Oh, you’re speaking my language now!

GB: Stockpile more.

It’s all about, yes, we need to focus on demand. Okay, sorry, continue, I didn’t mean interrupt. It’s very exciting.

GB: Oh my God, we need to focus on demand. We need an incentive to source minerals for goods made in America. Without a demand signal, it is so hard for me to fix the current price environment and unfortunately, what this Administration has done is they killed the demand signal in the Inflation Reduction Act. Remember that your conventional gasoline vehicle needs 32 kilograms of minerals, your EV needs 210, that is a six-fold increase. I need that incentive to buy that car to get companies to make the investment for every other industry. So we need a demand signal that’s agnostic — it needs to be for semiconductors, defense, industrial manufacturing. So one, we needed an industry-agnostic demand signal to balance the market disequilibrium right now.

Right. If you’re talking about just an EV subsidy or whatever it might be, doesn’t that just fuel Chinese supply? How do you ensure that demand signal is received by non-Chinese suppliers?

GB: To be able to receive that the minerals have to be sourced from the US or an allied country. Right now we have something called the Foreign Entities of Concern. And under the Inflation Reduction Act to qualify for that, you had to be less than 25% owned by a Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian firm. The idea is you want to sunset that down to zero but to qualify, you have to buy from an allied offtaker, that’s really important. And then ideally, if you want to re-industrialize America, those minerals come back here for manufacturing, but I need that demand signal.

As part of this Congressional regulation, what needs to be done as far as the regulatory regime? Like you mentioned the time it takes to open these things, Americans like lawsuits, but the Treasury Secretary yesterday was talking about we’re going to do an Operation Warp Speed about this space, which entailed certain things as far as limiting liability and things along those lines. What needs to be done in that regard to make this happen more quickly?

GB: So two things. We want to streamline permitting, but you have to realize the reason that projects often end up in court is because of friction with indigenous communities. Over three-fourths of the minerals in America are located within 50 miles of indigenous land, America is one of the only countries that does not have a royalty or a benefit-sharing system, most developing countries have these.

I remember I was at UCLA law school for an event last year and the panel after me was about these same issues and these two indigenous leaders said, “We know that these minerals are not going to stay underground through our children’s lifetime, but what we would like to see is a fair share of benefits coming from that, whether it’s to fund local infrastructure, etc.”, so I think we need to think about social license to operate and ensure that the people who are sitting on this land are getting a fair share of benefits because then it’s not in their incentive to take it to court and have it be paused for a few decades. So we need to streamline permitting, but also ensure that people are getting a fair share of benefits.

Globalized Risk

Given the massive risk that is here, let’s sketch out that risk. What happens if China actually just cut off rare earths tomorrow? What happens?

GB: Our manufacturing stops. Even in April 4th when those restrictions hit, US government officials said, “Maybe we get to June before we run out”.

So that seems pretty severe. At what point is actually the appropriate action, again, setting aside the legality of how this happens, we have emergency declarations for everything that supersedes law, a lot of which don’t seem to be emergencies. Isn’t this rising to that level, and there needs to be dramatically more political will to just force some of this stuff through?

GB: We’re doing it. This Department of Defense-MP Materials deal is entirely unprecedented. There was some concerns around which authorities were being used to actually undertake a deal that included $400 million of equity. I mean, when do we have a partially state-owned mining company? But a lot of it was done on these national security emergency grounds, which give us certain flexibility with our Defense Production Act. So we’re pretty much in that phase right now of unprecedented intervention because it truly is a national security threat.

Does the US need to take total responsibility here for solving this? I mean, you wrote a really good piece that I’m going link in here, Developing Rare Earth Processing Hubs: an Analytical Approach, that both was a great overview of the issue, talked about the different countries that can help solve this issue, but then in this article you talk about, in May 2025, a Chinese company just bought an Australian rare earths project. Are we in a situation where, okay, maybe we just woke up, let’s hope that’s the case, has anyone else in the world woken up? Or does the US need to fully internalize this, do it all domestically? Or what is the role for other countries and can we actually depend on them?

GB: So those April 4th restrictions were a wake up call to far more than the United States. For example, Japan, Suzuki, the auto manufacturer, they literally had to stop manufacturing the Swift model, the European Vehicle Manufacturers Association raised the alarm there. This is actually a much larger concern than the United States, number one.

Number two, there is no way we’re going to do this alone. And I remember I was once sitting next to a Republican Senator at a dinner and he said, “I don’t know why we don’t just mine what we have here at home first”, And I looked at him and said, “With all due respect, we’re going to have about a half a battery”, because God didn’t give us the geology to do it all alone.

Do you know what China did very strategically with these export restrictions? There are 17 rare earths, they didn’t restrict all 17, they only restricted 7 of what we call heavy rare earths.

Right. Tell me the differences between the light and heavy. I meant to ask you that earlier, but can you explain?

GB: It’s the atomic weight. So you have light rare earths and heavy rare earths.

And we have more light in California, right?

GB: We have way more light, we are very scarce on heavy, and we’re building light rare earth separation facilities and they’re far more advanced. But we don’t have a lot of heavies, so the reality is I can build all the facilities I want in the world here, but I don’t have the endowments I need. I mean MP Materials, they’re doing amazing work, they don’t have the heavies out there that they need to be able to meet all of our demand for permanent magnets.

So this is where you’re going to have to work with other countries, both from a geological perspective, because countries like Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil have a lot more heavy rare earths, but ultimately we can’t process everything here, it’s not economic to bring minerals from Africa all the way over here, the closest place becomes Saudi Arabia.

Because before you process it, it’s just like a bunch of junk, most of which is going to get thrown away.

GB: It’s a bunch of dirt.

But this Australia deal is in May 2025. That’s after the April restrictions, what’s Australia doing here?

GB: Transactions were made, they were being planned for years ahead, deals are very rarely struck in two weeks. These are very tricky things, where Australia is applying a much higher level of scrutiny now. Remember that Australia was still the first country to ban Huawei, like they were also the first country to put in rules on interference in higher education from foreign countries, so Australia is certainly starting to clamp down.

What they did do quite recently, they issued over a billion dollars of financing for the Iluka refinery, it’s a rare earth refinery. A condition of the financing was selling to like-minded countries, so they too are starting to clamp down. But it takes time because the Chinese involvement in this sector is so deep and pervasive.

Short-Term Memory

I guess the challenge here is you go back to the mining economics question and it’s such a classic, everyone in tech should understand this to a certain extent, but it’s an industry that’s predicated on the upfront investment and the low marginal costs or zero marginal costs in the long run. But to your point, the extremity of it with something like mining where you’re talking about 100-year payoff schedules is so extreme, and you look at China relative to chips and cutting off Nvidia completely, or we will see how much they turn a blind eye to private companies wanting to do it, that is going to be very painful. It’s going to be very hard, it may mean falling behind in AI. But the payoff, at least in theory, is you develop your own chip industry. Do we have to be that extreme? Is there a world in which we can thread the needle, bring in Chinese supply and stockpile? In that world, does any of this stuff actually get built, or is there going to have to be a rude awakening and stuff shut down and suddenly stuff will happen a lot more quickly?

GB: I hate to say it, but China made that decision for us. China started banning exports of minerals because they can and it forces our hand to do things that we don’t want to do. So this year, April 4th was a particularly hard wake up call for us that we couldn’t just build our stockpile slowly, because China was like, “No”, and so that is the reality that we live in now, is the tension. We are in economic war, right? We are in a world of semiconductors, minerals, tariffs.

But how many people know that? What percentage of people knew that, let’s say in March, how many people knew that in April, and how many people know that today in September? Wait, October — whatever month it is.

GB: Listen, for those of us who were working kind of at the critical intersection of strategic technologies, we knew this a couple years ago.

Well, you’ve known this for ages and so it’s like you talk about today, you’ve been on calls all day, you’re the most popular person in town. But did that just happen this week? From your perspective on the other side about who cares and who’s paying attention, do you think that shift has truly happened?

GB: Let me tell you a secret that you already know. We are extremely short-term memory people, which means we panicked in April, we panicked in May, we panicked in June, and then supply kind of got restored for a lot of key entities and we’re like, “Okay, we can move on to other problems now”, and then it’s hit us again and that’s going to continue happening.

It became an acute challenge quite recently but at this point, when you look at, we are looking at a potential meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Trump, and one of the big questions were like, “What are the negotiating tactics on the table?” — tariffs, semiconductors, minerals, that list gets longer and longer. We are in a full out economic conflict that we hope doesn’t escalate to a kinetic conflict to be honest.

Because I’m curious, I was actually talking to someone in NASA a couple of weeks ago and he was despairing about the race back to the moon and my take to him was good and bad. Again, not knowing about space, just sort of thinking about the US and the way this country operates, which is I’m kind of pessimistic about China getting there first and that they probably will, but that will also probably be the best thing to happen to you because suddenly it’ll become priority number one and you’ll get all the resources and focus that you wanted. I’m like, just look at Space Race 1, right? The USSR got an astronaut into space first, got Sputnik up, and then that kicked us into rear end for the moon landing. Which we started out — this is going to be an international thing, can we get our allies to help us? Blah, blah, blah, and suddenly, actually no, we’re doing it all ourselves and we’re going to get there within a decade.

I guess the big question is, I think this country is still capable of doing things like that, but it has to become The Current Thing as it were, it has to be an all-consuming focus. It sounds like, somewhat pessimistically, we might not quite be there yet, it’s more and more people are concerned, but are we pulling every possible lever? And is it going to really take a lot of factories shutting down to get there?

GB: We are not going to do this alone, and the pure reason is we don’t have the geology to do it alone.

That’s right.

GB: I can manufacture for days, but the US at the end of the day has less than 1% of the world’s nickel, cobalt, we have about 2% of the world’s rare earths, we have less than 1% of graphite, we are not going to win this race alone no matter how we cut the cake. The question is how do we form — I mean, think about it — we used to form strategic alliances over oil, our relationship with Saudi was the defense for oil agreement that kept our economy open for a long time. The question is, “How do we work with our partners in a way that our supply chains are as close to us as possible?”, but we can’t do it alone, God didn’t give us the rocks.

Which mineral is the hardest problem to solve of these?

GB: I would say that the most complicated mineral is probably actually rare earths, and there’s a few reasons for that.

Is there one specific rare earth in particular?

GB: The United States Geological Survey just undertook its review of what is a critical mineral, and of the 55 or so minerals, samarium is ranked number one. The reason samarium is number one is when I take out a ton of rock from the ground, there’s a different percentage of every mineral in that ton, and samarium is such a small percentage of that rock that and I need more of it than that percentage is in there. So samarium is our most critical, which means that it is a high likelihood that there’s a failure of that supply chain. Niobium is right up there and rhodium is up there, and rhodium is a platinum group metal. So you pull it out with platinum, tiny percentage. So that’s what I mean by geology, I can’t will myself to have more Samarium in a ton of rock.

The Energy Problem

So you mentioned before, just to return about this hub idea, where ideally this processing refining happens close to where stuff is pulled out. How does China solve that problem? If they have all the refining and processing in China but they don’t have the geology, are they actually just shipping a bunch of dirt to China and solving it that way?

GB: Oh yeah. But China has a lot more capital than we have to be able to solve this problem. The reality is the United States does not have the capital-

What do you mean by capital, just money, or ships, or what?

GB: Money for sure is our first problem, it’s extremely expensive and remember how much Chinese financing has gone into these projects over time, so I would say that that is actually one of our big binding constraints.

The second thing, America doesn’t have the energy. Mining and processing are extremely energy-intensive, China can do this for virtually nothing because they have so much cheap coal. When you actually look at our energy prices, it is a reason that we are not competitive and it’s a chicken-and-egg problem, because I need a lot more minerals to build my energy generation and transmission, and I need that energy generation and transmission to be able to get my minerals out.

There’s the logistical corridors, right? Remember that China built this advantage through their Belt and Road Initiative to get all of these minerals to rail and to port to bring it back, so there’s all these factors that make it so difficult for the United States to catch up on our own.

The energy point I think is a really interesting one, that’s top of mind in tech generally because of AI. Is this ultimately an issue that is going to come down to the Middle East once again, where they both have the resources, they have the energy, and that’s going to be the key way to solve this?

GB: The Gulf is a crucial player, and you know what’s really fascinating? When President Biden started in office, he had a very cold relationship with Saudi Arabia. If you remember, he fist bumped MBS. Now over time, over the course of four years, that relationship warmed up quite significantly. And his energy whisperer, Amos Hochstein, went to the Mining Indaba, which is Africa’s biggest mining event, they get about 10,000 people, and he went on the main stage and said, “The Gulf is going to be a really crucial player in our mineral processing because we can’t do it alone”, and this administration has continued that.

Every Gulf country has a different approach, the UAE does not have minerals underground, but they are willing to make really quick transactions in emerging markets. Saudi Arabia is a little bit slower, but because they have Saudi Aramco, they have the reagents and petrochemicals, they have the logistical quarters, they have the cheapest energy in the world so they can become a processing hub.

Qatar, the United States and Qatar co-own a mining company. We put in $105 million, they put in $180 million. So every country here has their own advantage, but certainly from a lot of these capital infrastructure, they have certain key advantages. But it’s not one country or another country, it’s really working together, we are not going to become a leader and develop an absolute advantage in 55 minerals, so the question is how do we divvy up all of our priorities?

This energy point I think is just so interesting because I’m skeptical about capital being a limitation. I feel like if this elevated to the level of emergency that it probably is, but sort of like the space race example, it turns out we had the money to win the space race once it came down to it and stopped scrounging around.

But the energy point, it’s a huge limitation. It’s like not just building the refining and the mines and all the permitting that goes into it — that applies to energy as well. One talks about energy being the key to everything and you can literally never have too much energy, energy abundance, is this really just the downfall of this industry in the US? Is it all the same story, the sort of late-70s, back away from energy, whether it be nuclear, whether it be whatever else, the increase in regulation and permitting? It’s a cliche to say everything is an energy story, but it sounds like everything is an energy story.

GB: I think you can learn from Canada why it’s an energy story. So the reason Canada has built an incredible dominance in mineral processing for a range of commodities, but particularly military grade aluminum, is because they have so much cheap hydroelectric power in Quebec and we simply don’t have that generation capacity and that transmission capacity. When you look at the amount of energy build out — look, we are a capitalistic society in America, shareholders want their quarterly return, they are not going to do something if they are doing it at an economic loss. Until you can bring down the cost of doing business, particularly on the energy side, it’s just not economically viable. So when you look at the models that have worked globally, cheap energy is the bedrock of making the system work, wether it’s cheap coal in China and Indonesia or cheap hydroelectric in Canada.

I’ve been thinking about a lot about the Middle East in the context of AI. I suspect that the end state of a lot of these crazy OpenAI investments and deals is basically data centers in the Middle East, and it’s a function of they are willing and capable of building the power production that we don’t seem to be able to do, and it sounds like that’s kind of a similar answer here. Yes, there’s Brazil. Yes, there’s Canada, there’s other areas. But if energy production is the gating factor, and generally speaking, we may not be at peak oil anymore or whatever, or the same oil dependency, but it sounds like we’re jumping back into the exact same quagmire.

GB: I want to remind you one really important thing about the Gulf, which is the Gulf is not just looking to mine and they’re not just looking to process, it’s exactly what you said, is they actually want to be a leader in the strategic technology sectors that are mine to manufacturing a good.

So if you look at something like Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 — they want to be a top EV producer, they want to be a top data center producer, they want to be a top aerospace producer, so they’re thinking about the entire supply chain, and that story replicates for other Gulf countries, is then the whole supply chain works out and it’s your incentive to make these long-term strategic investments to become this manufacturing hub for AI data centers, etc.

The Root Problem

So I guess zooming out, we’ve jumped around and covered a lot of ground, I think the summary over here is actually this is a even bigger emergency than people think, we need to grant you godlike powers to actually get laws passed. But when you talk about this has to be a broad-based solution, you keep coming back to the geology point about what minerals are here and what minerals are not here. Is that actually the limitation, or how much of the limitation is also self-imposed in our ability to generate power, to avoid the onerous permitting lawsuit sort of issues? If we could fix the latter, which one’s harder — I mean you can’t move geology, but is that actually less of a problem?

GB: So there’s a couple of binding constraints. First is one of the most important laws in mining is the mining law of 1872 — I don’t know about you, but that’s a really long time ago. We have archaic laws governing the mining industry and that is actually a crippling constraint, so there is a lot of legislative reform that needs to happen. But as you know, it’s difficult to get things done in Congress, that’s one crucial bottleneck.

But the thing about the US, and I’ll give you an example is, it really is still a lot of it is economic geology, so we need a lot of manganese, you need manganese for steel, we currently rely on pretty unstable countries for our manganese like Gabon, which had a coup. We have not mined manganese since the 1970s in the US because it’s not actually economic viable, the ore grade is low and it’s too deep in the ground and so there’s a couple of things we need to do.

One is we need to find a way to make projects more economic where we have resources, and that’s kind of what the MP Materials deal sought to do. Second, we do need legislative reform, there’s no doubt about it. But again, it’s much harder for all of us to get Congress to do what we need them to do.

This is the point that I’m kind of pressing on, is it’s important of course that some of these minerals are not present in the geography of United States and it’s easy to point to that and say, “Look, because of this we need XYZ solution”, but it seems like me, someone on the outside that doesn’t know a lot about this, is actually a huge — I don’t want to put a number on it — but I would say larger than 50% of our problems are actually completely our fault, and we see things as regulations, as archaic laws, as lawsuit issues, as sort of laws of physics. And the reality is, those could be changed and this could be overcome, but it is almost more depressing because those feel actually even harder to fix than where the minerals actually are.

GB: Absolutely. So permitting in the US, just the permitting is 7-to-10 years, that’s a really, really long time.

And that’s for both processing, refining or mining, or all of the above?

GB: That’s mining, that’s going to be mostly mining number, and then the Government Accountability Office found that three years of that is just like the difficulty of pushing paper between local, state and national permits, so that is a long time. And do you know what that does, Ben? Just two things. If I was a mining company, if I want to do a mine in the US, I better have one hell of a legal budget knowing that that could take decades and go to court. The second thing is it’s just a deterrent to doing business, I’m not even going to start making my money back for 30 years, why would I put my capital there? So the legal and regulatory and barriers end up becoming a deterrent to getting capital markets to move even though we know the sector is incredibly strategic and that we will not manufacture anything without it.

Yeah, it’s pretty interesting how this is a consistent issue, I think it applies to the chip problem as well. The problem with chips is there’s no economic rationale for anyone to buy from an Intel when TSMC is there and to your point, it’s all a demand problem. And how do you actually fix the demand issue? I actually think it’s not unreasonable to insist actually the top X number of established chip providers buy from Intel whether they want to use it or not, it’s just that’s the reality, that’s sort of your insurance premium, it sounds like something similar is here.

One other question though, is there another route? I know there’s been efforts to actually eliminate the necessity of rare earth materials in a number of applications. How much viability is there? Is there a potential where we could actually innovate our way out of this solution such that we don’t need these minerals that we can’t get anyways?

GB: We’re never going to innovate our way out of needing minerals because you’re always going to need inputs for things, but we can need less of things and we can be more efficient, we can also recycle more. So 15 years ago, we could not get 98% of lithium out of a lithium ion battery the way that we can today and that was a product of R&D and innovation.

Is that our R&D innovation or is that Chinese R&D and innovation and how far behind are we there?

GB: That’s actually a lot of our own R&D. Listen, America’s comparative advantage to me has always been our innovation when we put our minds to something. Our labs have spearheaded some of the best technological innovation, one of the questions that this administration is contending with now is there are certain goods that have rare earth and permanent magnets in them, but we actually export them to China for them to get those magnets back out of them. So one of the things we’re looking at is if we put in a black mass export ban, can we hurry up and accelerate the development of recycling technologies for our permanent magnet?

This is where we’re throwing a bunch of trash into these ships and they’re going back all these empty container ships or bulk goods ships, and then China’s doing all the processing and re-extracting all these materials?

GB: 100%. But the problem is if we put in a black mass export ban, but we don’t develop our domestic capabilities, we’re just going to have a land full of good stuff, which isn’t a much use either. So between recycling between this innovation changes in battery chemistry between the R&D, for example, needing less rare earths in our permanent magnet, we should be in a better place in 3 years, 5 years and 10 years. But we are never going to be at a point where we don’t need these inputs.

How has your overall view of China changed or shifted through all this time? Or is this a matter of, because you’ve been in the mining space early, you’ve seen them come and dominate the space, you’ve been wary and concerned about this for years and this is totally not a surprise to you, or has it gotten worse than you expected?

GB: Oh, it’s much worse than I expected. But 10 years ago we didn’t see the escalation between US and China to the point where we are virtually in an economic war, first of all.

But the second thing that I would say is that China right now has a lot of leverage, but remember a lot of this is an economic necessity for them. Here’s what I mean by that — a huge amount of the heavy rare earths that go to China actually come from Myanmar, Myanmar is an extremely unstable region and owing to internal conflict, in February of this year, there was an 89% reduction year-on-year in their own heavy rare earth exports to China. Now China is at a complex point in their economy. As we mentioned, there’s a lot of economic challenges there, high deflation, high youth unemployment, poor property sector, soft demand, the IMF has flagged all of China’s economic risk to the downside, these factors matter, China is also trying to restore a level of economic stability.

A lot of these negotiations around minerals — could we have a stable, durable tariff policy so that we can rebound our own economy? On one hand, China has this enormous amount of leverage, it’s gotten much worse than we thought it could, it’s accelerated incredibly quickly. But at the same time, what China is, is they’re also in a very weak position right now and how this resolves will be a very interesting negotiation, but don’t expect it to be linear. I expect there to be solutions and then walk back, because that’s what we’ve seen over the last two years.

Is the worst-case scenario that a deal is cut and then we end up just not doing anything because it feels like it’s fine?

GB: I don’t think that the United States after the last year can ever go back to a point of comfort with our relationship with China, number one. Two is one of my favorite people in the world tells me I wouldn’t want to rely on my best friend for 90% of something, so even if we were great friends, we recognize that supply chain diversification is in everyone’s interest. So I don’t see a world where even if a relationship was restored, we would have the confidence to have a status quo. We will continue our diversification efforts just like we did with the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Do we need to annex Greenland?

GB: Greenland has like 200 miles of roads, I have a feeling we have a long way to go before anything is economically viable given it’s under layers of ice and has no roads.

I just wanted to see how much of a reaction I’d get and drop that at the end. Well, you’ve had a long day, lots of phone calls. Gracelin, I appreciate you coming on, this was super interesting and I think you’re going to remain a popular figure going forward.

GB: Thanks so much for having me. This has been great.

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An Interview with Gracelin Baskaran About Rare Earths

An Interview with Gracelin Baskaran About Rare Earths

Mining Economics

Rare Earth Primer

China’s Chokehold

Fixing the Problem

Globalized Risk

Short-Term Memory

The Energy Problem

The Root Problem

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player: Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

An Interview with Gracelin Baskaran About Rare Earths (Stratechery Interview 10-15-2025)

Ben Thompson<email@stratechery.com>Oct 15, 2025, 10:06 AM