When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump this week for a high-stakes summit, he’ll be armed with a powerful card: rare earths.
Rare earths have loomed over the U.S.-China relationship since at least April 2025, after Trump unveiled punishing tariffs against much of the world. China retaliated in part by unleashing its own rare-earth trade restrictions, laying the groundwork for several rounds of negotiations and other trade escalations before both sides agreed to a one-year trade truce that expires in November.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump this week for a high-stakes summit, he’ll be armed with a powerful card: rare earths.
Rare earths have loomed over the U.S.-China relationship since at least April 2025, after Trump unveiled punishing tariffs against much of the world. China retaliated in part by unleashing its own rare-earth trade restrictions, laying the groundwork for several rounds of negotiations and other trade escalations before both sides agreed to a one-year trade truce that expires in November.
In the months since, the Trump administration has waged an aggressive campaign to slash Washington’s mineral vulnerabilities at the same time as Chinese rare-earth flows have fluctuated. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said China only gets a “passing grade” on its rare-earth exports, and Chinese shipments of rare-earth magnets to the United States dropped again in August, underscoring just how vulnerable Washington remains.
As the two leaders gear up for their highly anticipated meeting—which could touch on issues including artificial intelligence and Taiwan—Trump still doesn’t appear to have much of an answer to China’s rare-earth card.
“The U.S. is unhappy about the flow of rare earths, but they’re also concerned about doing anything that may shut that off,” Jennifer Welch, the chief geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics and a former National Security Council (NSC) director for China and Taiwan under the Biden and Trump administrations, said during a briefing on Tuesday.
Ahead of the meeting, analysts’ expectations of potential outcomes are limited, and experts who spoke to Foreign Policy said both parties believe a truce extension is in their interest.
“Neither side wants to blow this up,” said Cory Combs, the head of critical mineral and supply chain research at Trivium China, a strategic advisory firm.
Yet even with an extension, China’s rare-earth leverage is set to loom over its trade relationship with the United States for years to come. According to Bloomberg Economics, China is estimated to continue dominating rare-earth supply chains until at least 2030, from mining to the stages of separation and magnet production.
“Despite all of the investments, all of the deals that the Trump administration has announced since last April, the dependence remains,” said Chris Kennedy, a former NSC director for international economics under the Biden and Trump administrations, who was at the same briefing. Even if all the announced projects deliver on schedule, Washington’s dependence will likely persist until the early to mid-2030s, he added.
U.S. dependence on Chinese rare-earth supply chains is extensive, as there is substantial intermingling with Chinese goods at every stage of production, said Kennedy, who is now the lead for economic statecraft at Bloomberg Economics. For example, a lot of the magnet production outside China is in Japan, which still relies on Chinese inputs and technology, he said.
“All of those dependencies will need to be unwound,” Kennedy said, adding that he expects there to be an extension of the truce.
In the run-up to the summit, Greer has suggested that Washington could support a three-to-six-month truce extension.
Beyond economics, Washington’s rare-earth gaps also have major military implications. Trump and Xi’s meeting comes as the Iran war has blown through U.S. supplies of critical munitions, further exposing the U.S. defense sector’s reliance on rare earths and other critical minerals and metals. In July, Trump urged defense executives to expedite weapons production and ramp up their manufacturing capacity, telling them that “we need a little more speed.”
Washington has also ordered U.S. defense contractors to stop sourcing rare earths and certain other minerals from China by Jan. 1, although some defense companies are reportedly scrambling to do so on that timeline.
“Given the war in Iran, there’s a greater demand from the U.S. defense sector now to rebuild munitions stockpiles,” Kennedy said. “Those dependencies are expected to remain.”
Maxine Davey contributed graphics research.
