How 'Rare' Became a Geopolitical Weapon

The minerals everyone is fighting over are not, by and large, rare.

That is the central contradiction at the heart of a geopolitical narrative that has gained considerable traction since 2022 — and that resurfaced in mid-May 2026 when Andrew Tate, speaking in a video that circulated widely across alternative media channels, claimed the Russia-Ukraine conflict is being prolonged because Russia seized territory rich in rare earth minerals. Tate is not a policy figure, but his argument distills a version of the logic that surfaces repeatedly in online discourse: that the war is, at root, a resource grab.

The claim is tidy. It is also, on close examination, geologically awkward.

The processing problem, not the deposit problem

Rare earth elements — 17 metals including lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and dysprosium — are present in the Earth's crust in relative abundance. Cerium is more plentiful than copper. Lanthanum appears at concentrations comparable to lead. The "rare" in the name refers not to geological scarcity but to the difficulty of extracting and separating these elements from ore in commercially viable quantities.

That distinction matters enormously. The actual constraint in the rare earth supply chain is not the ground beneath which deposits sit — it is the infrastructure required to turn raw ore into usable material. Processing rare earths involves grinding ore, dissolving it in acid, applying solvent extraction, and separating individual elements through repeated cycles of chemical treatment. Each step requires specialised facilities, trained personnel, and careful waste management. Building that capacity from scratch takes years and enormous capital.

China, by dint of state-backed industrial investment beginning in the 1980s, built that capacity first. It now processes roughly 60 percent of global rare earth output and accounts for around 85 percent of the world's capacity for separating refined rare earth oxides. This is the dominance that matters — not the hypothetical value of untapped deposits.

A convenient framing

The "rare" label has done political work. It conjures images of scarce, irreplaceable resources locked underground — a framing that conveniently fits both Western policy narratives about supply vulnerability and the alternative-media argument that great powers are fighting wars to monopolise minerals.

In policy circles in Washington and Brussels, the "China controls the rare earths" line has been a driver of industrial subsidy programmes — the US Inflation Reduction Act, the Minerals Security Partnership, EU critical raw materials legislation — aimed at building non-Chinese processing capacity. These are legitimate and substantial efforts, but they operate on a decade-plus timescale.

Meanwhile, the proposition that controlling a stretch of contested territory in eastern Ukraine gives Russia decisive leverage over the rare earth supply chain misunderstands where that leverage actually resides. It is in the smelters, not the ore. Deposits of heavy rare earth minerals exist in many parts of the world, including in countries already aligned with Western security architecture. The question has never been whether the metals are there. It is whether anyone has built the infrastructure to get them out in usable form.

China's structural advantage

The rare earth supply chain is not simply about who owns the ground. It is a multi-stage industrial process — mining, chemical processing, separation, alloying, manufacturing — in which China has built vertical integration that no other country currently matches. Australia has significant deposits. Canada and Brazil have known reserves. But most ore extracted outside China still travels to Chinese facilities for processing, because those facilities exist at scale and others do not.

This is the supply chain reality that Tate's framing elides. It is also the reality that Western governments are trying to alter through deliberate industrial policy, with mixed results and timescales measured in years rather than months. The Inflation Reduction Act has drawn investment into US and Canadian processing projects; Mountain Pass in California is operational; Lynas in Australia processes some materials outside Chinese infrastructure. None of this yet approaches the scale or efficiency of Chinese operations.

What the discourse around rare earth minerals reveals is less about geological facts and more about the narratives that shape how the public understands resource competition. The word "rare" does rhetorical work that the chemistry does not back up — implying scarcity where abundance exists, and attributing power to territory rather than to the industrial infrastructure that transforms raw material into strategic asset.

The competition for rare earths is real. The claim that it explains the Russia-Ukraine conflict is not.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element