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China’s rare earth pause is set to expire Tuesday, November 10.
A year ago, as part of its trade deal with Washington, Beijing paused the sweeping rare earth export controls it announced in October 2025. In September, China extended its trade arrangements with the U.S. to January 10, 2027, and its statement never mentioned rare earths.
So as of this morning, nobody outside Beijing knows whether the pause survives Tuesday.
The easy assumption is that China extends it and nothing changes. Even if it does, the controls China put on seven heavy rare earths in April 2025 never went away. And if Beijing grants a pause on Tuesday, it can pull back any day it likes.
Rare earths sit inside the F-35, precision-guided missiles, wind turbines, and the motors in most electric cars on the road. China controls more than 70% of global extraction and 90% of magnet-metal refining. In other words, it holds the master key to all of it.
The U.S. is fighting back on four fronts, and the first one is already in place. There’s also a fifth, and it’s the most creative of the bunch. I’m saving that one for last.
China has a history of flooding the market to crash prices and bankrupt Western startups before they can scale. For years, it worked.
In July 2025, the Defense Department agreed to buy $400 million of MP Materials’ (MP) preferred stock, putting it in line to become the company’s largest shareholder. It also set a 10-year price floor of $110 per kilogram on MP’s NdPr, the neodymium-praseodymium oxide that goes into magnets.
A price floor takes away China’s favorite weapon. If Beijing dumps product to crash the price, the Pentagon covers the gap, and MP stays in business. Every Western producer now wants the same deal.
America has the raw material. What it’s missing is refining. For years, U.S. miners shipped their ore to China for processing, because doing it here cost too much and came with a mess of environmental hurdles.
At Mountain Pass in California, MP has partnered with General Motors (GM) to build a supply chain that runs from mine to magnet inside the U.S.
Copying China’s dirty, solvent-heavy methods is a losing battle, though, so the winners will be the companies with cleaner, next-generation separation technology.
No single country beats a global monopoly alone. That means more joint ventures with Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths, plus supply lines through Canada, Brazil, India, and Kazakhstan.
If the G7 coordinates stockpiles and pricing, our allies can ride out a sudden Chinese export ban and push their dependence on any single supplier well under 60%.
New mines take years to clear permits. Meanwhile, millions of old phones, laptops, and appliances get dumped every year with their neodymium and dysprosium magnets still inside.
Scale up recycling the way Apple (AAPL) has started recovering magnet materials, and you get a stream of rare earths that’s already here, with no new mine required.
Re-engineering a global supply chain takes years, and the capital and the partners are lining up. What’s missing is urgency, because every day we wait is another day Beijing holds a veto over American defense.
All four of those fronts chase the same goal: more rare earths from somewhere other than China.
The fifth front skips that race entirely. Instead of finding more of a material Beijing controls, you engineer your way around needing it. BMW already builds electric motors that use no rare-earth magnets at all, and every product like that chips away at Beijing’s leverage.
It’s an old American idea. In 1915, with war raging in Europe, Thomas Edison argued that the government should maintain a “great research laboratory” for the military. The Navy took him up on it, and the Naval Research Laboratory went on to build America’s first radar and the first GPS satellite prototypes.
My colleague Matt McCall says that same lab has done it again, with an invention that lets the military work around another material China controls. More on that in a moment.
Tuesday is the first date to watch.
The second lands November 27, when China’s pause on its gallium, germanium, and antimony curbs runs out. Those are defense materials too, and the Navy invention Matt is tracking takes aim at one of them.
Matt McCall is going live on Wednesday, November 11, at 2 p.m. ET, to show you where he thinks this fight pays off. That’s Veterans Day, a fitting day to tell this Navy story. A tiny company worth less than $1 billion holds the sole right to manufacture that invention.
He thinks it has a shot at rising 20 times by the end of Trump’s term, and he’ll name a second stock pick for free.
Save your free VIP seat for The Edison Prophecy right here.
Rare earths aren’t always rare. Cerium, the most common one, is more plentiful in the Earth’s crust than copper or lead, according to USGS geologist Brad Van Gosen.
The hard part is getting it out of the rock and separating it, and China spent decades cornering that part.
