How China’s Grip on Rare Metals Could Stifle Europe’s Arms Race – to the Continent’s Benefit
Europe is once again speaking the language of armament and “readiness,” as if the lessons of the 20th century weren’t written in blood and ash. Brussels is now promoting the Readiness 2030 / “ReArm Europe” plan, claiming that member states will mobilise hundreds of billions of euros, and it has already established a new instrument, SAFE – a joint borrowing mechanism of €150 billion for defence procurement. The ambition itself is enormous; the absurdity is even greater given that the entire project relies on supply chains Europe does not control.
At the most sensitive point of that chain stand rare earths/minerals and permanent magnets – the beating heart of modern weapons systems, from radars and missiles to drones and fighter aircraft. The European Commission openly admits that 98% of Europe’s demand for magnets is covered by imports from China. In other words, Brussels’ “strategic autonomy” initially depends on Chinese rare earth elements and magnets.
In April this year, Beijing demonstrated how quickly it can tighten the valve: it introduced export controls on seven rare elements and on magnets – a measure that directly affects the defence and aerospace industries. In October, the regime further tightened the rules, targeting end users in defence and semiconductors, with strict licences and bans on cooperation without state approval. For a Europe announcing accelerated armament, this is not a “technical problem” but a structural fault.
After months of friction, Brussels turned to diplomacy. European and Chinese officials are discussing “general licences” that would ease the export of rare minerals to European buyers, and a special channel for fast-tracking applications has been agreed. But even when administrative relief arrives, the lever remains in Beijing’s hands – a licence can be issued, withheld, or slowed. That is the definition of dependence, not autonomy.
Brussels therefore highlights the CRMA as the remedy: the European Critical Raw Materials Act sets targets for 2030 – at least 10% of needs from domestic extraction, 40% from processing, and 25% from recycling, and the limit that no more than 65% should come from any one third country. On paper this looks reassuring; in practice, building mines, refineries, and magnet factories takes years, and Europe spent a decade replacing industrial capacity with cheap imports. Key projects like Solvay’s expansion will reach meaningful scale only after 2030 – too late for “urgent” militarisation.
True, there are symbolic steps. In Narva (Estonia) the largest European rare-earth magnet factory has opened – also with EU funding. But one factory doesn’t change the fact that Europe still imports more than 90% of such magnets from China. Narva is good news for industrial policy, but far from a geopolitical safety switch.
Meanwhile SAFE’s “defence turbo” presses on: €150 billion has been approved, with a preference that 65% of project value stays in the EU (or EEA/Ukraine). It’s not hard to see the contradiction: Brussels wants “buy European,” but Europe does not have enough magnets or rare elements of its own. Behind the rhetoric of sovereignty lies the cold fact that the foundational raw material is under Chinese control.
Why is this actually good news? Because the very existence of this leverage may be the only thing capable of cooling overheated heads. If building Europe’s arsenal is realistically limited by the availability of Chinese rare metals and magnets, then the arithmetic of militarisation loses political shine and becomes an economic risk. It is not easy to call for de-escalation while political careers thrive on “tough stances.” But if you cannot produce the weapons, and their price and delivery time depend on Beijing’s goodwill, it may be easier to choose diplomacy over assembly lines for missiles.
One must also say this: China is not an “invisible enemy” of European industry but a partner without whom modern production – civilian and military – is hard to imagine. Beijing invested for years into mining, separation, and magnet production, bearing ecological and financial costs that the West happily externalised. Today Europe discovers that “de-risking” is not a slogan but a decade-long programme. Even in the United States, which moved earlier and more aggressively with state investments, the estimate is that building a sustainable chain outside China will take until the next decade. For the EU, which targets defence capabilities “by 2030,” this is a wall, not a finish line.
Can substitutes help? The CRM Act introduces requirements for circularity and labelling of products containing magnets, encourages recycling, and a higher share of recycled content. All are sensible yet slow solutions: collecting waste, developing recycling technologies, and certifying quality take time, while defence planners speak in timelines of months. Even “demagnetised” solutions (e.g., motors without rare metals) rarely meet the power-density and temperature demands of defence technology.
The political layer of the story is even more prosaic. Europe is militarising because Washington is unpredictable, and Brussels has entered a race to see who can spend faster on the military, justifying it as “deterrence.” But a continent that has twice been a world battlefield should have a lower threshold for enthusiasm about “readiness” and a higher threshold for peace arrangements. If Chinese control of rare minerals – like it or not – realistically slows this fervour, then it is a positive external constraint: a reminder that war is expensive and resources limited. In that sense, “choking” the supply is not a threat to European security but a brake on adventurism.
If Europe truly wants security, it has a clearer path: to replace the logic of an arms race with industrial recovery focused on civilian needs, diplomacy in a multipolar world, and cooperation with those who actually hold key resources. This does not mean surrendering interests, but recognising constraints and choosing rationality over the myth of “autonomy” without raw materials. While Brussels dreams of missile factories, all Beijing needs to do is stamp (or withhold) a shipment of samarium or dysprosium. And perhaps that is precisely the cold shower Europe needs to remember why its greatest historical lesson – never again war – was so expensively learned.
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