Editor's Note: In the coming year, RANE will analyze the geopolitics of natural resources and raw materials. This series will be published periodically throughout the remainder of 2026; you can find all parts here.
The Strait of Hormuz is the most important waterway in the global energy sector, and it is, for all intents and purposes, closed. Only a trickle of crude oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, helium and fertilizers is transiting the strait amid safety concerns stemming from the Middle East conflict, which has entered its second month. While over the last decade many people — myself included — have argued that data is the new oil, this crisis is proving that black gold remains one of the most critical resources worldwide. And the impacts don't stop there. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are causing not just an energy crisis, but far-reaching shortages of natural resources and critical raw materials on which the global economy depends. These compounding crises are exposing the flaws in a global economic system that relies on a key post-Cold War assumption: resource supply chains will not be severed. That assumption has now been shattered.
This year, RANE will publish a series of analyses examining the geopolitics of natural resources and raw materials. This first installment will focus on how the changing geopolitical environment and the shift toward a multipolar world are changing the global natural resource and raw material paradigm that has largely existed since the end of the Cold War. Future installments will dive deeper into specific geographies, national strategies, specific commodities and more in an effort to shed light on how critical natural resources and raw materials are changing the world — and how the changing world is shaping their importance. Planned installments include China's rare earth strategy and Western countries' attempts to diversify their rare earth supply, the growth of the lithium triangle in South America, Russia's future energy exports after the Ukraine war, resource availability risks for data centers and semiconductors, and the development of seabed mining.
Competition to secure access to raw materials is rising in importance as two key post-Cold War assumptions are proving untenable: first, the notion that mutual economic interdependence necessarily reduces trade frictions and the potential for war. The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have demonstrated that, while a barrier, economic interdependence will not prevent global conflicts, which in turn can create significant supply disruptions. Short of kinetic conflict, increases in global protectionism and export controls on raw materials and critical intermediate goods demonstrate that interdependence will not prevent countries from cutting off another's access to certain goods when nonviolent tensions erupt.
The second assumption is that market forces can optimally allocate investment in the natural resource sector. In a frictionless world, investment driven by profitability and other financial and technological factors can yield optimal outcomes, but resource-driven geopolitics challenges that assumption. For instance, the West has proven unable to build China-free rare earth supply chains, despite knowing the risks of relying on China for more than a decade, because China's low prices make investment elsewhere less attractive. It seems clear that market conditions alone are insufficient to drive a country to protect its supply chain vulnerabilities. Instead, governments are increasingly intervening to allocate resources in ways that address geopolitical considerations, rather than prioritizing financial or economic optimization.
China's Resource Power as a Catalyst
China's rise as a resource power and efforts to scale its export controls over the last few years are emblematic of the changing nature of raw material trade and competition. China dominates the mining or processing of more than a dozen critical raw materials, producing more than 70% of the world's gallium, cobalt, magnesium and rare earths. In recent years, Beijing has frequently used its sway over the market as leverage against its rivals. In 2025 alone, China placed new export controls on dual-use raw materials, export licensing requirements on several key rare earths and an extraterritorial licensing requirement on goods made overseas using Chinese rare earths. Between April and June 2025, during a standoff with the United States over tariffs, China sparingly approved licenses for exporting rare earths, causing a crisis for supply chains in the automotive, aerospace and other industries needing Chinese rare earth magnets, and causing several Japanese, European and American auto or auto-part manufacturers to reduce or halt production as a result. Many automakers warned that if China had not relaxed these restrictions, they would have been forced to make more drastic production cuts within a few weeks or months.
China's use of resource restrictions has been a strategic success. In the wake of China's export controls on rare earths, the Trump administration has effectively agreed to halt, or at least slow, the implementation of new technology export restrictions on China by, among other things, suspending special fees on Chinese ships, approving the export of certain high-end artificial intelligence chips to China, slowing the approval of tightened restrictions on AI technology exports, and reversing some restrictions on jet engines and other key technology exports. Perhaps most significantly, the United States has halted implementation of its "affiliates rule," which would extend many restrictions targeting Chinese entities to their majority-owned subsidiaries, effectively pausing what would otherwise be much wider U.S. export restrictions. The United States even halted plans to sanction China's Ministry of State Security over a massive cyberespionage campaign against the United States in an effort to preserve the trade truce that kept Chinese rare earths largely flowing to the United States.
These changes represent a massive shift in U.S. policy and set a precedent that even the world's sole superpower can change its tune in response to Chinese leverage over critical materials. Prior to 2025, the United States largely kept its national security-related technology restrictions and trade policies separate, arguing that its export controls on China were strictly national security-related and that the United States would not negotiate them away during trade talks. However, by weaponizing its own export controls in a similar manner, China forced the White House to mix its national security and trade policies and to make concessions on the former, which are likely far more important to the Chinese government than trade restrictions. This precedent will teach China (and, in turn, other countries) that an aggressive retaliation strategy can work on the United States, as well as smaller nations. It also demonstrates that U.S. leverage over China is lower than U.S. leaders previously believed.
Geopolitical Multipolarity Begets New Risks
The shifting geopolitical landscape from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world, in which China and many middle powers are gaining influence at the United States' expense, will pose greater risks to raw material supply chains. In the U.S.-led unipolar world, U.S. naval dominance kept supply chains largely open, at least at sea. The U.S.-led Western global order also set norms and rules that most nations generally followed. The threat of U.S. sanctions and a loss of access to the U.S. market was a strong enough enforcement mechanism that virtually all countries sought to maintain workable ties with the U.S. government. That is no longer entirely the case. While the United States is certainly throwing its weight around through tariffs and sanctions, it is no longer following many of the norms and rules it once championed. Perhaps most importantly, the United States is taking direct aim at a cornerstone of unipolar resource stability: a liberalized trade environment. With the global liberal trade order under significant stress, more countries can weaponize their resources or enter exclusive deals with one global power at the expense of another.
Virtually all major global powers are putting natural resources and raw materials near the top of their agendas. This has clearly been a central foreign and economic policy of the Trump administration. The White House has made critical raw materials a key part of trade talks with Australia, signed a resource deal with Ukraine, threatened to take control of Greenland in part due to its natural resources, established the so-called Pax Silica aiming to secure semiconductor supply chains and taken effective control of parts of Venezuela's oil exports. Over the past year, the U.S. government has directly invested in more than a dozen producers of critical raw materials, natural resources or essential intermediate goods, as it seeks to prop up China-free production. European governments have done the same, as have Japan and many other countries. The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act came into effect in 2024, and in December 2025 the bloc adopted the RESourceEU Action Plan, which set up a critical raw materials center aiming to finance and steer investment in projects securing resources for the bloc, with a goal of reducing dependencies by 50% from 2029. China, of course, has long made natural resource acquisition a key part of its strategy, and while it is certainly still seeking resource opportunities abroad, the government is also now trying to protect its market share as much as possible through market manipulation, such as by keeping prices artificially low, and restricting processing technology exports, such as rare earth processing technology that is now under export controls.
Importantly, global powers' increased focus on raw materials offers opportunities for resource producers. Smaller countries, for example, can dangle resource agreements in front of the White House or China in return for concessions on other issues, as well as investment in their own sectors. The Democratic Republic of the Congo provides one example of this strategy; Congo has traded deals for its extensive natural resources — including cobalt, copper, tin and zinc — for increased U.S. pressure on Rwanda, which has historically been a far closer partner of the United States, to halt support of rebel groups in eastern Congo, in part leading to U.S. sanctions on the Rwandan Defense Force in early March. Indonesia has also taken advantage of the situation by adopting raw ore export restrictions that have forced many companies to set up processing facilities in Indonesia, helping the country move up the value chain, as there are few attractive alternatives to some of Indonesia's resources, like nickel.
But for every example of a country that may benefit from a changing geopolitical environment, there are myriad other risks. The return of multipolarity creates the potential for more armed conflicts globally, reintroducing the risk of physical supply chain chokepoints. The ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a salient example of how a disruption at a chokepoint can have massive global ramifications. Shipping disruptions in the Red Sea due to Houthi attacks in 2024 and 2025 offer a second recent example. Other key maritime chokepoints that could be threatened include the Danish Straits, which have already emerged as a key point of contestation between Europe and Russia over Russian energy exports; the Turkish Straits, which control access into the Black Sea; and even the Panama Canal, where the United States has sought to push out Chinese port investors over national security concerns.
While geographic chokepoints are crucial, so are industrial chokepoints. China's dominance in processing certain raw materials, particularly rare earths, is a de facto industrial chokepoint, as evidenced by its export cut-offs last year. Congo's aforementioned dominance in cobalt, accounting for more than 70% of global production, is another critical chokepoint that the United States is now seeking to gain control of after years of Chinese investment in the country. South Africa's dominance in the platinum and palladium industries is another similar industrial chokepoint. This list goes on.
With natural resource and critical raw material competition and disruptions now becoming frequent, companies — not just countries — must be more mindful of risks in their physical supply chains, right down to the ground level. This series is designed to shed light on many of these issues, both well-known and underappreciated, as companies continue to navigate emerging supply chain disruptions and develop and implement their risk management strategies.
