Strategists have a shorthand for the instruments a state uses to compete and coordinate abroad: diplomatic, information, military and economic power, or DIME. It's a framework built for embassies, broadcasts, battalions and trade - the same one that, as I have recently written, now applies almost line for line to the space economy. It turns out to apply just as literally to the ground beneath it. The difference with minerals is that the convergence gets almost uncomfortably concrete: the same rock that goes into a magnet for an F-35 also goes into a supply chain that a rival government can switch off.
I spent this week at a conference in Virginia where the pitch decks looked like Wall Street and the panelists talked like the Pentagon. Officially, it was about critical minerals and rare earth elements. Unofficially, it was the same story I keep running into at every one of these gatherings lately: an economic sector getting reclassified, in real time, as a security problem. By the time Maura Burns - the CIA's former Chief Operating Officer and the day's keynote - finished speaking, nobody in the room was still pretending otherwise.
The conference was hosted by the Irregular Warfare Initiative and the Special Operations Association of America, and SOAA's Doug Livermore opened bluntly. Livermore, who runs the Irregular Warfare Division out of the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security, told the room that critical minerals aren't "merely economic commodities," but "national security vulnerabilities" sitting at the center of irregular warfare and strategic competition. His prescribed fix - a "private-public partnership" - is a line we hear frequently about frontier industries.
Diplomacy here looks like coalition-building on fast-forward. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted representatives from 54 countries and the European Commission at a Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington, alongside Vice President Vance and four Cabinet secretaries. The U.S. signed eleven new bilateral minerals frameworks that day alone and announced the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, or FORGE, a successor to the Obama-era Minerals Security Partnership that will be chaired on a rotating basis, starting with South Korea. It's the mineral world's answer to the Artemis Accords: less about any single deposit than about locking in which nations set the rules before Beijing does.
Information power, in this domain, is mostly about exposing how the leverage actually works. Burns walked the room through it: China's dominance "did not happen quickly or overnight," but was built for decades on state subsidies, cheap financing and loose environmental rules that undercut Western producers. The result, she argued, is a supply chain China has learned to "weaponize" - export licenses and price manipulation used as foreign-policy tools rather than mere trade friction.
Military power is where the stakes stop being abstract. SOAA CFO Austin Higgins put it bluntly: "nearly every piece of equipment in an operator's hand downrange starts as raw ore somewhere in the ground," and the U.S. currently can't build those platforms "without buying the raw material from the very countries we're competing against." Mike Kuiken, vice chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has made the same point elsewhere: modern weapons systems carry pounds of critical minerals, and Washington "cannot afford to depend on our primary adversary" for any of it.
Economic power is where Washington has moved fastest, and strangest. The federal government is no longer just regulating this market; it's buying into it. From January 2025 through this June, the federal government had put roughly $10 billion into the sector, according to the Council on Foreign Relations' deal tracker.
Wall Street has already renamed the trend: Goldman Sachs' metals team describes companies racing toward a "mine-to-magnet" strategy, integrating extraction through manufacturing to capture value that once disappeared overseas for processing.
China's numbers explain the urgency: it refines roughly 91 percent of the world's rare earths, a dominance built since 1986, when it overtook the U.S. as the top producer. Every ministerial, equity stake and tabletop exercise at this conference was, in one way or another, a response to that fact.
What the conference made clear is that critical minerals can no longer be assessed as a commodities story. They're a domain where all four instruments of state power - the coalitions being built, the leverage being exposed, the weapons that depend on the ore, and the capital now chasing it - operate at once and reinforce each other. Livermore's call for private-public partnership wasn't a platitude; it was an admission that no single agency, company or ally can unwind three decades of engineered dependency alone.
The countries that get the refining right - not just the mining - will be the ones setting the terms of the next industrial era. Everyone else will be shipping their ore off to find out what it's worth.
Elise Labott is an award-winning journalist covering U.S. foreign policy, national security, and global trends as well as the host of Cosmopolitics and a contributor to mtf news.
