Brussels is quietly sketching out a creative trade lever for a world where minerals are as strategic as missiles. One idea under serious discussion would force certain Chinese exporters to deliver critical raw materials into EU stockpiles as the price of access to the bloc, a kind of “in-kind” tariff that swaps cash duties for physical inputs Europe lacks. It sits alongside other potential countermeasures, including tightly targeted EU export curbs on goods and services where China is structurally dependent.

Nothing is settled and politics are delicate: any move needs Commission consensus and backing from key capitals, with Berlin and others wary of a tit-for-tat spiral. Beijing’s recent throttling of rare earth magnets, and the whiplash it has caused across automotive, defense and electronics, has given the conversation urgency.

Indonesia, a nation rich in gas reserves, is taking strategic steps to boost output in its energy sector. The government is making significant changes to its oil and gas terms to attract investments, a critical move at a time when global investors are increasingly shifting away from fossil fuels.

Tokyo and Washington are turning a cartographic speck in the western Pacific into a strategic test bed for supply chain resilience. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi says the two allies will jointly study whether Japan can lift rare earth-rich mud from around Minamitori Island, an isolated atoll 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo and well inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and do so at abyssal depths that push current technology.

The plan is staged: a feasibility campaign in January to verify whether mud can be raised reliably from roughly 6,000 meters, followed by a larger trial that, if the early engineering holds, would target pre-commercial operations later in the decade. The political scaffolding is already in place.