Critical Minerals and the Quad: Navigating the Trump-Xi Truce

As the global economy pivots toward green and digital technologies, control over critical minerals lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements has emerged as a decisive factor shaping strategic power. China’s dominance across the value chain, from extraction to refining, grants it unparalleled leverage over supply chains vital to clean energy and advanced manufacturing. For Indo-Pacific democracies, this concentration of control exposes a structural vulnerability, rendering their industrial and climate strategies dependent on Beijing’s political calculus. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States represents the most viable framework to rebalance this asymmetry through coordinated resource mapping, technology sharing, and resilient supply networks. However, the June 2025 Trump–Xi “minerals truce” underscored the fragility of such efforts, revealing how short-term political expediency can undermine long-term strategic autonomy. This chapter examines the implications of the deal and argues that only an institutionalized Quad critical minerals alliance can ensure sustained access, equitable governance, and strategic independence in the emerging multipolar mineral order.