Agencies<\/p>\n
Ambassadors from the EU\u2019s 27 member states will huddle in Brussels this week to thrash out a memorandum on critical minerals with the United States.<\/p>\n
Underpinning the debate will be a tension that girds many elements of the bloc\u2019s dealings in 2026: capacity versus trust.Envoys will negotiate in the shadow of a new trade threat from US President Donald Trump, who last week shocked Brussels with a tariff investigation linked to overcapacity and forced labour of 60 economies, including China, the European Union and India.<\/p>\n
The bloc\u2019s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, told the Financial Times last week that \u201cit is important for everybody to understand that the US has been very clear that they want to divide Europe. They don\u2019t like the European Union.\u201d A senior official added: \u201cWe know we cannot trust them as far as we can throw them.\u201cNobody is under any illusions about Trump and the US any more.\u201dYet, the Europeans believe they do not have the capacity to wean themselves off Chinese minerals alone.<\/p>\n
The bloc\u2019s memorandum will be non-binding, with an eye to a more formal instrument down the road that would effectively create a special trading zone for minerals made up of countries keen to decouple their supply from China.<\/p>\n
The zone could entail tariffs on the import of Chinese rare earths to maintain demand for more expensive local alternatives, which could have a price floor to encourage production.<\/p>\n
Some in Europe fear this could drive investment away, to which the US has suggested industrial tariffs on those that take their production elsewhere. EU sources indicated that Brussels was not quite ready for such a quantum leap in industrial policy.<\/p>\n
In this zone, stockpiles of rare earths and other critical minerals would be sourced, mined, recycled and processed as a club.Crucially, at a time when trust is running low, the commodities would also be stored in each participant state, lest Trump decide to keep them all for the US.<\/p>\n
Washington has tried to steer talks with Brussels bilaterally \u2013 even the US believes it cannot break Beijing\u2019s dominance alone \u2013 but the EU has pushed dialogue into the Group of Seven (G7) format, hosted this year by France.From there, the arrangement could expand to as many as 40 global partners, including the likes of Mexico and India.At G7 meetings, tensions have risen to the surface, with EU representatives asking their US counterparts how they could trust them when Trump was threatening to seize Greenland.On the other hand, nobody is throwing resources at critical minerals like the US \u2013 except, perhaps, China. This capacity deficit percolates through other strands of the EU\u2019s China policy, too.Industries argue that their complaints about Chinese dumping take too long to process, while politicians gripe that they simply lack the resources to do things more quickly or differently.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are trying to do everything all at once,\u201d said one official, referring to the bloc\u2019s push to re-arm, reindustrialise and negotiate trade pacts with large chunks of the world. \u201cThe focus is not quite right.\u201d This week\u2019s summit of EU leaders in Brussels was supposed to be about the bloc\u2019s competitiveness, widely understood as a response to China\u2019s state-backed industrial expansion.Now, however, it has been bumped down the agenda as the US-Israel war on Iran takes top billing. The demotion fits with a time-worn pattern.<\/p>\n
Over the last half-decade, as crises rained in from Ukraine and Gaza to migration and transatlantic relations, well-intentioned planners have added relations with China to agendas countless times.<\/p>\n
This has often been done in the veiled language of \u201cde-risking\u201d, \u201ceconomic security\u201d or \u201cgeoeconomics\u201d, only to see it moved down the list of priorities or taken off altogether, as the issue du jour takes centre stage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agencies Ambassadors from the EU\u2019s 27 member states will huddle in Brussels this week to thrash out a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[104],"tags":[211,210,174,16826,12252,327,23094,9731,14222,6499,217],"class_list":["post-40834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-china","tag-club","tag-counter","tag-eu","tag-grip","tag-minerals","tag-seeks","tag-supply","tag-to"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116236863712508924","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}