Minds on mines: the mineral security imperative for Nato
5 min read
NATO admittedly has no shortage of challenges to navigate—including maintaining support for Ukraine, meeting defense spending targets, countering hostile Russian activities, and accelerating the build-up of the defense-industrial base.
Even among these critical priorities, however, we argue that the issue of collective mineral security should be at the top of the agenda.
While last month’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington did yield a number of impressive results, particularly on industrial enablement, we believe it was a missed opportunity to highlight the crucial role of critical minerals.
It was Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg himself, who, at the last Munich Security Conference, acknowledged that Europe’s dependency on Russian gas had made the Alliance vulnerable and that it should not make the same mistake with critical minerals. But has it learned its lesson? Are its members states on track to reduce their dependencies, including on China for the critical minerals required to power everything from their energy transition to their military capabilities?
The harsh truth is that neither NATO as an organization nor most of its member states are where they need to be on this issue. Much remains to be done to address severe vulnerabilities, reduce potentially weaponizable dependencies, and increase systemic resilience across the Alliance.
This is particularly true, but not limited to, the Alliance’s exposure to China. China’s dominance in mining and processing of critical minerals is staggering—much greater than Russia’s or Saudi Arabia’s grip over oil at their peak shares of global supply. Today, China processes between 80-100% of the world’s manganese, graphite, rare earth elements, nickel, and cobalt. Even where Beijing controls “only” 65% of processing, as in lithium, its grip on the midstream allows it to control markets and prices – and it has already shown that it is definitely willing to instrumentalize this dominance. Beijing has flexed its leverage for political reasons on several occasions, starting by blocking rare earth element exports to Japan in 2010, and more recently, in 2023 by restricting global exports of germanium, graphite and gallium.
Even though most countermeasures will naturally have to be taken at the level of individual member states, we believe that NATO, as an organization, is well placed to drive and help coordinate these measures by ensuring political focus, providing facilitation and planning services, offering its expertise and experience in joint procurement, and by activating its existing partnership base in the Indo-Pacific.
NATO, through its reach into capitals across Europe and its historical leadership, is well placed to ensure that political attention on the secure supply of critical minerals does not wane at the first opportunity. By constantly reminding capitals that this should be considered a national security priority and a crucial cornerstone of any national resilience strategy, it can help put into perspective pricing, environmental, and social concerns that may otherwise hamper on- or near-shoring efforts and support national governments as they develop policies in the face of assured opposition from activist and interest groups.
NATO has many decades of experience in procuring and supporting major military systems
NATO can also help prepare the Alliance for mineral supply shocks by launching simulations and exercises on supply risks to help cut through the noise and inform decision makers. And on concrete action, NATO could explore demand modeling and joint stockpiling to build capacity and reduce reliance on autocratic competitors, or create common or jointly funded procurement programs to aggregate demand for common materials and engineered components. NATO has many decades of experience in procuring and supporting major military systems. They should be able to apply this expertise to the joint procurement of certain critical minerals across the Alliance.
The collective expertise of Allies and their industries can drive efficiency, sustainability, and disruptive solutions—for example, full-value mining, which identifies new ways to extract additional metals and other valuable materials from ores mined for other purposes. NATO could also activate its existing partnerships in the Asia-Pacific. South Korea and Japan have extensive industrial know-how and expertise. Their cooperation could be organized under existing partnerships and should build upon coordination with other multilateral bodies already working on these issues.
Lastly, as with oil, stockpiling is not a comprehensive solution to combat supply shocks and price volatility, but it can serve as a valuable buffer in times of emergency or conflict. The Alliance understood this well when during the Cold War it built its own Central Europe Pipeline System with multinational fuel storage and management.
The Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for the debate of international security policy. is convening a high-level summit in Stavanger, Norway, this Sunday to discuss what is required to improve international collaboration on enhancing the security of supply for critical minerals. While all of this may seem less immediate or concrete than the spectre of a Russian victory over Ukraine or a U.S. exit from NATO, there is an increasing likelihood that in the end, the next challenge we will face will come down less to steel and lead than to lithium and germanium. We should get ready.
Benedikt Franke is Vice-Chairman and CEO of the Munich Security Conference. Robbie Diamond is founder and CEO of SAFE.
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