Rare Earth Politics across Time, Space, and Scale

The seventeen elements on the periodic table collectively known as "rare earths" or "rare earth metals" moved from a mostly ignored topic in middle school science classes to front page news in every major newspaper and a top level concern in every foreign ministry, seemingly overnight. By now, most know that they have become critical in high-tech electronics, communications and energy sectors, among other uses. And global demand for rare earths has grown substantially since the 1990s. More surprising to many is that rare earths are not rare. There are lots of them, in many parts of the world.

There is no "Persian Gulf" of rare earth reserves. But their production is not distributed globally; rather, they are highly concentrated in China, which has what Sophia Kalantzakos calls a "near monopoly" on these globally critical resources. This fact helps to explain why rare earths are now famous, and infamously politicized.

The two books reviewed here have much to teach us, but they embody very different world views, conceptual frameworks, and methods. While there is no evidence that they were written to be explicitly in conversation with one another, they nevertheless embody that conversation.

In 2010 rare earth exports to Japan from China were halted or heavily restricted. Almost instantaneously, China was perceived by many in Japan, the United States, and the European Union (EU) as strategically leveraging its near monopoly on rare earth elements in territorial disputes in the East China Sea. These developments prompted nearly two years of high-level diplomacy, a flurry of tripartite industrial policy efforts among the US, EU, and Japan, rare earth price spikes, and substantial economic anxiety in many areas of the private sector. That this period quickly became known as the "rare-earth crisis" captures the reactions and anxieties of the era quite well. Once the "crisis" passed, China retained the dominant, nearly monopolistic position it held before prices fell to acceptable–some say even cheaper–levels, and the attention of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers moved on.

The central question animating Sophia Kalantzakos' China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths is this: "Was the rare earth crisis really just a temporary glitch in the international system, without subsequent political and economic repercussions?" (pp. 5–6). Spoiler alert: Her answer is no. Kalantzakos details how and why demand for rare earths has grown, and how and why China came to dominate the global market for rare earths. Along the way, she explores historical comparisons to two other strategically important resources: salt and oil.

Kalantzakos' overarching perspectives are perhaps best summarized by the title of chapter one: "Resource Competition, Mineral Scarcity and Economic Statecraft." Certainly she is correct that resource competition, especially among some great powers, has not gone away. She is also right to suggest that an energy transition away from fossil fuels toward cleaner and more distributed solar and wind, shifts or changes—rather than eliminates—resource competition related to energy. While traditional, inter-state, geopolitical competition is unlikely where sun and wind are concerned, the material resources and production required to capture them has the potential to engage old-school economic statecraft. While the book suggests that strategic resource competition is likely and ongoing, it also focuses on the capacity of states to address this competition through a combination of domestic policy and international cooperation. Kalantzakos suggests, in a host of ways, that China's capacity—and sometimes willingness—to pursue economic statecraft to the disadvantage of more open-market democracies is substantial in contemporary global politics. For her, the rare earth crisis and its legacies illustrate the endemic risks in contemporary global resource competition. In this context, she covers the Obama era "pivot" to Asia and Trump-era criticism of and confrontation with China. In short, chapter one is much more about a realist and mercantilist view of China and global geopolitics than it is about rare earths. The rare earth...