Metals, Mining and the Geopolitical Struggle for Critical Minerals: An Interview with Brian Goldstein

Brian trades non-ferrous and critical metals ores and concentrates for Penfold World Trade. With extensive ties into the Asian mining and smelting industry cultivated over 20 years of living in Beijing and Shanghai, Brian specializes in both upstream exploration and mining investment as well as physical trading of metalliferous raw materials. Brian previously worked in the Beijing office of the US-China Business Council assisting US companies with strategic and regulatory business issues, and in international government affairs with Ford Motor Company in Dearborn. Brian grew up in upstate New York and graduated with a B.A. in Government and Asian Studies from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan, with year-long language studies as a Monbusho scholar at Keio University in Tokyo and at the IUP Chinese Center at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

Hi Doug. Really pleased to be here with you. It’s hard to believe it was over 25 years ago when we were studying together in Beijing. That wide-eyed optimism of our youth just happened to coincide with the backdrop of being where the greatest wealth creation in the history of mankind was about to happen. “Realistic Exuberance” was the title of an article I wrote for the Chinese Business Review during my first job researching the changing policy landscape as China entered the WTO. And it was exuberant – I remember being at a watch party when Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics and the city piled into the streets to celebrate. They then built a real estate asset class that went from USD 1 trillion to USD 60 trillion dollars. How sentiment has changed, but that is getting ahead of myself.

I grew up in upstate New York, where boredom of the ordinary found me studying Japanese and taking my junior year abroad from Dartmouth in Tokyo. I was hooked immediately to that frenetic energy – the density, the modernity, the newness – but there was something missing in that post-bubble funk. I transitioned to China, hoping to find synergies and instead finding a society oddly more familiar – pragmatic, casual, entrepreneurial – and simmering with that drive that would launch China onto the world stage.

Back in 2003, staring down the path of law school and a career in government affairs, my quest for anything-but-the-ordinary found me an opportunity with a small trading company marketing ores and concentrates. I learned the business selling manganese ore and molybdenum concentrates to China smelters in Guizhou and Liaoning. (Fortunately, both metals are a lot easier to say in Chinese as one syllable characters). I’ve since been to every Chinese province and marketed over 20 different ferrous and nonferrous metals and a few industrial minerals along the way.

I’d like to claim I had the business sense to sniff out what was about to happen – that being in the “right place at the right time” was more than dumb luck – but at least I can say that I did have the nose for an industry with an indelible link to my undergraduate major in government. To paraphrase the artist Ai Weiwei’s quote about art and politics, we are living in age where “Everything is metals; everything is geopolitics”. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that puts my career at the heart of it all.

For most of my working life, China has been the center of the global metals and mining universe, accounting for 100% of net global demand growth for most metals. You need to realize what that means. The growth in what China was consuming, effectively to build that USD 60 trillion worth of real estate and to make export products as it became factory to the world, was greater than growth in the rest of the world combined. China accounted for every single ton of new demand on the planet. You can understand why I stayed.

Then we know how the story unfolded. The US became disenchanted with its China engagement strategy by 2015 and the backlash against the hollowing out of manufacturing helped bring Trump to power. However, commerce was late to catch up. China continued full speed ahead on the deepening of trade globalization. Only once Covid hit did the lack of supply chain resiliency start to lead to an awareness that China had developed an oversize dominance in the production of key industrial precursors – pharmaceutical Key Starting Materials (KSM) like para-aminophenol, polysilicon wafers, citric acid, battery chemicals, and of course, critical metals. Policymakers became concerned and MNCs started to shift manufacturing away from China.

This concern has now given way to a frantic hysteria with a fear that the two main areas of US-China great rivalry competition – AI and robotics on one hand, military hi-tech and drones on the other, and batteries underlying it all – are subject to a Chinese chokehold over most raw materials the US needs to compete. And China has already started to tighten its grip. Or put another way, many in Washington believe China not only has the capacity but has shown the will to use critical metals to slow US technological and military advances, that it is actively working to decrease the lead the US has in key technologies.

Taking off my hat as an American, if such a thing can be done, it’s easy to look from the outside to wonder at these developments: (1) how could the US have given up on China engagement without FIRST building an industrial base outside China to ensure it has the raw materials and plants necessary to go it alone? (2) How could the US and its leading companies have collectively decided to invest trillions of dollars into AI without FIRST addressing required raw materials resiliency to do so? And (3) How could the US not expect, after decades of openly restricting China’s access to key/dual-use technology, that China wouldn’t seek to exercise similar leverage?

I posit that the short answer is that the US was not so foolish, and that the media and political hype on both sides is giving critical metals a lot more weight than merited. We’ll go into this later, but there are two key issues to keep in mind throughout our discussion. First is that each element on the periodic table has many, many demand uses, most of which are used in mass industrial processes with only a small minority going into key defense or cutting-edge technologies. That small minority of truly critical demand is the last to lose out in any supply shortage. The rest of the end-users are more elastic and adapt to high prices.

A second issue is that there is a huge difference between smelting and refining of a given metal to say 99.95 or 99.99% purity for mass industrial use on one hand, and further refining those metals to a much, much high purity for use in mankind’s most advanced industrial applications on the other. In many metals, production of these refined metals to a level where impurities number in the parts per trillion, i.e. 99.9999999#%, is done by companies in Japan, Europe and the US, companies that have dominant market positions. If the West is supposedly so hollowed out and bereft of skilled labor, how then can that be the case? And if that isn’t the case, how hard can it be for the West to apply those skills to metals where production is currently lacking?

Q2. For those unfamiliar with your world, please provide a high-level overview of the metals industry including how they are extracted, refined and traded. What are some common ferrous, non-ferrous and critical metals, and their important uses?   

The simple version is that I sell dirt, or rather, it at least looks like dirt, without the organics. It is rocks that have been ground up and contain a bit of moisture. Technically it is called a mineral concentrate. I sell this dirt to processors that turn the contained metals into usable metal.

Metals and mining is the original brick-and-mortar industry. It literally started with the Bronze Age. Fun fact – the Bronze Age collapsed due to the world’s first critical mineral crisis, which involved tin. Bronze was 10% tin (the balance being copper) and the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations became dependent on far-flung tin mines in Afghanistan and England. They were over globalized and over dependent on a couple tier-1 suppliers. When rebellions from drought and migration destroyed the capacity for the leading powers to maintain freedom of navigation across the long trade routes to the tin mines, the military-industrial complexes collapsed, and it was all over within a single generation. All this happened around 1147 BCE.

Mining has continued relatively unchanged since. We find mineralized rocks with sufficient grades and sufficient scale (i.e. a “mineral deposit”) that justifies investing the capex and opex to dig up and crush the rocks and turn them into metals and alloys at progressively higher degrees of purification. Over time, humanity has created myriad products from every element found on the periodic table and end-uses to match. But fundamentally it’s the same process it’s all always been to extract rocks and purify what is in them.

One thing that has changed is the scale of industry and the energy it consumes. There’s a little known fact that mining consumes twice the amount of electricity as data centers today. The issue is that the comminution of ever expanding and ever lower grade ores requires massive amounts of electricity. For example, a typical large scale mine digging up over 30 million tons of ore per year uses 30Kwh of electricity to break each ton of ore down. Estimates are that global comminution consumes something like 1,000Twh per year, or 3-5% of all the electricity the world produces. Data centers are forecast to require ~2,000Twh per year by 2040. But since mining will only grow, and lower grades mean even more tons to grind, barring any technology improvements, mining is likely to still be consuming the same amount of electricity as data centers.

Another change has been the widening availability of freight at ever cheaper costs. Traditionally, smelters were built next to mines as the cost of moving the ore was too great. Now, Australia exports 900 million tons of iron ore at <USD 10 per ton. That’s over 2 million tons per day loaded into ships, each carrying 180Kt every single day of the year. This means steel mills and smelters can be built anywhere, and everywhere. Of course, in the past 20 years they have mostly been built in China.

It is also important to understand where in the vertical chain, from mine to end-use, the profits are highest. An old maxim is that “110% of the value of metal comes from the mine; negative 10% of the value come from the smelter”. This underscores that the true value driver in most mines is geological scarcity, not industrial processing. Mining companies that do invest in smelters often regret the substantial maintenance capital every year just to keep the smelters operating. And sooner or later the nearby mines are exhausted, leaving a stranded smelter without feed, poor logistics, old technology and high legacy clean-up costs. The same applies to steel mills – note Fortescue (Australia’s 3^rd largest iron ore miner) recently noted how China was complaining that margins for the iron ore mines were running at 70-80% as compared to almost nothing for the Chinese steel mills.

The exception to this rule of mining being more profitable than processing is none other than rare earths and some other minor metals. But in many cases, processing of these metals becomes possible only because they are by-products of a larger ecosystem of installed modern smelters. For example, much is made of the negative treatment charges that copper, lead, and zinc smelters now pay, which is an upside-down scenario where the metal in concentrate that the smelters buy is worth more than the refined metal the smelters produce. The reason is because these metals have become the carrier metals for the profitable by-products like gold/silver, Cu/Pb/Zn and Sb/Sn/Bi plus sulphur contained in the primary concentrate.

And as I mentioned above, a major change in the industrial use of metals has been their refinement to incredibly low impurity levels for advanced semiconductors and other high-tech applications. This entails not only producing ultra-pure materials, but also growing monocrystalline layers onto wafers, or combining these metals with other highly purified elements for use in advanced techniques like doping, sputtering, spintronics, and a lot of other processes I don’t understand. These important markets for super refined advanced materials are mostly a very, very small part of any given metal’s consumption story. And sorry to your readers, but my expertise largely stops at the simple process of getting metals out of the ground and to that initial 99.99%.

Regarding a framework for considering metals and industrial minerals, they are divided into a few different categories as below. Metals are what you think of – shiny with high melting points, conductive, not brittle. Many metals though have chemical uses that don’t rely on their metallic properties, such as the titanium used in paint, and not the metal produced from the same titanium that goes into dental implants or aerospace.

• Ferrous: Things that go into steel – iron ore and (though not a metal) coking coal, and the various metals used to alloy steel – manganese, chrome, nickel, and a whole range of ferroalloys.
• Non-ferrous aka “base metals”: Copper, aluminum, zinc, nickel, lead and tin. After steel, these metals are fundamental to basic industry.
• Precious and platinum group metals (PGMs): Gold, silver, platinum, palladium and 4 other metals you wouldn’t bother to know.
• Minor metals: Tungsten, antimony, indium, germanium, gallium, cadmium, arsenic, and range of metals that aren’t so rare but have relatively small markets.
• Industrial minerals: Boron, lithium, zircon, titanium that can be turned into batteries and metals, but also quartz, graphite and bauxite, and the minerals that go into fertilizers and cement such as sulfur, phosphates, potash (potassium), clay, limestone and gypsum.
• Radioactive elements and rare earths: Uranium, thorium and the much vaunted unpronounceable elements at the heaviest part of the periodic table.

Each one of these categories has its own industry universe, with specific production processes, processing technologies, and end use applications. Only a few mining companies globally dabble in more than one category, whereas trading companies can bring their financing, hedging, warehousing, logistics and marketing skills to bear across the full spectrum. This also brings advantages in being able to adjust to market dynamics, as opposed to a mine that once it is built is locked in to producing specific products regardless.

Q3. Please share some numbers on the relative sizes of the key metal markets. Terms like “rare earths” or “critical minerals” get thrown around without any assigned dollar amount, so it would be helpful to understand where the value sits within the larger metals industry.

Scale does matter, as big mining companies put priorities on massive projects with large markets to move the needle. The largest markets would be oil, coal, steel and iron ore. In terms of volumes, that means 2025 production of 37 billion barrels of oil (or about 5 billion tons), 7.3 billion tons of thermal coal, and 1.9 billion tons of steel. In terms of value, we are talking USD 3T for oil, USD 1.4T for steel, and USD 510B for thermal coal.

Next down the tier is iron ore and base metals. In terms of annual volumes, 2.6 billion tons of iron ore was worth USD 250B, about the same value as 27Mt of copper. Aluminum with 74Mt was worth USD 95B, nickel with 3.7Mt was worth USD 57B, zinc with 14Mt had a value of USD 44B, and tin at 430Kt worth USD 22B.

From there we drop to the smaller markets. Lithium was 1.5Mt of lithium carbonate worth USD 15B, cobalt’s 270Kt was worth USD 8B, and tungsten’s total was around USD 5B. Rare earths and titanium metal were each about USD 4B and germanium was maybe USD 1.3B.

As you move down the list, the numbers become tiny, which means if you were a financier, a geologist, a metallurgist, you wouldn’t want to specialize in any of these small markets if you had the choice to work in markets with much bigger scale and liquidity. And then you have a related problem in that even the largest mining companies can only manage building 1 or 2 giant tier-1 mines at a time.

And I left out gold. Every year 5000 tons of gold are mined, worth now USD 800B, far exceeding any other metal. Half of the world’s USD 12B mineral exploration budget for metals goes into gold, with about 1/3rd of the USD 100B in metals mining capex going to fund new gold mines each year. That’s a lot of resources going into one metal.

Q4. Who are the major players in the metals trade both in terms of leading companies as well as the countries where the ores are mined, refined and ultimately purchased?

The top 2 dominant global mining majors are BHP and Rio Tinto, with market caps each around USD 200B. Southern Copper, Zijin Mining, Newmont, Grupo Mexico, Freeport-McMoRan and Barrick are the largest copper-gold companies with valuations of USD 80-150B each. After Glencore and iron ore plays like Vale and Fortescue, the list then quickly dwindles to companies with valuations below USD 20 billion. Most of these companies are pure miners, though some do have downstream processing.

If we look at the smelting groups, market capitalization ranges from USD 4-20B for the top companies around the world. By country or region, these include Korea (Korea Zinc), Europe (Boliden, Umicore, Aurubis), Japan (Sumitomo Metal Mining (SMM), Mitsubishi Materials Corporation and Dowa Holdings) and China (Jiangxi Copper and Tongling). Smelters have smaller valuations because their invested capital is significantly lower and profits are more in line with utility company margins at ~8%, compared to much higher mining margins (currently), which pushes up traded P/Es for miners to average 12x, versus smelters’ 8x.

I should note that steel mills are a different beast with much bigger capital footprints, so market caps range from USD 40-80B. Margins are a bit higher, largely due to the ability for the main players to rationalize capacity given the higher capex barriers to entry.

And then there are those advanced materials companies making super pure semiconductor compounds, such as excimer-grade fluorspar, and Indium Phosphide (InP) and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) wafers. These operations are often private (Indium Corporation, Hellma Materials, Freiberger Compound Materials GmbH) or small parts within larger companies (Corning, Coherent, Sumitomo Electric Industries, JX Advanced Metals). It is hard to place a valuation on these business units. But again, this advanced processing, whilst important for critical metals, is far, far removed from the initial mine-to-smelter part of the chain.

So back to smelters, mostly they are located near coasts (for logistics) or near cheap power sources. Mines don’t have that luxury as they are where they are found. In many cases that is in remote mountainous areas where tectonic plates collide (high altitude Chile/Bolivia/Peru). In other cases, they are in far flung regions that were land-locked with low populations that never had much infrastructure developed (i.e. copper in the Mongolian steppes). In other cases, high-grade deposits remain unmined due to prolonged political instability (i.e. Myanmar). And many commercially viable deposits don’t turn into mines due to the NIMBY “not in my backyard” curse or native title holder opposition.

So, for many metals, the world depends on an amalgam of disparate, politically risky mines. Take tin for example, where Indonesia, China, Bolivia and Myanmar dominate. Or antimony, where the world’s predominant mines are in China, Tajikistan, Russia and Myanmar. Even larger markets are not immune. Take Peru – the world’s second largest copper mine – where the recent presidential election was a dead-heat with potential nationalization risks for the miners. In Mexico, the world’s largest silver miner, 9 silver miner employees were killed amid narco cartel extortion in early 2026.

This all leads to another megatrend of a new “Great Game” of jockeying for foreign alliances with the Global South to compete for access to resources. My news feeds on mining supply runs the gamut from separatists in Balochistan, leftist rioters in Bolivia, and the Myanmar Junta bombing mines owned by the Karen rebels.

Q5. What are rare earths and why have they become such a topical issue? What are some of the more pervasive misconceptions that should be cleared up? How did China become such a major player in this space and why did other countries, including the United States, fail to do so?

I’m not a rare earths expert and I don’t trade them. The raw materials markets are too small, too closely tied to defense and therefore bordering on “state secrets”, and can’t be hedged on futures markets. Fundamentally, rare earths are chemical products, where the value-add really does sit in the processing-side. After mining and producing a concentrate containing a mixture of different rare earths, the hard part then is the “cracking”, a hydrometallurgical process, i.e. leaching, which can also be very expensive environmentally. Plus, they often contain radioactive elements like uranium and thorium to boot.

After cracking a concentrate into individual rare earth oxides (REO), the next step is refining each REO into a high purity metal. China is dominant in both the cracking and REO refining.

My simplistic understanding is that the main industrial use for rare earth elements (REE) is permanent magnets in the form of Neodymium-Iron-Boron (NdFeB). Neodymium (Nd) is a light rare earth along with Praseodymium (Pr). The value of that magnet industry is about USD 20B, and almost all modern electronics use these magnets. The problem is that high-performance applications (think defense) require the addition of heavy rare earths (namely Dysprosium and Terbium) to keep the magnets working at high temps. That market is said to be 1/3rd of the total REE magnet market by volume, but more than half by value. China has more control over global heavy rare earths than light rare earths given the nature of its deposits. Other rare earths also have uses in different high performance magnets (Samarium-Cobalt). Then there is a long list of “absolutely crucial” applications that require trace amounts of rare earths that I still can’t pronounce.

But let me interrupt the story to say something controversial: Industry adapts to supply deficits through thrifting, substitution and innovation. Prices rise and the weakest users are priced out. Life goes on. As long as deficits can be forecast and supply restrictions don’t cause a hugely substantial shortage, economies adapt. I say this is controversial because there is a completely different mainstream view. This view is that demand is so inelastic for certain metals that China now possesses the means to restrict US high-tech and defense production at will. Or more specifically, that exponential planned growth in critical metal demand from these new key technologies gives China veto-power over key US national interests.

I remain unconvinced, as evidence to date says that is not what is happening. When China banned REE magnet exports briefly last year, Ford and other auto makers said they had to stop output as their just-in-time supply from China dried up. This included silly things like little permanent magnets that go into windshield wipers being unavailable. Give them enough time and they’ll find a way to make the wipers work another way, or for thrifting to ensure a limited supply of permanent magnets are available for truly key components.

Another example, outside of rare earths, is antimony, which tripled in price up to USD 60K/t after China banned exports. A year later prices crashed and smelters both inside and outside China are complaining demand is awful despite China’s export restrictions still being place. Why? The main uses for antimony – flame-retardants and lead-acid car batteries – found ways to thrift and substitute away. And antimony’s recent growth market from its use in solar glass panels dropped as China solar installations started to go backward in 2026. Problem solved. Meanwhile new supply, substantial in aggregate, got into production. The military requirement seems to be quite small relative to general industry.

The recent boom and bust in lithium is another story of how prices drive the market and how industry can adapt quickly. As soon as EV production started to take off, lithium demand went from 400Kt of LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent) in 2020 to 1.5Mt in 2025. Prices spiked from USD 10K/t to 80K/t but quickly crashed back to USD 10K in 2023 despite continued strong demand growth forecasts. What happened? Lithium bearing rocks aren’t rare, aren’t low grade, and even a 3Mt ton market is tiny. Producers in Australia and Africa responded immediately and the supply crunch was met.

Chinese processors adapted quickly to figure out how to upgrade these new ores in high purity battery chemicals and shorten the previously long qualification timelines to get those products into batteries. Some people like to tell a story that “China Inc.” purposely crashed the lithium price to knock Western producers offline just as they were getting going. Indeed, China’s main battery maker, CATL, brought on domestic lithium mines at the higher end of the cost curve as prices spiked, and then turned them off once supply deficits were erased, just as you would expect a dominant player maximizing its supply-chain clout to do in any environment.

The fact that they turned off the mines when prices dropped is somehow evidence of a grand conspiracy to ensure that Western producers didn’t come online. Recall Elon Musk urging the world’s miners to mine more lithium and nickel. Well, they did. I’d argue prices achieved just what they were supposed to. You can blame Australian producers as much as the Chinese for overproducing ahead of demand. And it is a hard and fast rule that mines at the high-end of the cost curve only get into production when prices just about peak. That is not a conspiracy. Meanwhile there was no supply shortage stopping Tesla from starting production at its 50Gwh lithium hydroxide plant in Texas earlier this year.

Back to rare earths, the story for how China became dominant has taken on mythical status. I’m not going to get into the politics, but it’s illustrative to see how the story is framed from each side. The view from the West is well known. China’s state-planners were so amazingly prescient in knowing that rare earths would be driving all the technologies that we need today (wind turbines, electric vehicles, AI data centers, robots and advanced weaponry), that 40 years ago they adopted a plan to first flood Western markets with cheap rare earth units in order to bankrupt all mining and processing outside China, destroying China’s environment in the process, and then, once the West was hooked, cut them off by “weaponizing” China’s control of the industry against the West. Deng Xiaoping himself made the call on his famous 1992 Southern Tour that opened China for business, saying “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths” (中東有石油，中國有稀土).

The story from the Chinese side is that rare earths (and most other commodities China have an abundance in, such as tungsten) were almost worthless in the 1990s after the USSR collapse. China needed hard currency, so started exporting massively, supported by a home-grown Tsinghua mathematician who had innovated a new solvent extraction method that, along with, yes, lax environmental standards back then, put Chinese production on the low-end of the cost curve. Like most business in China, it was “bees-to-the-hive” (一窩蜂), meaning everyone chased the business resulting in what we now call involution – massive overcapacity and no profits. China eventually grew wealthy enough to consolidate and clean up the rare earths industry just at the same time as the technology took off in a way that made permanent magnets essential. Simultaneously, Western businesses made historic mistakes to devolve production of key parts to just one or two critical, just-in-time suppliers and to allow those suppliers to be located in one jurisdiction.

I should repeat the point that China had been waiting decades to find a counter to the US licensing system for its hi-tech exports, which explicitly operated under the “sliding scale” to ban exports of any technology to China to ensure the USA maintained a “two-generation” lead.

I’m not a fan of the term “weaponization” being applied to trade restrictions. Countries have been using trade restrictions and currency controls as tools in national competition since the dawn of civilization, and in too many instances that has led to armed conflict. But to call every new trade restriction or jostling for leverage as a “weaponization” risks a desensitization that makes actual hot conflict seem a justifiable reaction.

Q6. Why don’t mining companies or investors invest in rare earths or other less common metals? For those that the market isn’t interested in funding, does the State need to play a role, or is there still a place for entrepreneurs and private capital to carve out a profitable niche?

Mining in general is a terrible business, which is why only 0.5% of the S&P 500 is mining. Timelines to positive cash flows are ridiculously long. From exploration to resource delineation to feasibility studies and permitting, and then actual construction can take 10-15 years before production even starts. You then have 6-10 years before you’ve ever paid back the capex, all with the risk that local stakeholders say no, or expropriate your asset, or tie you up in court over permitting. And since the time periods are so long, you have to navigate multiple changes in governments and weather multiple economic and commodity price cycles. You then have to hope technology hasn’t advanced beyond needing what you actually set out to produce. And if you do get it all right and are in production when prices are running, you can expect whatever jurisdiction you’re in to institute a “super tax” to take any bonanza profits you might actually make, when you need those bonanza years to survive the down cycles.

For metals with smaller markets, it’s even worse. Price volatility is higher and markets are less transparent. Markets are so small that just one or two competing projects could move forward and shift a market from deficit to surplus, making your production redundant before you even start. And often these minor metals are tagging along as by-products with other metals, overshadowed by the main event. Or sometimes you think you hit the jackpot with multiple critical metals in one deposit only to find the flowsheet to separate them is novel and expensive, and end-users who might back stop the project are loathe to take on risk that depends on the other metals they care nothing about. On top of all this, entrepreneurs who would take the reins for driving these small scale projects are often not mainstream professionals or they lack proven track records on delivering projects, especially when no such projects have been built in two or three generations.

Even the established players trying to invest in the space make mistakes. For example, take Umicore, the specialty Belgium smelter/refinery and recycler of catalysts and precious metals. In 2018 they made a call to invest heavily in cobalt-nickel battery cathode production just before the electrical vehicle market shifted to cheaper LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) batteries made using more readily available materials. Limited supply had driven innovation to find alternative materials. The market worked and moved quickly, creating a cautionary tale for anyone trying to invest to supply a changing technical landscape.

So overall, yes, it does seem that some level of government support is needed to move such projects forward, but at the same time it will be challenging for a government to back the right horse. And also yes, there is room for private capital backing novel technologies in the sector. I wouldn’t diminish the real work being done now by some larger companies to add in critical metals recovery circuits in Australia, like Alcoa looking to recover gallium and Iluka recovering rare earths, or Korea Zinc looking to expand into the US.

Q7. With the growing hysteria around securing rare earths and critical minerals, has this led to a surge in amateurs or grifters seeking to exploit this opportunity? Any interesting examples that you can share?

Hysteria is the right word and yes, every promoter and madcap scientist is throwing their hat into the critical metals ring, as has the junior mining sector in Vancouver and Perth, which has transitioned from lithium to cobalt to the latest flavors-of-the-day. All that anyone needs to say is the metal in their ground can supply the absolutely mission critical metals for the F-35 stealth jets, or next-gen submarines, or space force lasers, and up goes their share price. It’s all super-secret as to what metals or in what quantity these defense technologies actually use, but trust them, it’s necessary. Cue the ominous red-scare music.

Certainly, there is a role for prospectors. These are the folks who peg ground and put a prospect into corporate vehicles for people to review. If something actually does shape up to look worthwhile, then serious people will step in to move it forward. Non-serious retail investors will be taken for a ride, but no one forced them to buy a ticket, so I guess that’s how it goes. There are somewhere around 80 different junior exploration companies launched or renamed to include the words “battery”, “critical” or “strategic” metals.

The problem of course arises when governments start trying to pick winners and start allocating capital to folks without the right pedigrees. To be fair, almost no one in the mining industry has a pedigree in these fields because the critical metals aren’t mined but come out the back end of processing. So, the last thing you need to listen to is a mining promoter telling you how advanced semiconductor substrates are made. Thus, we are poised for a massive distribution of capital to folks without the capability to move projects forward, but if the alternative is doing nothing, then the shotgun approach of flooding the zone and hoping a few projects come out the other end does seem a path forward.

I can give a few head-scratching examples of some smaller companies in the space. For people outside the industry, it’s always hard to drill down through the glossy presentations to figure out which projects really have legs.

• One listed company that has ridden the antimony wave saw their share price increase 40x since May 2024. They operate a very small refinery in Idaho and generated a whopping US 35 million in revenue in 2025. They now have a market capitalization of USD 1.5B and won a contract to supply the Department of War with USD 245M worth of antimony metal. They are building new capacity, but those numbers are still software metrics, not valuation applied to the basic materials industry.
• Another company was hoping to solve the problem of relying on cobalt from the conflict ridden DRC. Their answer was to build a nickel refinery in Oklahoma as a first step to recover by-product cobalt. The cobalt price has since crashed as technology evolved, so the project now is all about nickel. They market themselves as building the only American nickel refinery, which is true, except that there are 3 nickel refineries in Canada and 2 in Europe and they are all struggling to find adequate feed. There is actually no processing bottleneck here on class-1 nickel. They chose an older, expensive smelting technology that uses carbon monoxide. Lo-and-behold, the local communities don’t want it, and it looks like things are on hold and lawsuits are flying.
• One company exploring for a critical metal took an IEA chart showing their metal had a demand growth forecast of 33% from 2025-2039 and “accidentally” fudged it to make it say 1233%. 33% over 14 years is a pretty benign CAGR of 2%, so yes kind of “meh”. To be fair, many existing mines will be closed by 2040, and new mines are needed to get to that 1/3rd more output, so actually yes, we will indeed need a number of those projects to get funded.
• A well-meaning project divorced from reality was a storage battery invention started by a renowned MIT professor and backed by Bill Gates. This molten salt antimony battery was marketed as “if you want to make something as cheap as dirt, make it out of dirt”. Sounds compelling, but antimony wasn’t anywhere as cheap as dirt and the invention, if scaled, would have consumed 50Ktpa out of a then 80Ktpa primary antimony supply. There is some merit to the argument that new inventions that drive demand will create the right incentives for investment in supply, but there also is a proclivity for tech investors to misjudge the timing required for physical markets to react.
• One final example relates to the lack of an adequate venture ecosystem. Not too long ago I was due diligencing a start-up with novel technology for recycling a specific strategic scrap using bacteria through a form of bioleaching. The problem was that the company’s lab in a suburban warehouse district was not insured/licensed for the potential that bacteria could eat through the bioreactors and melt into the foundation. Going down that rabbit-hole is something called ecophagy, or the “gray goo” scenario – where uncontrolled self-replicating bacteria or nanobots feeding on natural materials could exponentially eat through all of the earth’s crust within 2, maybe 3, days.

Q8. For a time, Ukraine was in the media as a potential source of strategic minerals and rare earths. Is this feasible and how should we look at opportunities like this from a risk/reward standpoint?   

I call this the “debacle of numeracy”. Back in April 2025, US and Ukraine signed a joint reconstruction investment fund. The Azov rare earths deposit, despite it being undeveloped and in Russian-occupied Ukraine, became a focal point. The discussion was framed that the USA wanted to recoup the supposed USD 350B spent on helping Ukraine and getting ownership of the Azov deposit could be some sorter of barter repayment. However, as we have seen, the world’s largest mining companies have market caps far less than that. Standalone advanced rare earths companies like MP Materials and Lynas have market caps below USD 4B in stable political jurisdictions. If we are talking about a deposit that still needs years of exploration and feasibility studies and then a likely capex bill north of USD 1 billion, market valuations would likely be less than USD 200M.

We can also look at the potential revenues the mine would generate if it ever gets in production. The best resource estimate is that the Azov ore body is 11 million tons of ore containing 1.35% rare earth oxides, or 148,500t of contained rare earth oxides (REO). The problem is that you can’t just assume that you can recover 148,500t, as the process of concentrating the ore into higher-grade mixed rare earth concentrates will see 20-35% of the contained REO lost to tailings. Let’s say 25% is lost, leaving 110,000 tons contained REO to be sold over say a 15 year mine life. Next, you can come up with a value for what each ton of the particular mix of REOs Azov would produce, and it does have a large portion of the higher-value heavy rare earths, say 30% (compared to Mountain Pass which is 99% light rare earths).

The Azov REOs together might be worth USD 30/kg. But you are then going to lose another 35%, as the next stage processing (a “cracker” that would separate out the rare earth oxides) has costs and recoveries and needs a profit margin, all of which gets reflected in the discount they will pay the miner. So that works out to USD 19,500 per ton of REO in concentrate. Undiscounted that is USD 2.1B, and applying a 10% discount rate you get a present value of future cash flows of just USD 1B. Yes, there is zircon revenue on top of that, but we also haven’t gotten into the capex and opex to get to those cash flows. I get the argument that the true value in national security terms cannot be captured by traditional metrics, but the disparity here between USD 1B in potential metal value in exchange for USD 350B already out the door seems a bit much.

And on that point, a Treasury official briefing the press on that April 2025 deal was trying to argue that Ukraine could satisfy all US aluminum requirements. Now, the US imports 4-5Mt of aluminum each year compared to Ukraine’s pre-war capacity of 300Kt tons per year. No one in the room had any concept of the numbers to even begin to question the math. It is hard to have serious discussions on trade policy with that kind of knowledge base. And it is kind of against everything the US is doing to tariff aluminum coming into the US (even from friendly nations) in order to incentivize domestic production.

Q9. The Trump Administration is touting its Project Vault. Please explain what this is and how it is supposed to function. They have identified 60 minerals on the critical list, but is that realistic to focus on so many, and in your view, is this smart policy?

A long-standing problem with commodities markets is price cyclicality, driven by economic and restocking cycles, and given that the long lead times required for projects make managing capacity difficult. Many observers are coming to the conclusion that this cyclicality requires Chinese-style state-led capacity management and trade controls rather than leaving it to the invisible hand. Or at least that a hybrid global economy with one part of the world operating under state-control makes the other party’s free market unsustainable, hence the “if you can beat, join ‘em” policy pivot underway.

A not-long-ago example of how attempts at price controls ultimately fail is the tin cartel from the 1980s. Two dozen countries (including major tin miners like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand) set up a mechanism to reduce price volatility among member producers and consumers. It worked for a while, until non-member nations (Brazil and China) crashed supply by producing under the floor. Like a country trying to prop up a failing currency, the cartel went bust trying to buy up metal to create artificial tightness. This serves as a reminder that best intentions at managing prices easily come undone.

Traditionally, aspirant miners hoping to de-risk a project’s exposure to price fluctuations (and to ensure there is someone willing to buy the proposed product) would work with end-users (or trading company middlemen) to lock in long-term contracts with floor prices for the years when the cycle would otherwise force the mine to turn-off. In this way end-users lock in consistent supply, but at the same time they are not going to take on only the downside risk. They will also ask for a cap on prices to capture those bonanza years as well. Not many mining companies can get funded with capped prices, plus traditionally the floor prices offered were never high enough.

Price floors, on the face of it, would seem an ideal way for governments to backstop mining projects, as governments can achieve their goal of seeing supply produced – at any price. In the upside case of higher prices, the government is happy to sit back. Governments would only need to subsidize production if there is actual production in a low price environment, at which point strategic materials would still be produced and potentially even stockpiled at low prices (albeit above the then spot market). This price floor method was adopted recently for MP Materials but has since fallen out of favor to methods that rely more on industry end users – those people who should know best what materials and in what quantities they will need – to drive the process.

This is the logic of Project Vault, the latest iteration of trying to find a market mechanism to reduce price flexibility. The principles of this policy launched in 2026 are that industry end-users would place firm orders to a centralized platform (Project Vault) with prices, specifications and volumes fixed. With these orders, national-champion trading companies with credit lines from JP Morgan and guaranteed by the US government Ex-Im bank would then ensure these products are secured and even possibly stockpiled. The scheme is short on details and doesn’t yet seem to have started operationally.

In theory, the scheme can potentially solve the problems plaguing the industry and build up strategic industrial reserves without further government intervention. In practice, however, one can foresee where things might go wrong, as no supply-chain system can operate immune from broader macroeconomic events.

One example to keep in mind was the Fanya exchange in China from 2011-2015, a private-industry led stockpiling of critical metals. Producers delivered a range of metals, including antimony, tungsten, gallium and germanium, that they couldn’t sell into real demand. Retail investors bid up the prices well above any supply-demand fundamentals. Eventually when people started to sell, it was a bank run and the scheme froze up. Like the tin cartel, it all works until someone is left holding the bag. This is also why you should never buy into a minor metals ETF. It only works when the market is moving up.

A second related US endeavor is the Open Price Exploration for National security (OPEN) program, an AI system funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The system is meant to take in all the inputs of costs throughout every step of the mine-to-end-use supply chain and come up with a true cost estimate for a given metal product. The government then intends to use that price to determine if dumping is happening, set tariffs, time stockpiling purchase decisions, and pick more likely winners for companies it might back. OPEN was a point of contention at the recent G7 ministerial, as the US pushed to use it as technical foundation for a new, Western-led critical minerals trading bloc, but the Europeans were not keen on letting Washington make the price decisions. To me, it all sounds a bit scary, as if we have been only waiting for AI to evolve enough to truly implement central planning.

Q10. How have US tariffs impacted your industry? More broadly, has the US’s more assertive foreign policy, such as its actions in Venezuela, impacted supply chains or the fundamental market mechanisms in the metals and mining sector?  

Let’s take a step back first on what functions commodities prices are supposed to achieve and how trade policy might rightly address unintended distortions, before getting into the aftermath of recent US tariffs. We are all familiar with the anti-dumping story, when a company prices products too low to purposely drive out competition and grab market share. It’s often a fight within the US between the producers of the dumped products and the US end-users who want the cheapest supply. The charge against China writ-large is that China’s non-for-profit model hollowed out US industry to the great short-term benefit of both US consumers and profitability of US multinationals, but to the long term decimation of the heartland and national security. By the time the hollowing out is done, there isn’t even anyone left to “claim injury”. But China didn’t then predatorily raise prices. They kept prices low.

So now the answer to counter the fact the Chinese dumpers haven’t turned profit-centered and proceeded to raise prices is to, well, raise prices. Hence the tariffs. Pushing up Chinese costs by 10-20% wouldn’t be nearly enough, but neither are US consumers nor Chinese politics going to allow the broad imposition of the huge cost increases that would be necessary to force change. So, we get the repeated cycle of threats to impose >100% tariffs and the repeated back down to something lower.

Another problem of course is the US is not the only economy in the world. There is a school of thought that the US plus Europe and Japan and all its multinational corporations collectively have enough economic weight to force de-coupling and establish a competing manufacturing ecosystem outside China, aka “friend-shoring”. I call this the “We made you and we can takeaway theory”. On one hand, then, the US is supposed to be making trade agreements with allies to form a united front, but on the other hand, as we have seen, the US is pushing back against its allies by imposing tariffs on them and trying to push up US prices.

There is some twisted logic to the madness. Take aluminum. The US imports 4Mt per year and produces very little, including exporting its own scrap. The US now imposes a 50% tariff on Canada and US consumers were paying, until recent price crashes, USD 6,400/t, as the US regional premium had skyrocketed to USD 2,550 on top of the USD 3,850 LME price. European premiums were only USD 340/t, so they paid USD 4,190. Canadian producers still received USD 4,000 regardless of who they were selling to. The US government collected USD 2,000 per ton and the cost inflation of the much higher import prices gets absorbed through the system.

Indeed, since tariffs were put in place there have been some announcements to build aluminum smelting in the US, but at best they are 5 years out and will only meet half the US import demand, if they all get built. It also means the US is never going to be competitive in exporting ali products or anything where ali is a substantial input. There is also one other minor problem in that ali is incredibly energy intensive.

One million tons of ali annual capacity will require 15Twh. That is currently the entire consumption of all data centers in Texas, and US industrial electricity prices aren’t cheap and aren’t getting cheaper. We’re looking at roughly 6-7c/Kwh at best in the US versus compared to 2c/KwH for the cheapest solar/wind sites in Western China. As crazy as it sounds, two old ali plants in the US (Century Aluminum and Alcoa) sold their power plants just this year to data centers and bitcoin mining. Granted, those ali plants were outdated such that they are better off starting from scratch, but still, devoting expensive electricity to low-value ali only works if national security drivers distort markets enough to somehow make that work.

The justification for the 50% ali tariffs started in 2017 with a Section 232 investigation, claiming US national security is impaired by over-reliance on imports. That makes sense as an available policy tool, as there is almost no one left to claim injury from too-cheap competing imports. It has taken 8 years for critical metals mining/processing to get the same treatment. The White House Critical Minerals Proclamation of January 2026 is a fascinating document. The document lays out the US vulnerabilities of being too reliant on imports, and then calls for a deal with allies to form a trade bloc with minimum price floors or to outright restrict the US import of such materials from non-allies.

This is as mind-boggling as trying to figure out US strategy on the Straits of Hormuz, which we’re not going to get into. On one hand, China’s export bans were met with outrage, and the US negotiated that reprieve on rare earth magnet restrictions until November 2026. Other restrictions on antimony, tungsten, germanium and gallium remain in place and prices outside China have skyrocketed (though antimony has since crashed). Is that what winning looks like?

Q11. What is China’s strategy in the critical minerals space? You’ve noted China has been moving up the periodic table. What does this mean and how does it relate to the manufacturing sector and the government’s goal of moving up the value chain?

I’d be remiss not to mention China’s Made in China 2025 (中國製造2025) and also its public Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) (軍民融合) doctrines undertaken during the last decade. The first meant to increase China’s self-sufficiency and value-add, and the latter was meant to essentially declare everything dual-use. Both of those rang alarm bells in Washington and in 2022 the sliding-scale two-generation metric was abandoned, with the US committing to trying to keep as large as lead as possible. Now we have an ever escalating tit-for-tat of the two sides export control regimes.

The US has long had its Entity List and related dual-use export control reviews, and since 2021 is using a 1260H blacklist of Chinese dual-use companies that it bans from doing business with the US government. On the Chinese side, there is a similar licensing of technologies and products deemed to be dual-use, along with outright bans on certain products going to blacklisted US companies. The latest Chinese response was to ban even reagents going to MP Materials, which is not at all surprising given the US Department of War is now its majority shareholder.

With that backdrop and given that the current growth industries – AI, robotics, clean energy, EVs, military – all require critical metals, China is flexing its muscle to restrict exports of those materials, as well as the precursors and technological IP to build processing plants. After first announcing an outright ban after Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, China negotiated a reprieve, which is set to expire in November 2026. That deadline is now looming large and I wonder if China risks overplaying its hand here. After all, China’s economy is not fully self-sufficient, relying on huge volumes of imported iron ore, copper concentrates, and bauxite. And China’s trade restrictions have now incentivized the West to make a full speed sprint towards reducing its reliance on China.

The verdict is also still out as to whether China will force further consolidation to bring about pricing leverage for Chinese smelters. Recent years have seen national state-owned champions aggregating the best economies of scale and cheapest/greenest energy, but we’ll see if China really enters a new stage of achieving long term, high profits in these sectors. Restricting exports is not going to help profitability and even in China’s state-led system, profitability at the end of the day does drive innovation. We could go off on a whole different tangent to discuss the theory that China’s advances in innovation and improved efficiencies in the metals processing world were acts of survival, achieved only because of the near-zero margins these smelters have continuously faced.

So, China does continue to innovate in the metals space. There has been a clear trend towards trying to do what that MIT professor aimed for – finding ways to use readily available elements to accomplish our industrial needs and wants. One key barrier to doing so previously was the cost of energy. Lighter elements require more energy to purify, rendering mass-scale extraction financially unviable without access to cheap, low-carbon electricity grids. China has opened the door to exactly this with its massive installation of wind and solar, especially in Western China, now known as the Super Green Power Bank. China is quickly using that new advantage to move up the periodic table by making materials cheaper, lighter and increasing China’s self-sufficiency along the way. Some examples worth noting include:

• We already saw the shift from nickel-cobalt cathodes to LFP. Now sodium-ion batteries, made from super-abundant soda ash and biomass, are poised to replace LFP in some applications. The sodium-ion batteries only become commercially feasible with super cheap, clean electricity.
• China is also building out magnesium production, having potentially cracked the code to efficiently recovering Mg from the Qinghai salt lakes with cheap electricity. Mg is significantly lighter than aluminum, and scaling production would see significantly reduced ali demand, both from substitution and by alloying with ali to produce a stronger metal.
• Similarly, China is leading the way in implementing the production of graphene-copper composites. The efficiency gains achieved by adding small amounts of graphene can significantly improve copper’s conductivity, reducing the total quantity of copper needed. Only cheap energy makes it viable to take abundant carbon and restructure it into single-atom-thick hexagonal sheets of graphene.
• The same “cheap-energy unlocks new industrial processes” applies to processing fluorspar as well. While the exact chemistry is beyond me, highly engineered fluorine molecules will apparently unlock the next generation of ultra-high-density batteries.

Q12. The Iran war has caused shortages in many areas, most notably in petroleum and fertilizer. How is it impacting the metals world?

We were expecting prolonged shortages of aluminum, bromines, helium, fertilizers, and styrene due to shipping stoppages from the petrochemical and ali smelters around the Gulf as well as Israel. Hopefully, with the peace deal that means the shortages all go away, even though it may take longer to complete repairs to the 800-900Ktpa of damaged aluminum capacity there. The world seems to have compensated fairly quickly to higher prices through demand destruction and China stepping up output.

We will be watching closely what happens to sulfuric acid prices in China. The Middle East normally accounted for 50% of the global seaborne sulfur trade (byproduct of gas/oil refining), which accounts for about 25% of sulfuric acid production. Globally, sulfuric acid prices spiked during the conflict, bringing a sudden boost to Chinese copper, zinc and lead smelters who produce sulfuric acid as a byproduct as well. A correction in sulfuric acid prices back to previous levels could reverse the downward pressure on those already negative treatment charges for base metal concentrates.

Q13. Technological innovation plays a fundamental role in your industry. Please share some key innovations and explain how they came about. More generally, what does it take to invent, pilot and commercialize a new idea, and how can countries credibly follow this path?   

I did talk about how the upstream and initial processing technology in my industry hasn’t changed much since Bronze Age, but yes, there have been examples of technological breakthroughs that revolutionized some metals:

• We talked about the Chinese invention on rare earths separation in the 1990s by the mathematician Xu Guangxian. His countercurrent cascade extraction process slashed the processing time of rare earths from weeks to hours, pushed purities to 99.99%, and cut production costs by 75%. Study math, kids.
• The Soviets pioneered in-situ leaching of uranium in the 1970s. Instead of digging up rocks and crushing them to extract the contained minerals, the process injected sulfuric acid directly into the deposit to leach minerals without building a conventional mine, then pumped the pregnant solution to the surface. Today 60% of the world’s uranium comes from in-situ leaching. Extraction of other elements in this way, including copper and boron, are being commercialized as well.
• Nevada has always had gold production, but until the 1970s, any rocks with less than 1g/t of gold were ignored. The gold was microscopic at best – we are talking about 1 gram of gold out of 1 million grams (ppm). Then in the 1960s, the US Bureau of Mines combined a series of inventions to effectively recover this gold through Heap Leach-Carbon Adsorption Methods. Basically, the ores were crushed finely, agglomerated, and put into a pile which was then sprayed with a dilute sodium cyanide solution. The pregnant solution that eventually came out at the bottom could be stripped using a carbon adsorption innovation. This unlocked a whole new Nevada gold rush in the 1980s.

These three examples were driven by talented scientists doing hard work, all within an ecosystem that allowed their theories to be trialed and improved. The US clearly retains ecosystems for innovation; just look at the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. It also has clear STEM capabilities being applied to mining, nuclear energy, and advanced materials. How hard would it be to redirect these talents towards basic materials processing if the right funding was in place?

A clear advantage in mineral processing that China now has is abundant, cheap power. The US is not going to be able to compete on that front anytime soon. Despite some announcements for investments into traditional smelters in the US, the bulk of activity in critical metals is going towards novel technologies for recycling and the hydrometallurgical low-energy processing of primary ores. This makes sense, as recycling offers a ready supply of materials that don’t need to be mined, and hydrometallurgy offers potential for lower capex, less pollution, and higher recoveries. Another avenue is recovering metals from the tailings of old mines – material produced when prices were lower, recovery technologies were less advanced, and some end-use demand markets didn’t even exist for metals tossed aside. I’d watch those technologies for the next breakthrough. It doesn’t take many successes to change a given metals supply/demand outlook.

Q14. If the goal is to secure long-term access to critical minerals, what are the real solutions governments should be pursuing, and what policies should be avoided?

First, let’s look at the short term, meaning 5 years. Apart from making a quick leap in getting gallium in production outside China in the next year or two, most other investments underway to ramp up critical metal production outside China are not going to come to fruition in that time period, which is the same timeframe that the massive ramp up of material into AI servers needs to happen. The only answer is a ‘Great Compromise’ of some sort between the US and China. Neither economy is entirely self-sufficient in the key materials needed to maintain growth. The answer is simple – allow trade to happen largely unfettered and ensure whatever competitive restrictions take place are pushed to the margin. I’m not a military guy, but I just can’t believe a hot conflict is going to be decided by how much gadolinium is in each side’s satellites. If I am wrong, then we better learn how to play nice prior to achieving self-sufficiency.

Critics will argue that approach will just deepen the current divide, and that critical metals production outside China will never be incentivized if prices aren’t higher in the US market. This means that tariffs are needed and we should welcome Chinese export restrictions as just the kick-in-the-pants, short term wakeup call the US needs to invest domestically. I just don’t think the US will be able to ramp up production fast enough and I believe higher prices will cause more harm than good.

Longer term, yes, there is a strong case for governments to fund research in basic materials and advanced metals production, the same way it does for universities researching health and semiconductors. Also, I believe significant responsibility should be borne by the semiconductor companies themselves to invest more upstream into refining the materials they need. Those investment amounts are tiny compared to what they are building downstream. But setting prices and trying to pick national champions seems a step too far. Picking fights with allies also seems counterproductive.

Q15. Please share any favorite books, publications, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of metals, rare earths, mining or other related topics.

I spend a fair bit of time reading things I know I will likely disagree with, just so I am not in an echo-chamber. So those are not really things I want to recommend. One example is Thomasz Nadrowski’s “Mineral War: China’s Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction”. The histories are largely informative and the policy recommendations somewhat credible, but the hyperbole makes it all really hard to swallow.

I somehow find solace in reading the apocalyptic prophecies that try to explain our “retrogression to the law of the jungle”(倒退回叢林法則) and where we go from here: Ray Dalio’s “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail”, “The Fourth Turning is Here” by Neil Howe, and the “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration” by Peter Turchin. I am looking forward to reading “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation” by Victor Davis Hanson.