Twentieth-century power ran on oil. Twenty-first-century power runs on a longer, less familiar list: lithium and cobalt for batteries, copper for grids, gallium and germanium for chips, dysprosium and neodymium for wind turbines and precision-guided munitions. Tim Marshall's argument is straightforward: if the biggest single factor driving twentieth-century geopolitics was where the oil came from, the biggest single factor in twenty-first-century geopolitics will be where the critical minerals come from and who processes them. That is why every major power now has a critical-minerals strategy, and why Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and Greenland have become names in national-security memos in Washington, Beijing, Brussels and Tokyo.
The single most under-appreciated fact in the mineral race is that China's advantage is not primarily in the ground — it is in the refineries. China mines only a modest share of the world's raw lithium, cobalt and rare earths, but it processes roughly 60% of the world's lithium, 70% of cobalt, and around 90% of rare earths. That is the result of a two-decade industrial strategy that accepted low margins, pollution and Western indifference in order to sit at the chokepoint of every downstream supply chain. In an economic war, the country that can refuse to process your ore has as much leverage as the country that sits on the ore.
One reason the Trump administration wanted a minerals deal with Kyiv in 2025 was not headline politics, it was the map. Ukraine holds significant deposits of lithium, titanium, graphite, gallium and rare earths — much of it in the east and south, which is precisely the territory Russia now partially occupies. From the American point of view, backing Ukraine has an economic upside that reduces reliance on Chinese processing. From the Russian point of view, holding onto Donbas denies those minerals to the West. Every side in this war is also, quietly, fighting over a periodic table.
Chile alone produces roughly a quarter of the world's copper, and Argentina, Bolivia and Chile share the 'lithium triangle' that holds more than half of global reserves. Add Venezuelan bauxite and rare-earth potential, and Peruvian and Mexican copper, and you have a mineral geography that mirrors, uncomfortably for Washington, the same Chinese trade footprint that the Monroe Doctrine is being restated against. The tariff pressure, the Panama Canal rhetoric, the moves against Venezuela and Cuba: they are not separate news stories. They are the mineral story, seen from a different camera.
Greenland matters for more than shipping lanes. It sits on very large deposits of rare earths, uranium and iron, which are becoming accessible as the ice retreats. That is a large part of the reason it keeps returning to American political rhetoric: whoever controls the Kvanefjeld and Kringlerne deposits controls one of the few Western-friendly alternatives to Chinese rare-earth supply. Denmark, Greenland's constitutional partner, has grown steadily more nervous about Chinese investment in Greenlandic mining precisely because it understands the same map that Washington does.
Every great-power strategy for critical minerals reduces to the same three verbs. Secure your own supply, at almost any cost. Dominate as much of the global market and processing chain as you can. Deny the other side access wherever possible. The US Inflation Reduction Act, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, Chinese export controls on gallium and germanium, Japan's stockpiling programme — different labels, same three verbs. This is what a resource-driven Cold War looks like, and it is why the twenty-first century's geopolitical map is going to be drawn as much by mines and refineries as by armies.