Prior to his planned meeting with Xi Jinping On October 30 in South Korea, Trump signed deals with several Asian countries that may eventually do much, in conjunction with expansion of mining and processing in the United States and perhaps other steps, to reduce U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals (BBC, October 28, 2025).
The deals with Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia differ in size and substance and it’s too early to assess their tangible impact. But they all include efforts to diversify access to the minerals that have become essential for advanced manufacturing, from electric vehicles to smartphones.
The agreements, which aim to lock partners into trading with the US, are a clear bid to reduce dependence on China, ahead of a key meeting with its leader Xi Jinping.
They could eventually challenge Beijing’s stranglehold over rare earths, but experts say it will be a costly process that will take years….
It’s not clear yet if the $550bn US investment Japan had previously agreed to will be part of the rare earths deal. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is expected to flesh out those details with Japanese companies during his upcoming visit.
Meanwhile, CNN and Time magazine are warning us that “If you think Trump’s China deal is the end of the story, you haven’t been paying attention.” I didn’t think that the impending China deal, if there is one, would be the end of the story, so I’m off the hook vis-à-vis that assumption.
Talking
CNN quotes U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, one of the top talkers in the trade talks with China, as saying that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “told Chinese negotiators at their last meeting, ‘This is the last time we want to be talking about rare earths.’ ‘Unfortunately, that is not the last time they want to be talking about it,’ Greer told reporters earlier this month.” So CNN at least a little bit blames the CCP side as well as the Trump side for any failure of the story to end.
Time, though, seems to believe or pretend to believe that it’ll be all mercurial Trump’s fault if a deal doesn’t last, the implication being that the Chinese Communist Party is nothing if not trustworthy.
The basic problem with the trade deals is that we should not be doing trade deals with the PRC party-state. Our problems with the totalitarian dictatorship and its global ambitions will not be resolved by deals. We’re at where we’re at and it’s not easy to extricate ourselves. But the important beginnings in doing so made by President Trump and others in our federal government and state governments have not depended on the CCP’s acceptance and agreement.
