Across three continents, the architecture of global power is being rebuilt not with diplomatic summits or military campaigns, but through mining contracts, processing facilities, and supply chain agreements for critical materials most people have never heard of. The scramble for lithium, rare earths, and copper reveals what Pentagon strategists have known for years: American hegemony is dissolving, and the nation that controls critical minerals will dictate the terms of the 21st century.
The evidence emerges in fragments scattered across the globe. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, Chinese battery manufacturers outbid American extraction companies for lithium processing rights. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Beijing-financed railways bypass traditional Western shipping routes to move cobalt toward Asian ports. In Brussels, European officials draft emergency plans for mineral independence while remaining 100 percent dependent on Chinese rare earth imports. And across Latin America, nations that once reliably aligned with Washington now play competing powers against each other, extracting concessions from Beijing and Washington while committing fully to neither.
This is the story of an empire confronting the reality that its post-World War II dominance is ending, not through military defeat but through economic displacement. The minerals essential to modern technology—from smartphones to fighter jets—have become the leverage points where rising powers challenge established hierarchies, where resource-rich nations extract concessions from desperate consumers, and where the fiction of Western primacy collides with the mathematics of geological distribution.
The Geology of Power: Why Minerals Determine Hegemony
Empires have always been built on resource control. Britain’s naval supremacy rested on coal deposits and iron ore. American 20th-century dominance emerged from oil fields in Texas, Appalachian coal, and Midwest steel mills. But the 21st century operates under different physical laws. The technologies that define modern power—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, electric transportation—require elements that exist in commercially viable concentrations in only a handful of locations worldwide.
Unlike oil, which can be found across dozens of countries, or iron ore, which is globally abundant, the specific rare earth elements needed for precision-guided munitions or the lithium required for advanced battery systems concentrate in geographically isolated deposits. This geological reality creates strategic chokepoints that no amount of innovation can bypass, no military force can overcome, and no diplomatic pressure can wish away.
The National Interest documents that Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia’s “lithium triangle” contains approximately 49.6 percent of global lithium resources—far exceeding the 16.5 percent held by the United States, 7.7 percent in Australia, and 5.9 percent in China. For copper, Chile and Peru account for over 34 percent of global production. Brazil holds the third-largest rare earth element reserves globally, after China and Vietnam.
The implications cascade across every dimension of statecraft. Without lithium, electric vehicle manufacturing cannot scale. Without rare earths, the precision electronics in F-35 fighter jets cannot function. Without copper, the infrastructure for renewable energy grids cannot be built. What emerges is a brutal arithmetic: the nation that controls these supply chains controls the capacity for technological advancement itself.
The Mineral-Military Nexus: Strategic Dependencies Exposed
- China controls 85% of rare earth processing capacity globally, with 70% of production
- China processes 58% of global lithium, 70% of cobalt, 42% of copper
- Electric vehicle batteries require 6 times more mineral inputs than conventional cars
- Wind turbines demand 9 times more mineral inputs than gas-fired power plants
- Global lithium demand projected to increase 40-fold by 2040
- Copper supply shortfalls begin in 2025, persisting throughout the decade
- U.S. currently produces only 12% of global rare earths despite possessing reserves
The International Energy Agency projects lithium demand increasing fortyfold over the next 15 years. Copper demand will surge 40 percent by 2030, outpacing current production capacity. Yet industry analysis reveals that China maintains near-monopoly control over processing infrastructure—85 percent of rare earth refining, 70 percent of cobalt processing, 58 percent of lithium conversion. This isn’t market competition—it’s strategic encirclement executed through patient capital deployment over two decades while American policymakers focused on counterterrorism and Middle Eastern stabilization.
Three Spheres of Hegemonic Competition: Americas, Europe, Middle East
The transformation of global power is visible across three distinct theaters, each revealing how resource control has replaced military dominance as the primary currency of geopolitical influence. In each case, the minerals and energy resources essential to modern economies create leverage that traditional diplomatic or military tools cannot counter.
The Americas: Where Resource Competition Meets Hemispheric Realignment
Beneath the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert, Argentina’s northwest plateaus, and Bolivia’s Uyuni expanse lies the future of technological competition. Global Finance Magazine analysis shows that in 2021, China accounted for 65 percent of Chilean mineral exports, amounting to roughly 6 percent of Chile’s entire GDP. This isn’t trade—it’s structural dependency that gives Beijing effective veto power over decisions made in Santiago, Lima, and Buenos Aires.
The numbers reveal strategic vulnerability on a staggering scale. European Parliament research documents that China has invested $11 billion in Latin American lithium extraction since 2018, with Chinese companies purchasing half of the world’s largest lithium mines during that period. When a consortium including CATL, BRUNP, and CMOC invested $1.4 billion in Bolivia’s lithium sector in 2023, they weren’t merely buying minerals—they were purchasing influence over a government, leverage over neighboring states, and insurance against future American sanctions.
Europe: Russia’s Energy Shadow and Continental Paralysis
If Latin American lithium represents the future of technological competition, Russian natural gas and strategic minerals embody Europe’s present paralysis. The parallels illuminate how resource dependency shapes foreign policy more decisively than military alliances or democratic values. Just as China dominates critical mineral processing, Russia maintains leverage through energy infrastructure that shapes European decision-making at every level.
European Parliament briefings reveal the extent of strategic exposure: the EU imports 100 percent of its rare earth elements from China and 97 percent of its magnesium supply—two materials essential to manufacturing everything from smartphones to fighter jets. When Brussels attempted to diversify by developing Serbian lithium deposits—potentially Europe’s largest—environmental opposition and political resistance stalled projects indefinitely.
The Ukraine war laid bare this strategic weakness with devastating clarity. When Russian gas flows ceased, European industries didn’t simply switch suppliers—they curtailed production, hemorrhaged competitiveness, and absorbed inflationary shocks that reshaped political landscapes across the continent. Germany’s industrial base, built on decades of cheap Russian energy, faced existential questions about future viability.
The Middle East: Israel and the Energy Chokepoint Architecture
In the Middle East, a different dynamic plays out that illuminates how American statecraft adapts resource control to regional specifics. Israel doesn’t sit atop vast oil reserves or critical mineral deposits, yet it serves a crucial hegemonic function—a technologically advanced, militarily capable, ideologically aligned partner that justifies permanent U.S. engagement in a resource-rich region where energy supplies flow to global markets.
This triangulation—Latin America for critical minerals, Europe constrained by Russian energy leverage, the Middle East as an energy chokepoint managed through Israeli partnership—reveals the architecture of hegemonic maintenance in the resource-constrained 21st century. Each theater requires different tools, but the underlying logic remains constant: control access to materials that industrial economies cannot function without, and geopolitical influence follows as mathematical consequence.
China’s Alternative: Patience, Capital, Vertical Integration
While Washington deploys naval vessels, threatens sanctions, and frames resource competition as ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, Beijing has spent two decades constructing an alternative infrastructure that operates beneath the threshold of military confrontation. The contrast in approaches reveals fundamentally different theories of how hegemony is built in the modern era—and which approach proves more effective when military superiority no longer translates into economic compliance.
Business Standard analysis documents that 22 Latin American and Caribbean nations have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative since 2017. Though recent data shows Chinese BRI engagement in the region declining to just 1.14 percent of construction engagement, this reflects strategic recalibration rather than retreat. Beijing is moving from broad infrastructure projects toward targeted investments in critical mineral sectors that deliver greater strategic value per dollar deployed.
The vertical integration strategy represents China’s most sophisticated geopolitical tool, creating dependencies that compound over decades. Strategic analysis reveals that by 2024, China controlled approximately 60 percent of global lithium processing capacity, 77 percent of battery cell manufacturing, and produced 56 percent of the world’s electric vehicles. This creates structural dependencies that transcend simple market relationships—countries that adopt Chinese battery technology, charging infrastructure, and electric vehicle platforms become locked into ecosystems that generate decades of technological dependence.
“We are in the natural geographic area of influence of the US. We share all values with the US, but we have a very strong commercial relationship with China. We don’t want to pick sides even though we are culturally, geographically, strategically closer to the US. But if the US puts in place policies that alienate Chile, they might end up pushing countries closer to China, which could end up being counterproductive.”
—Chilean mining official, Columbia University forum
Trump’s Transactional Doctrine: The Rules-Based Order’s Demolition
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marks not merely a change in administration but a formal repudiation of the international legal architecture that the United States itself constructed in the aftermath of World War II. On January 7, 2025, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, when asked whether he could rule out using military force to seize control of the Panama Canal or annex Greenland, Trump replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to commit to that, no. It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
The statement wasn’t hyperbole or negotiating bluster—it was doctrine articulated plainly, revealing a worldview in which American interests supersede international law, where sovereignty exists only for powers capable of defending it militarily, and where the “rules-based order” becomes a constraint to be discarded when inconvenient.
Erosion of International Law: The Trump Administration’s Documented Departures
- January 7, 2025: Trump refuses to rule out military force for Panama Canal seizure and Greenland annexation
- Threatened “very high level” tariffs against Denmark (NATO ally) over Greenland refusal
- Claims Canada annexation through “economic force” – tariffs and sanctions
- Naval blockade considerations for Venezuela violating UN Charter Article 2(4) prohibition on threat of force
- Proposed renaming Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” – symbolic rejection of sovereignty
- Congressional Democrats introduce legislation (March 2025) preventing war with Canada, Greenland, Panama without vote
- Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary declined to rule out military force for annexations (January 8, 2025)
- Secretary of State Rubio travels to Panama specifically to pressure canal control negotiations
Legal analysis by Just Security points out the profound irony: Trump’s threatened annexations of Canada, Greenland, and Panama would violate the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty) of 1947—a collective security arrangement that the United States itself authored and ratified.
Regime Change and the Sovereignty Paradox
The Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela exposes the central paradox in contemporary American foreign policy: the simultaneous invocation of sovereignty when convenient and its violation when profitable. Officials defend sanctions, naval deployments, and support for opposition figures as responses to Maduro’s authoritarian violations of Venezuelan sovereignty—the government doesn’t represent the people, therefore external intervention becomes justified. Yet this logic applies selectively, never extended to authoritarian allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or the United Arab Emirates whose cooperation America values.
The implications ripple globally. If the United States can deploy military assets to pressure Venezuela toward regime change based on claims of democratic illegitimacy, what prevents China from applying identical logic to Taiwan, Russia to Ukraine, or any powerful nation to weaker neighbors whose governments it finds objectionable?
The New World Order: Multipolar Anarchy or Revised Hierarchy?
What emerges is not the “new world order” that George H.W. Bush proclaimed after the Soviet Union’s collapse—a unipolar moment where American power and international law aligned to create stable global governance. Instead, we are witnessing the birth of something more volatile: a multipolar system where major powers increasingly ignore international law when it constrains their interests, where sovereignty exists only for nations capable of defending it, and where the weak face coercion from multiple directions rather than from a single hegemon.
China observes American contempt for international law and draws obvious conclusions. If the United States can threaten Venezuela’s sovereignty, sanction countries that defy its preferences, and demand territorial concessions from allies, why should Beijing respect international arbitration rulings in the South China Sea? When Trump publicly muses about taking Greenland by force, he provides precedent for China’s territorial claims, for Russia’s absorption of Crimea, for any powerful nation’s expansionist ambitions rationalized through national interest.
“The current secretary of state was not born in Cuba, has never been to Cuba, and knows nothing about Cuba. But there is a very personal and corrupt agenda that he is carrying out, which seems to be sacrificing the national interests of the U.S. in order to advance this very extremist approach.”
—Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuban Foreign Minister
Hegemonic Decline and the Multipolar Transition
The broader pattern is unmistakable: American hegemony is not collapsing through dramatic military defeat or economic crisis, but eroding through the accumulation of dependencies that make U.S. preferences increasingly optional for countries with alternatives. This differs fundamentally from previous hegemonic transitions that dominate historical memory and strategic planning.
Britain’s decline involved military exhaustion and economic depletion after two world wars that destroyed European industrial capacity and transferred wealth to the United States. The Soviet Union’s collapse came through ideological bankruptcy and economic dysfunction that could no longer compete with Western consumer capitalism. American decline, if that’s what this multipolar transition represents, proceeds through relative loss of leverage as other powers offer comparable or superior alternatives across multiple dimensions—patient capital versus conditional aid, technology transfer versus market access, non-interference versus democracy promotion lectures.
Latin American nations navigate this environment with practiced cynicism born of experience. They’ve endured American-backed coups in Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and attempted regime changes throughout the Cold War—all justified through anti-communist rhetoric that masked resource interests and economic control. The contemporary version uses anti-authoritarian language while pursuing identical objectives: governments aligned with American preferences, markets open to American corporations, resources flowing toward American processing facilities.
The Question That Defines Our Era
As President Trump threatens to seize the Panama Canal, as lithium flows through Chinese refineries while international law erodes into tactical suggestion, as nations worldwide observe that American respect for sovereignty extends only to powers capable of resistance—will the rules-based order that enabled seven decades of relative stability survive its creator’s abandonment? Or are we witnessing the birth of a multipolar anarchy where geological distribution of critical minerals matters more than treaties, where regime change is justified by whoever possesses the military capability to execute it, and where the only sovereignty that exists is that which can be defended against all comers?
Words by Phil Colon
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