How China’s Calculated Truce Forces Western Resilience
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▦ OPINION | Arno Saffran, Mon 27 Oct, 2025The Gift of a Deadline
The October 2025 US China trade deal has been miscast as a fragile truce. In reality, it is a stark lesson in strategic clarity. By suspending its expansive export controls on the rare earths and critical minerals it dominates—controlling 90% of global rare earth refining, 65% of cobalt, and 60% of lithium processing—China has not merely provided temporary relief. It has given global industry a quantifiable, 12-month runway and exposed the true cost of decades of strategic delay.
For many years now, we have observed western policy oscillate between market reliance and reactive alarm, while China executed a patient, trillions-of-yuan strategy of upstream investment and downstream integration.
The result is a supply chain chokepoint of its own design. The current deal, relaxing restrictions that were set to be the broadest in China’s history by November 2025, is not a concession but a calibration. It transforms an amorphous geopolitical risk into a hard deadline: November 2026.
The West could view this deadline as a ‘gift’. It forces a focus that vague “de-risking” slogans never could. The task is Herculean—building alternative refining capacity can take 5-10 years and billions in capital.
The firms that will succeed are not those merely auditing suppliers, but those using this window to deploy a new caliber of leader: executives who can secure offtake agreements in Namibia, structure joint ventures in Saudi Arabia, and build the political trust in Jakarta that China spent 30 years cultivating. This is the human infrastructure required for mineral security.
China’s move is the ultimate test of strategic maturity. It has provided the timeline, clarity, and impetus the West lacked. The question is no longer about dodging risk, but whether we can finally match the discipline that created it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
— Arno Saffran
Arno developed his approach through roles in client development (KPMG) and strategic commercial engagement (affiliated with advisories including Hakluyt), focusing on complex industrial and energy sectors.
VSG works across the extractive value chain, positioning people who form the critical bridge to early-stage relationships and commercial access in complex markets.
