Gracelyn Baskerin
speaker
24 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gracelyn Baskerin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We are starting to see the rise of minerals diplomacy, which is what happens when we embed minerals into our foreign policy. We are forging alliances. We are making strategic decisions. We are pursuing certain objectives, all driven by a need to enhance our mineral security, which we acknowledge we can't do alone. Because at the end of the day, the U.S. still has limited geological reserves.
So we have less than 1% of the world's cobalt, nickel and graphite. So we have to work with other countries.
So China has built this advantage in minerals through about 40 years of concerted effort by linking up their foreign policy. So when you look at how they've used things like Belt and Road Initiative, they have spent their money and made their decisions to secure minerals from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and then they bring it back home for processing.
So when we look at some of our key minerals like rare earths, graphite, cobalt, lithium, nickel, like they process between 40 and 90% of the world's supply. What this means for the United States is that China can now weaponize these minerals.
And what this means, because the US doesn't necessarily have alternate supply, is that we now face supply chain vulnerabilities and potentially undermine our ability to protect ourselves in the instance of war.
We've seen President Trump talk a lot about critical minerals. So we've seen executive orders on domestic production and processing, international cooperation. We've heard the president talk about it in the context of Ukraine.
We've seen him talk about mining under the sea. This administration is really thinking about all of the above, home, abroad, production, processing, on land, underwater, but really going at it with all the tools in the toolkit.
So President Trump has pushed for the reconstruction deal that we signed with Ukraine, which essentially creates a fund that in the long term is capitalized by future mineral oil and gas revenue in Ukraine, as well as co-capitalized by the United States.
Now, Ukraine is a complicated place, though, and here's why. Some minerals are a little bit more, you know, what we might call shovel-ready, right? Something like lithium. But even then you have complexity because two of the four lithium reserves in Ukraine are actually on Russian-occupied land. We actually don't have a good understanding of what is economically viable.
So DRC has become a hot area in terms of mobilizing U.S. government efforts. So what's happened is there has been a conflict, a long-running conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now, what President of Congo, the DRC, came to President Trump and said is like, we need military support. And in exchange, we will give you access to minerals. So essentially a mineral for military support deal.
What we have seen already happen is that through the Trump administration, they have negotiated essentially a principles framework for peace that gives U.S. access to minerals in both Rwanda and the DRC, a separate deal. And there will be a third deal that is a peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda.
This is a game changer because DRC has a very, very developed mining sector. So 70% of the world's cobalt comes out of the Congo. They have fantastic lithium and nickel reserves. So it's a place where we see that we could actually get minerals for American offtake quite quickly, which makes it quite an interesting place for the administration to be targeting efforts.
Greenland is a strategic area for two reasons. One is from a national security position. It's geographically well positioned. The second is a critical mineral story. But we have to acknowledge, you know, there's a lot of minerals in Greenland. However, it's not all easily or cost effectively mined.
And cost competitiveness is a critical determining factor in whether a mining company is obviously going to go extract it. So it's a long-term look, and obviously Greenland and Denmark have said they are interested in private exploration and potentially sale of private land. However, they're not looking to be annexed.
There are absolutely more diplomatic ways to pursue mining interests in Greenland. And we have to remember that it's not just about the U.S. and Greenland here. It's also about our European allies. We are not going to out-compete China alone. We are going to need our European allies. We're going to need allies in emerging markets. We're going to need Canada.
So we're going to have to find a more diplomatic approach to pursuing our minerals security goals with Greenland.
coast. China, however, is warning that this could break international law.
You know, this is a great question and it's probably going to be one of those interesting things that we will watch play out in the next few years because there's a lot of mineral potential underwater, but there's a lot of challenges that we have. So one is licensing, right? We have now, we have our licensing system and the International Seabed Authority has their own licensing system.
What happens when there's a dispute between these two frameworks? We're not really sure, number one. Number two, there's maritime security implications that we're not thinking about. We're going to have Chinese ships sitting between Mexico and Hawaii under the guise of deep sea mining without a clear way of how to monitor and manage that in an era where geopolitical tension is quite rife.
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