The Trump administration’s bludgeoning of trans-Atlantic relations has made it difficult for U.S. and European officials to find much common ground—with a big exception.
In recent weeks, critical minerals have emerged as a rare area of cooperation between U.S. and European leaders, even as they clash over Greenland, the NATO alliance, and Russia’s now four-year-long invasion of Ukraine. The European Union, for example, has agreed to join forces with the United States and Japan to boost supply chain resilience; the United Kingdom and the United States have also signed a memorandum of understanding in the sector.
The Trump administration’s bludgeoning of trans-Atlantic relations has made it difficult for U.S. and European officials to find much common ground—with a big exception.
In recent weeks, critical minerals have emerged as a rare area of cooperation between U.S. and European leaders, even as they clash over Greenland, the NATO alliance, and Russia’s now four-year-long invasion of Ukraine. The European Union, for example, has agreed to join forces with the United States and Japan to boost supply chain resilience; the United Kingdom and the United States have also signed a memorandum of understanding in the sector.
The deals reflect how, as Europe also scrambles to diversify away from China, European leaders are harnessing minerals—one of their few clear shared interests with Washington—in hopes that they can help ease tensions in an otherwise fraught relationship.
“If the trans-Atlantic relationship has come under huge amounts of stress and a lot of people are worried that it could just fall apart, critical minerals [are] kind of the only thing that’s still really keeping it together,” said Tom Moerenhout, the head of the Critical Materials Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Few issues have permeated U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy agenda quite like critical minerals, which in the United States are a set of 60 or so raw materials that U.S. agencies have deemed essential to U.S. national and economic security. (The European Commission, for its part, has identified a list of 34 critical raw materials.)
The Trump administration has zeroed in on critical minerals such as copper, which powers the data centers underpinning the Trump administration’s big AI push, and rare earth elements, for which China overwhelmingly dominates global supply chains.
China has leveraged its rare earth chokehold in its trade war with the United States, accelerating Washington’s efforts to diversify away from Beijing.
As Trump has made his ambitions to secure new mineral supply chains clear, the world has paid attention. Several countries have lined up to offer the U.S. leader their own minerals deals, and the Trump administration earlier this month hosted delegations from more than 50 countries for an inaugural critical minerals ministerial, where U.S. officials pitched potential partners on a global minerals “preferential trade zone.”
European leaders were receptive. Out of the 55 delegations that attended the ministerial, 11 countries, including the United Kingdom, ultimately signed bilateral frameworks or memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with the Trump administration. The European Union, Japan, and the United States also announced plans to work together to conclude an MOU and jointly boost their critical mineral supply chain security.
By signaling that cooperation, Europe may be shielding itself against future threats—be they economic, such as tariffs, or even military, as seen in Trump’s initial refusal to rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland. “They’re concerned that if Trump doesn’t believe that cooperation is forthcoming, he’s demonstrated a willingness to use kinetic force to achieve policy outcomes,” said Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Still, analysts say that cooperation on minerals shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign of genuine warmth between Europe and the United States. Liana Fix, a senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the deals are driven by necessity, not by partnership or trust.
Like the United States, Europe remains deeply vulnerable to China’s critical minerals chokehold and was not spared by Beijing’s previous rare earth export controls. But Europe is wary of overdependence on the United States, too.
“I think that they have pretty reasonable and understandable reasons to believe that the United States could turn around and engage in precisely the same kind of mineral coercion that China has engaged in,” Hendrix said.
European leaders have for years been trying to boost their minerals supply chain resilience, although their efforts have lagged behind Washington.
“They are absolutely late to the game,” said Moerenhout, the Columbia University professor.
Under the European Critical Raw Materials Actwhich the European Commission adopted in 2023, the European Union set ambitious new benchmarks for domestic sourcing, production, and processing in its bid to build more resilient supply chains. Last December, the European Commission also unveiled about $3.5 billion in funding to strengthen its sector in 2026.
European leaders have also sought cooperation abroad; between 2021 and 2025, Brussels inked deals on raw materials with some 14 countries. The EU is now also advancing plans for a critical material stockpilewhich Reuters reported would be led by Italy, France, and Germany.
Still, progress has been challenging, especially because EU-led efforts have the additional complication of requiring coordination among more than two dozen member states that have different priorities and geopolitical interests.
In a recent report, the European Court of Auditors, charged with monitoring Brussels’s policymaking, found that the legislation is far from meeting its goals and that projects will struggle to secure more supplies for the bloc by the end of the decade.
“Efforts to diversify imports have yet to produce tangible results and bottlenecks hamper progress in domestic production and recycling,” the report read.
For Europe’s push to be successful, leaders will need to focus more on pumping much-needed capital into the sector, said Moerenhout.
“We’re now at this inflection point where they have the regulations, they have the targets,” he said. “But now they need to start spending capital, and that is a difficult thing to do for Europe.”
