In an essay published in The Times UK, historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson warns that the latest escalation in the struggle between the United States and China is not being fought with missiles or armies, but with minerals. Drawing inspiration from Tom Lehrer’s 1959 satirical song The Elements, Ferguson uses chemistry as an unlikely lens through which to examine the new “Cold War II.” In Lehrer’s tongue-twisting verses, every element of the periodic table is rattled off to comic effect — but in Ferguson’s telling, the once-mundane materials have become instruments of geopolitical power.
Ferguson points to the growing importance of rare earth elements (REEs) — a group of 17 obscure metals essential to modern technology and weapons systems — as the heart of a new economic conflict. Europium, gadolinium, samarium, dysprosium, and others once confined to laboratory charts now underpin global industries. These materials are used in nuclear control rods, cancer therapies, fibre optics, lasers, electric vehicles, and jet engines. Crucially, they are indispensable for the permanent magnets that power everything from smartphones to the F-35 fighter jet. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an F-35 requires more than 400 kg of rare earths; an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer around 2,400 kg; and a Virginia-class submarine 4,200 kg.
The problem, Ferguson writes, is that China has something close to a global monopoly on the extraction and refining of these elements. Last week, Beijing announced that all exports of rare earths would be subject to licensing on a case-by-case basis — a move that sent shockwaves through Washington and across global markets. The decision, Ferguson argues, is not merely bureaucratic tinkering but a calculated act of economic warfare, designed to remind the United States that China controls the mineral lifeblood of modern industry.
The historian frames the move as a dramatic escalation in the renewed U.S.–China trade war reignited after Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year. When Trump imposed sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on Chinese goods in April, Beijing responded not only with retaliatory tariffs but with restrictions on seven key rare earths — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium — and on magnets made from them. The implications, Ferguson observes, were immediate: rare earths are indispensable not only to advanced electronics but to the defense industry itself. Washington was forced back to the negotiating table, quickly agreeing to reduce the tariffs that had threatened to freeze bilateral trade. A senior American official, Ferguson notes, privately admitted that the confrontation had been “a mistake” — a rare acknowledgment of miscalculation in the U.S. capital.
Ferguson situates this struggle within a long history of “economic chokepoints” — resources, trade routes, or technologies dominated by a single state. From Napoleon’s Continental System to Britain’s control of the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca, great powers have always used such advantages to strangle their rivals. The United States did much the same during the first Cold War, denying the Soviet Union access to vital technologies. Today, he argues, economic warfare has replaced conventional conflict as the dominant mode of power projection. As former U.S. sanctions official Edward Fishman argues in his book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, Washington now fights its most consequential geopolitical battles through embargoes, tariffs, and export controls rather than with troops.
The post-9/11 era demonstrated America’s mastery of financial chokepoints — cutting nations like Iran and Russia out of the dollar-dominated banking system via the Swift network. Yet Ferguson warns that overuse of financial sanctions has pushed U.S. adversaries to build alternatives, such as China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payments System (CIPS). As a result, the new struggle has shifted to the control of physical supply chains — semiconductors, minerals, and other critical technologies that bind together what Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick once called “Chimerica,” the symbiotic fusion of the Chinese and American economies.
China, Ferguson notes, is itself vulnerable. Its greatest chokepoint lies in advanced semiconductors — the microchips that power artificial intelligence and supercomputing. U.S. export controls have crippled China’s access to the most sophisticated chips, produced largely by Taiwan’s TSMC using U.S. technology. The irony, however, is that 90 percent of Nvidia’s cutting-edge processors are made in Taiwan — the very island Beijing claims as its own. Thus, while the U.S. seeks to strangle China’s tech ambitions, it remains reliant on a fragile manufacturing hub at the centre of potential military confrontation.
In this “war of chokepoints,” as Ferguson calls it, both sides are testing each other’s resilience. Beijing’s rare-earth restrictions appear to mirror Washington’s semiconductor controls, yet their scope — extending even to products containing Chinese rare earths — suggests something broader: an assertion of veto power over the global trade in critical materials. Ferguson doubts that China’s Ministry of Commerce could realistically manage the hundreds of thousands of export licences implied by the policy. Instead, he interprets the move as a warning shot — a reminder of China’s capacity to upend global industries without needing to fire a weapon.
The historian extends his analysis to medicine and manufacturing. A recent U.S. Pharmacopeia study found that nearly 700 American drugs rely on at least one chemical sourced exclusively from China. Meanwhile, many American corporations remain heavily dependent on Chinese sales and suppliers, with the average S&P 500 firm earning more than six percent of its revenue from China. Beijing, Ferguson argues, can therefore exploit Trump’s sensitivity to market performance and corporate lobbying.
For Trump, tariffs remain the weapon of choice, though he privately acknowledges they are “not sustainable” because they drive up domestic costs. Instead, the U.S. is now wielding its own export controls — on aircraft parts, semiconductor-design software, and advanced medical technology — to retaliate against China’s rare-earth restrictions. Washington has even floated limits on “any and all critical software,” an extraordinary escalation that could affect everything from jet engines to laptops.
Yet Ferguson emphasises that Washington cannot act alone. Many chokepoints are shared with allies in Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands — home to ASML, the world’s sole producer of high-end lithography machines vital to chipmaking. Any coordinated U.S. response, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has hinted, will require G7 unity.
This interdependence leaves Europe and Britain in a particularly vulnerable position. Ferguson notes that Chinese-origin rare earths made up nearly half of the EU’s imports in 2024, with Russia supplying another quarter. British industry, too, depends on U.S.-made semiconductors that themselves rely on Chinese materials. Beijing’s export controls, while aimed at Washington, serve as a warning to Europe not to align too closely with American “de-risking” strategies or potential sanctions linked to China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Ferguson describes the political repercussions already visible in London and The Hague. In Britain, ministers have been accused of timidity toward Beijing after prosecutors dropped espionage charges against alleged Chinese agents in Parliament. China, he reports, has warned of “consequences” if its application for a new mega-embassy in London is delayed. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the government seized control of semiconductor firm Nexperia and suspended its Chinese chief executive under emergency powers — a move that reflected both national concern and U.S. pressure.
Across Europe, Ferguson writes, the middle path is collapsing. Attempts to balance economic protection with diplomatic neutrality are giving way to alignment with Washington. The G7 is expanding cooperation on critical minerals, and America’s Development Finance Corporation is set to increase funding for non-Chinese mineral projects worldwide.
Ferguson argues that the U.S. has shifted from financial sanctions to a broader strategy of technological and resource denial — a form of “weaponised interdependence” that China is now adept at exploiting in return. The contest, he warns, is intensifying, as both powers race to decouple supply chains and build domestic capacity. The U.S. is investing in chip production in Arizona; China is pouring resources into Huawei’s semiconductor arm. But Ferguson sees a danger ahead: when authoritarian states lose at economic warfare, they may resort to military action rather than accept defeat. The lesson of the 1930s, he reminds readers, is that economic strangulation did not prevent the Axis powers from launching World War II.
“Economic measures,” Ferguson concludes, “are necessary but not sufficient.” Without credible military deterrence, the West’s strategy risks becoming as intricate and clever — but as weightless — as one of Tom Lehrer’s mathematical songs. The melody of this new Cold War, he suggests, is being composed not in the barracks, but in the mines and factories that produce the world’s most vital elements.
