EditCritical materials will not wait for the next Commission. SOTEU can still change that
State of the Union on 16 September is useful only if it is treated as a decision, not a podium
The EU has a raw-materials strategy. But it does not yet have a raw-materials policy equal to the threat. That is the distinction that matters, and it is why “do more” is not a slogan. It is the only honest conclusion from the last two years.
China still controls the midstream. Processing, separation and magnet-making are where leverage lives. Mining in Africa without refining at home or among allies is just a longer truck route to the same chokepoint. Beijing understood that twenty years ago. It bought mines, locked offtake, built plants, and accepted political risk that Western capital would not. African resource nationalism- export bans, mandatory local processing, state equity – raises everyone’s costs. It does not automatically transfer processing power to Europe. It often transfers it to Chinese plants built on African soil, with the chemistry still designed in China.
Washington has stopped pretending this is a market failure that will self-correct. The August mining roundtable was industrial policy with a defence serial number: billions in loans and equity, a multi-billion stockpile, price support for key rare-earth alloys, restrictions on adversary-sourced defence materials, mining schools, and projects from Arizona lithium to Australian scandium. The motive is not climate branding. It is munitions, aircraft alloys, batteries for drones and satellites, and the fear of being unable to rearm at speed. Love Trump or not, the method is clear: the state takes risk so private capital will.
Brussels has written the better regulation. The Critical Raw Materials Act set 2030 targets. RESourceEU added a financing hub, a Critical Raw Materials Centre, stockpiling talk, scrap restrictions, and Strategic Project labels. Partnerships exist on paper with a long list of countries. A US–EU minerals understanding exists. Von der Leyen has already named the dependency: more than 80 percent for many critical materials, 90 percent for some rare earths. The architecture is not empty. It is incomplete.
Incomplete in four ways.
First, money. American public mobilisation is an order of magnitude larger and arrives as equity, floor prices and offtake, not only as “access to instruments.” European figures of a few billion, much of it still queued behind national funds and EIB procedures, will not build a midstream. Mines and refineries fail on revenue risk, not on the absence of a recital in a regulation. If the EU will not underwrite price and volume for a decade, investors will go where someone will – often the United States. That is how dependence migrates rather than shrinks.
Second, speed. Twenty-seven-month permitting clocks are a legal promise. They are not a hole in the ground. One-stop shops are missing in too many member states. Local opposition, environmental litigation and water rules still decide timelines. The Court of Auditors was right to say targets look arbitrary and delivery is lagging. A Strategic Project badge that does not change the date of first production is a press release.
Third, the midstream gap. Extraction in Sweden or Greenland does not secure Europe if concentrate still leaves for Chinese separation. Recycling targets without a ban that actually keeps black mass and magnet scrap inside allied circuits are piety. Circularity is necessary. It is not a substitute for primary processing capacity measured in kilotons, not pilot lines.
Fourth, geography. Africa, Central Asia, the Andes and the Arctic will not wait for the next Multiannual Financial Framework. China is already there with cash and fewer sermons. The EU’s Global Gateway and raw-materials partnerships are the right idea at the wrong tempo. Offtake, infrastructure and local processing plants have to be signed this year, not “accelerated” in a communication.
I was in Kazakhstan recently, and the mismatch is visible on the ground. This is not a peripheral supplier. Astana can already cover most of the minerals on the EU critical list – uranium first, then copper, tungsten, rare earths, graphite and the battery metals Europe keeps putting in communiqués. The EU signed a raw-materials partnership years ago, refreshed the roadmap, hosted Tokayev in Brussels, and designated projects. What you meet in-country is American capital moving faster: a U.S. firm taking 70 percent of two of the world’s largest undeveloped tungsten deposits, with Export-Import Bank and DFC letters of interest running toward $1.6 billion, while Washington treats Central Asia as a supply-chain theatre, not a seminar. Kazakhstan is explicit about the bargain – investment and processing on its soil, not ore on a ship. If SOTEU is a deadline rather than a podium, this is what the deadline is for: offtake, equity and plants in places that already have the rock, before the offtake is written in dollars.
Europe’s unused potential is not a slogan. I saw it at a copper mine in Bulgaria: the rock is there, the industrial memory is there, and still capital waits while municipalities, permitting chains and organised fear decide whether a project lives. Copper, tungsten, gold and barite sit inside the EU’s own borders, which is exactly what the Critical Raw Materials Act pretends to unlock with its 10 percent domestic-extraction target. In practice, investors face a second geology—local land-use vetoes, years of appeals, and campaigns that turn a deposit into a “lunar landscape” before the first drill. In thirty-five years Bulgaria has opened one major new mine. That is not an environmental victory. It is strategic self-sabotage. If SOTEU is a deadline, it has to name this domestic failure as clearly as it names China: Brussels can sign partnerships in Astana, but it cannot claim autonomy while existing European mines are strangled by bureaucracy and disinformation.
State of the Union on 16 September is useful only if it is treated as a decision, not a podium. Naming critical materials again will change nothing. Announcing a funded offtake facility, a real stockpile with published volumes, equity authority for the new Centre, enforceable permitting sanctions on member states that miss the clock, and a joint purchasing mandate for magnets and battery chemicals would. Anything less is the familiar European sequence: diagnose, legislate, underfund, wait.
Europe does not need to copy American bombast. It needs to copy American seriousness about risk. Defence, cars, grids, chips and AI all sit on the same thin list of elements. China has a monopoly position it is extending. The United States has decided that is intolerable. The EU has decided it is regrettable. Regret is not a supply chain.
Caption: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (front) receives a staff jacket during a visit to the European Emergency Response Coordination Center (ERCC) in Brussels, Belgium, 31 August 2026. EPA/VIRGINIA MAYO / POOL
Updated: September 3, 2026 - 08:59
