In the 21st century, the struggle for natural resources is becoming a new type of covert warfare. Countries today do not compete only for land, borders, or military influence. More and more often, they compete for access to the minerals, metals, and energy resources. In the modern world, whoever controls strategic mineral resources controls future.
Humanity has always experienced conflicts connected to natural resources. Throughout history, wars were fought over fertile land, water, gold, spices, coal, and oil. Empires rose by taking control of trade routes and raw materials. Today, resource conflicts are tied not only to digital technologies, military production, and global supply chains.
One of the main reasons for this struggle is the simple fact that natural resources are limited and unevenly distributed. Critical minerals do not exist everywhere. They are concentrated in specific regions, which creates dependency among states. Some countries possess the raw materials, while others dominate processing, refining, and high-tech manufacturing. This imbalance produces geopolitical tension. For example, major lithium reserves are located in South America and Australia, while the processing of lithium and the production of battery technologies are largely connected to Asian countries.
Rare earth elements have become equally important. These minerals are essential for manufacturing many modern products, including smartphones, electric vehicles, wind turbines, satellites, and advanced military equipment. They are especially valuable in the defense and aerospace industries because they are required for precision technologies, radar systems, aircraft components, and electronic warfare systems.
At present, China dominates the global rare earth industry. It controls a significant share of the world’s processing capacity and plays a central role in supplying these materials to other economies. China provides a substantial portion of the European Union’s rare earth needs (40%), while other important suppliers include Australia, South Africa, Canada, and Brazil. This level of dependence has become a major strategic concern for Western countries, especially USA.
Control over the production and supply of a huge number of minerals remains one of China’s main trump cards in the trade war with the United States. In December 2024, even before Trump’s return to the presidency, Beijing, in response to American sanctions against Chinese semiconductors, banned or significantly restricted exports to the United States of antimony, gallium, germanium and graphite, four elements not classified as rare earths, but also included by Washington in the list of “critical minerals.”
Perhaps no episode better illustrates the fusion of minerals and geopolitics than the proposal, advanced by the Trump administration, to exchange continued U.S. financial and military support for Ukraine in return for access to its mineral wealth. Ukraine possesses significant mineral potential: 21 of the 30 materials classified by the European Union as “critical raw materials” can be found there, representing around 5% of global reserves. Many deposits are located in the south of the Ukrainian crystalline shield, including areas near the Sea of Azov. However, many of these territories are currently under occupation.
Another important example is Greenland, which has attracted Trump’s attention because of its enormous mineral wealth. Greenland, the world’s largest island and an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, possesses significant reserves of strategic resources. The island holds deposits of 39 of the 50 minerals the U.S. government considers critical. Beneath its melting ice are deposits of rare earth elements such as neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium, as well as critical minerals including lithium, nickel, cobalt, zinc, and copper. The island also has potential reserves of oil, natural gas, and gold.
Iran’s uranium program remains a major concern for the United States and its allies. The reason is that uranium is a strategic resource connected to energy security. Control over uranium resources and nuclear capabilities can significantly affect the balance of power between countries.
Resource competition also fuels armed violence directly. In parts of Africa, armed groups fight to control mines and transport routes. Local communities are caught between militias, corporations, weak institutions, and foreign interests. These are not abstract geopolitical games. They are lived realities of fear, displacement, and destruction.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has become a symbol of what some critics describe as “green colonialism.” The country supplies cobalt and other minerals used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries for renewable energy systems. Congo possesses around 70% of the world’s known cobalt reserves. A country with such enormous natural wealth could potentially become one of the richest nations in the world, yet it remains one of the poorest.
Civil wars in countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cambodia have primarily broken out over ownership rights to deposits of diamonds, gold, and other natural resources.
In Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, the civil war began in 2002 after an uprising by soldiers. The war was financed by profits from the sale of diamonds and cocoa.
Countries that hold raw mineral wealth are increasingly refusing to simply export it. Indonesia banned nickel ore exports in 2020 specifically to force international companies to build smelting capacity domestically. Zimbabwe has similarly restricted chromium exports to push processing onshore.
Among all strategic minerals, lithium (“new oil”) has become one of the most important. But why exactly is lithium so valuable?
Oil (20th century)Lithium (21st century)
fuel for automobiles
the foundation of electric vehicles
influences global politicsinfluences technological competition
controlled by oil-producing powerscontrolled by countries with technologies
main resource of the industrial erakey resource of the digital and green economy
A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) analysis cautions against overstating the risk of interstate war triggered directly by mineral competition, noting that minerals are more likely to become entangled in – rather than the root cause of – wider geopolitical rivalries.
As we see, the struggle for critical minerals will only intensify in the coming decades. The world is becoming more technological and more dependent on advanced manufacturing. At the same time, major powers are increasingly suspicious of one another. In such a climate, resource control becomes inseparable from national strategy. States will seek to protect supply chains and reduce vulnerability to external pressure.
Yet this competition also raises a political question. What kind of future is being built if digital progress is paved with environmental destruction, labor abuse, and new forms of inequality? The resource-rich countries remain poor while powerful states and multinational corporations make profit.
Finally, the extraction of rare earth metals is almost always associated with the threat of serious damage to the environment. The most common way to separate clumped rare earth metals for commercial use is to wash them for a long time with a mixture of various chemicals, including the strongest existing acids.
The world’s largest Bayan-Obo deposit in Inner Mongolia is one of the most polluted places on the planet, where water, air and soil are totally contaminated with heavy metals, acids and radioactive isotopes.
The growing competition for mineral resources could become one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. If countries continue to fight for control over critical minerals, it may lead to more geopolitical tensions, economic instability, and even new conflicts. The real challenge for world leaders will be finding a balance between technological progress and access to these valuable materials.