Pakistan-USA relations have been fluctuating significantly since the War on Terror era, indicated by fiery embraces or icy drifts during various time periods. These on-and-off relations can be attributed to Washington’s tilt towards India as a strategic partner in South Asia and Pakistan’s cordial relations with China. Under the Biden administration, Pakistan went through a period of relative diplomatic isolation. However, Trump’s 2.0 and post-2025 developments in Pakistan’s regional context have flipped the tables, with Pakistan emerging as the USA’s potential partner.

Besides this diplomatic shift, Trump’s 2.0 protectionist policies and trade war invoked China’s retaliatory export controls on rare earth elements, signalling the need for America to diversify its REE imports away from China. Rare earth metals power everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines to advanced missile guidance, stealth systems, and fibre-optic networks, all of which are lifelines for America’s protectionism. Pakistan’s critical minerals sector, constrained by tech dependency on China, offered a valuable source of supply to Trump’s America Great Again ambitions, thus repositioning Pakistan from a peripheral state to a central stakeholder in America’s Great Game against China. While Pakistan is maintaining, even exploring new avenues for strengthening its “all-weather friendship” with China, the underlying scepticism about China’s debt terms under CPEC and developmental returns from projects like Saindak has pushed Islamabad to hedge its bets – diversify its strategic partnerships.

Great Game for Critical Minerals: US and China as Cold Rivals

China holds a rare earth monopoly, as it controls approximately 70% of global rare earth mining and over 90% of global rare earth processing capacity, thus maintaining near-total domination of global supply chains. This monopoly has been enabled by decades of strategic state interventions and a whole-of-government approach, including the Communist Party, the state apparatus, the military complex, industry, and research institutions.

However, the stage for this dominance was set by the late Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, who noted, “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.” His pro-market reforms set the country on its path to becoming an economic powerhouse. Chinese strategy for gaining a monopoly over rare earth supply chains included subsidising domestic mining and processing, buying rare earth assets abroad, offering cheap exports to push foreign competitors out of business, centralising mining under state-owned enterprises, and tightening export quotas to increase geopolitical leverage.

While China holds strategic dominance in REE processing, the USA holds a rare earth consuming monopoly (more than 80% of Western demands). The USA heavily relies on critical minerals and rare earths for development in both defence (F-35 avionics, missile guidance systems, and Golden Doom strategy) and commercial (electric vehicles, wind turbines, etc.) sectors, consuming ~12,000-15,000 tonnes of REO equivalent in 2024. The United States was the main global source of rare earth minerals, with Mountain Pass in California as the leading supplier, until the mid-1990s.

However, a combination of environmental constraints, corporate outsourcing, off-shoring polluting industries, and shortsighted government policies gradually dismantled the domestic supply chains. The major turning point that ended US dominance came in the 1990s, when US companies began offshoring rare earth processing to China, initially as a cost-saving measure and a way to avoid the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) tightening regulations. Thus, China’s recent monopoly has also been subsidised by the West itself, or Beijing’s dominance is a self-inflicted wound from 1980s- 2000s globalisation.

However, the recent developments have pushed both the USA and China into a “Great Game over Critical Minerals and Rare Earth Elements”. For decades, the United States watched its manufacturing base erode as it chased low-cost labour overseas, easy access to raw materials, and the pursuit of environmental regulatory standards during........

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