Beijing’s new restrictions on rare-earth materials ignited a political and economic firestorm. But the latest trade rift generated a surprising upshot: an American company jumping into the rare earths mining business.
Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF), the Ohio-based steel company, is already exploring the excavation of rare-earth material and has identified two promising sites, the company announced on Monday. Investors scrambled to get in on the resource play, sending shares up by more than 20%. The sudden excitement over mining is something that we’ve heard before — only this time it’s literally mining. Simply gesturing toward a pivot amid a charged moment is enough to really get the market going, bringing to mind the heyday of corporate pivots to crypto/blockchain and AI. And after Monday, investors may be eyeing the other miners for the next announcement.
But while that mining language, pivot, and timing fall into a neat parallelism with crypto, it’s clearly different than whatever we saw during the Long Island Blockchain (née Iced Tea) era.
Cliffs’ ambition signals a new period of corporate nationalism. If trade conflicts will come to define the first year of the second Trump era, executives pinning their own priorities to national imperatives is one of 2025’s biggest themes. Pulling in the same direction as the president has distinct business advantages.
“If successful, it would align Cleveland-Cliffs with the broader national strategy for critical material independence, similar to what we achieved in steel,” said CEO Lourenco Goncalves as the company reported third quarter earnings. “American manufacturing shouldn’t rely on China or any foreign nation for essential minerals, and Cliffs intends to be part of the solution.”
We’ve seen the playbook — and it’s working. Cliffs is operating in the mode of Nvidia (NVDA), Whirlpool (WHR), much of Big Tech, and US manufacturing in general, fashioning their businesses as an instrument of American competitionand technological sovereignty.
Beijing’s new restrictions on rare earths and the White House’s fresh round of tariff threats highlighted the strategic importance of the critical minerals and the vulnerabilities of not controlling them.
What Cliffs is offering, then, isn’t just a new way to make money from its existing assets, but a new, indispensable weapon in the trade war. Or at least the prospect of leverage as the White House negotiates with China.