The Guardian ·
Trump says the US doesn’t need Canada. But it’s the source of key minerals for the military
Trump himself has acknowledged the US need for Canadian aluminum – and has largely exempted metals from tariffs
As trade talks with Canada shambled toward collapse in late August, Donald Trump brayed on Truth Social: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” But in fact, Canada, like China, has something the US needs badly: critical metals that undergird modern military technology.
Canada is the United States’s biggest foreign source of minerals, supplying about $47bin worth each year. Sixty percent of all the aluminum the US uses each year, for instance, comes from Canada, where mighty, remote rivers provide smelting plants vast quantities of cheap, low-carbon electricity. The US military uses the lightweight metal for everything from shell casings to ship hulls and aircraft fuselage. The Pentagon’s cutting-edge F-35 fighter jet’s airframe is about 40% aluminum. “This country desperately needs aluminum,” Trump complained last month. “We get it all from Canada for the most part, and we need it badly.”
That dependence explains why the US quietly exempted almost all metals from the list of Canadian products subject to the new 50% import levies. But just because Americans want to keep buying Canadian metals doesn’t mean Canada will keep selling them.
Shortly after trade talks collapsed last month, the Ontario premier Doug Ford threatened to cut off nickel exports if the tensions heat up further. Nickel is a vital ingredient in the steel alloys that go into jet engines and armor plating for vehicles and ships, not to mention a wide range of industrial products. The US gets about half of its supply from Canada. The US has only a single nickel mine, but no refineries – so even the raw ore from that one lonely mine gets sent to Canada to be refined, and then sold back to US companies.
The premier of British Columbia has also suggested that his province could ban exports to the US of germanium, which is used to make military equipment such as night-vision goggles and laser rangefinders, as well as solar panels and fiber optics. That would present a real problem to US manufacturers, since China, which produces the bulk of the world’s germanium, has already largely stopped selling that metal to the US.
China has also restricted exports to the US of gallium, an ingredient in high-performance computer chips that power missile defense and radar systems. The US doesn’t produce any primary gallium at all. But a new gallium plant is slated to open next year in, yes, Canada.
And it’s not only the US military that depends on Canada’s minerals. Canada also supplies US nuclear reactors with much of the uranium they use to generate nearly a fifth of the country’s electricity. Even the US’s food supply is propped up with Canadian minerals. Almost 90% of the potash, a crucial fertilizer, that US farmers spread on their fields comes from their northern neighbor. (It’s a similar story with peat, another agricultural input.)
Of course, Canada isn’t the only place that has these materials. The US has deposits of many of them, too, and is trying to rebuild its once-mighty domestic critical metal industries. But getting the financing and regulatory approvals needed to open a single new mine in the US takes years, and the metals that come out are often more expensive than those produced elsewhere.
The US could also turn to non-Canadian foreign suppliers. But that would require a hugely expensive project of unravelling cross-border supply chains that have been built up over decades and support countless US jobs, and rebuilding them to more distant countries. In any case, the alternatives aren’t all that appealing. The US’s second-biggest source of potash is Russia – not exactly a trading partner most countries would choose to rely on. And the world’s biggest producer of most of the critical metals the US needs happens to also be its biggest rival: China. This is precisely why the US has for the last several years been pushing to build up a supply chain of critical metals that isn’t under Beijing’s control.
Clearly, someone has explained all of this to Trump since last year, when he was threatening to tariff everything coming from Canada. He’s learned that the US can’t afford to lose its supply of Canadian critical metals – especially at a time when China is already throttling exports of those badly-needed commodities. That’s why they’ve been exempted this time around.
But Canada knows it too. Cutting off metal supplies would seriously escalate the trade war, and would be a painful punch to Canada’s economy. But it has been proven to be a very effective weapon. Among many other commodities, China produces approximately 90% of the world’s refined rare earths, another set of minerals vital to military and other technologies. When Trump threatened China with tariffs last year, Beijing responded by threatening to ban exports of rare earths and the magnets and other products made from them. The US quickly backed down. Canada’s leaders took note. As Ontario’s Ford warned recently: “Everything’s on the table.”
Vince Beiser is the author of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future and the Power Metal newsletter.