The Pax Silica coalition: the U.S. builds an alliance of critical-mineral producers to counter China’s concentration

On December 12, 2025, it became known about the formation by the Trump administration of a coalition to counter China's dominant control over critically important minerals through the signing of the Pax Silica Declaration, which will unite Singapore, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Israel. The project is formalized as a separate multilateral framework outside traditional formats like the G7 or WTO.

The Pax Silica coalition serves as a format for the external contour of the development model for the U.S. critical minerals industry, which synchronizes rules of the game among allies, and which is taken outside the G7 and WTO, as Washington seeks to create a managed system for diversifying supply chains beyond these platforms.

Against this backdrop, the Chinese model of centralized control over processing is vulnerable, as the previous approach of locking imported raw materials processing in factories in China turns the Pax Silica coalition into a potential risk for the functioning of the entire mineral processing system in the PRC.