Trump hosts Central Asian leaders as US seeks to get around China

Washington: President Donald Trump will host leaders of five Central Asian countries at the White House on Thursday as he intensifies his hunt for rare earth metals needed for high-tech devices, including smartphones, electric vehicles and fighter jets.

Trump and the officials from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are holding an evening summit and dinner on the heels of Trump managing at least a temporary thaw with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on differences between the United States and China over the export of rare earth elements, a key point of friction in their trade negotiations.

Early last month, Beijing expanded export restrictions over vital rare earth elements and magnets before announcing, after Trump-Xi talks in South Korea last week, that China would delay its new restrictions by one year.

Washington is now looking for new ways to circumvent China on critical minerals. China accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the world’s rare earth mining and controls roughly 90 per cent of global rare earths processing.

Central Asia holds deep reserves of rare earth minerals and produces roughly half the world’s uranium, which is critical to nuclear power production. But the region badly needs investment to further develop the resources.

Central Asia’s critical mineral exports have long tilted toward China and Russia. Kazakhstan, for example, in 2023 sent USD 3.07 billion in critical minerals to China and USD 1.8 billion to Russia compared with USD 544 million to the US, according to country-level trade data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online data platform.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Wednesday to repeal Soviet-era trade restrictions that some lawmakers say are holding back American investment in the Central Asian nations, which became independent with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.