The New Dark Age

Thursday, 27 February 2025 — The Tricontinental

Cao Fei (China), My Future Is Not a Dream 05, 2006.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In his first month back in the White House, US President Donald Trump indicated his interest in annexing Greenland and brokering a peace deal for Ukraine that would include access to Ukrainian minerals and metals. It is important to note that Greenland has already been a point of contention around its vast holdings of rare earth minerals with such remarkable names as dysprosium, neodymium, scandium, and yttrium (there
are seventeen rare earth minerals that are central to any advanced technology). Given that Greenland is part of Denmark, it is therefore beholden to European Union (EU) rules. In 2011, the EU published a list of critical raw materials, which included these rare earth minerals. Then, in 2023, the EU passed the Critical Raw Materials Act, which urged domestic production of these critical minerals and metals and their import into the continent. Ukraine, meanwhile, has an enormous trove of rare earth metals (from apatite to zirconium) as well as reserves of lithium and titanium. Trump demanded at least $500 billion of these reserves from Ukraine as payment for the US’s support in the war. ‘I want to have security of rare earth’, Trump told reporters in early February, sounding like a character from the Lord of the Rings.

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