Critical Minerals, Rare Earths, and the Türkiye-EU Partnership: Supply Chain Resilience and the Restructuring of Global Order

The weaponization of economic interdependence has made supply chains the primary arena of geopolitical competition. China's deliberate consolidation of critical mineral processing capacity — controlling approximately 92% of global rare-earth refining — has transformed the trade architecture into a form of coercive leverage. This is the structural condition into which the Iran war of February–March 2026 has erupted, compounding logistical, chemical, and defense-industrial disruptions simultaneously and making the abstract costs of supply chain dependency concretely visible.