Executive Summary
Over the past few years, the US and China have both dramatically expanded the scope of their export control regimes to give their leaders the ability to rapidly put pressure on chokepoints in global supply chains. While export controls are nothing new, the strength and sweeping extraterritorial scope of US controls on semiconductors and Chinese controls of rare earth elements have dramatically upped the stakes. In the background of the US-China chip-mineral war in 2022, and other countries have started to establish their own mechanisms for controlling the export of key commodities – a trend that has dramatically accelerated since 2025. US actions, and rising geopolitical uncertainty in general, may have set off a global wave of key product export controls, leaving the global economy in a more precarious place than before.
Key Points
- The cycle of US-China export control retaliation has demonstrated the vulnerability of chokepoints on valuable commodities upon which the global economy depends
- It has also contributed to an atmosphere more permissive of state intervention around key commodities.
- In recent years, other major producers of critical minerals and semiconductor equipment have established export controls and other means of managing exports of these key commodities.
- Greater state control over key products may leave their global markets vulnerable to politically-induced (rather than market) supply shocks.
Analysis
The US government first discovered the potency of export controls when the first Trump administration targeted Huawei and ZTE (Palmer, 2023). The Biden administration’s sweeping October 2022 semiconductor export controls, which targeted China’s entire cutting-edge technology ecosystem, represented a major escalation and asserted a very broad extraterritorial jurisdiction (Sevastopulo & Hille, 2025). The Biden administration then pressed Japan and the Netherlands – home to advanced semiconductor production equipment firms – to impose similar export restrictions (Caixin, 2025). Starting in 2023, China retaliated with export controls on rare-earth minerals (Hunter & Cang, 2023). In 2025, China retaliated against President Trump’s tariffs and other trade measures by twice substantially expanding its critical minerals export control regime and claiming broad extraterritorial jurisdiction (Bradsher, 2025) This move – especially the September 2025 controls – sparked a stock sell-off in many markets and affected China’s exports to the entire world, not just the US (Bao 2025).
In this context, countries which export a large share of certain global supply chain inputs – especially critical minerals and chipmaking equipment – have begun to make similar moves. In 2023, Chile began to nationalize its lithium industry, while Namibia banned the export of unprocessed critical minerals (Villegas & Scheyder, 2023; Nyaungwa, 2023). Both countries framed the decision as a way to climb global value chains rather than as a hedge against geopolitical uncertainty.
However, in 2025 – after the resumption of the US-China trade war and the use of export controls as leverage by both Beijing and Washington – there has been a rapid increase in the number of countries imposing export controls or other mechanisms to manage the outflow and pricing of key commodities. In June 2025, South Africa – by far the world’s largest producer of chromium – imposed export controls on chrome ore (IEA, 2025). In late 2025, the Democratic Republic of the Congo banned on cobalt exports before resuming shipments under an extensive quota and compliance system. (Kasongo, 2025). Most recently, Indonesia announced that all exports and prices of key commodities such as nickel, copper, and palm oil would be managed by a state-owned export firm (Damayanti & Hadyan, 2026).
These export control mechanisms are a hedge against rising geopolitical uncertainty. However, they may be best understood as a vehicle for countries – especially in the developing world – to better control their resource endowments and pursue long-held ambitions to climb global value chains (Suhardi, 2026). Though governments have occasionally attempted similar moves in the past, they faced resistance – such as the EU’s WTO case against Indonesia for its 2019 raw nickel ore export restrictions. (Munthe & Blenkinsop, 2022).
Unlike the past few decades of US policy, under Presidents Biden and Trump, Washington has pivoted away from promoting free trade and free markets towards previously unthinkable levels of state intervention in the economy, primarily on national security grounds (Johnson & Lu, 2025). The US-China export control war since 2022, which has only recently deescalated, has played an essential part in shaping the new global economic environment where state intervention in key sectors has become increasingly permissible (Freifeld, 2026; Bradsher, 2026). In this context, developing countries – many with longstanding ambitions to ascend global value chains – have found the opportunity to do so through export control or management mechanisms. (Suhardi, 2026)
Conclusion
The prevailing global economic zeitgeist is not anti-trade, as the recent spate of mineral deals and trade agreements demonstrates. However, the current environment is one in which countries which sit on the chokepoints of global value chains may feel empowered to take advantage of that position to build leverage.
Just as the US and China have used their export control regimes as bargaining chips in recent negotiations, other governments may see granting or withholding access to their own key products supply as a way to win concessions in trade negotiations or – in an emergency – gain access to other goods they may need, such as oil or fertilizer.
Over the long-term, these export control and export management mechanisms are also a vehicle for governments in the developing world to force the localization of higher-value added stages of production, such as mineral refining. (Nantulya, 2026) This contrasts with US, Chinese, Japanese, and EU export restrictions on key goods, which are solely rooted in national security considerations, rather than both security and economic development objectives.
However, as more countries build export control systems to restrict or suddenly close off the flow of key goods for political reasons, the markets for these goods may be rendered much more vulnerable to sudden shocks. In other words, the upstream goods which underpin the modern, high-tech economy will be at the mercy of one or a handful of national governments which have established mechanisms to control their flow. Beijing’s recent mineral export restrictions demonstrated the “Hormuz effect” that such controls could have on supply and prices worldwide. (Wachtmeister, 2025) For specific minerals and other chokepoint commodities, such as chipmaking equipment, many other governments from Jakarta to Kinshasa to The Hague are setting up control mechanisms which could disrupt global manufacturing if deployed to their fullest extent. The outcome is a global economy more precarious and yet more prone to geopolitical disruption than before.
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