(A)Political - April 25th

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio met wit the EU Trade Commissioner to sign a landmark agreement on minerals, lessening U.S. reliance on China. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has taken Marijuana from Schedule I To Schedule III. The firing squad option at the federal level is now on option for federal cases

• U.S. Signs Critical Mineral Partnership With The E.U.

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U.S. Signs Critical Mineral Partnership With The E.U.

_{By: Atlas}

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and European Union Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič signed a memorandum of understanding on Friday establishing a formal U.S.-EU strategic partnership on critical minerals, the most substantive coordinated push yet by the two sides to reduce Chinese leverage over the materials that drive semiconductors, electric vehicles, and modern weapons systems.

The signing took place in the Treaty Room at the State Department in Washington and was paired with a separate action plan released by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Rubio did not name China in his remarks, but the context was unmistakable.

"The over-concentration of these resources, the fact that they're dominated by one or two places, is an unacceptable risk," Rubio said before the signing. "We need diversity in our supply chains, diversity in the places we get critical minerals."

Šefčovič said the agreement "formalizes our partnership across the entire value chain, from exploration and extraction to processing, refining, recycling and recovery," and told reporters he hoped pilot projects testing a price floor mechanism could begin before the end of the year.

What the deal actually does

The memorandum itself is a framework, not a binding trade agreement. The accompanying action plan, released by Trade Representative Jamieson Greer's office after a separate meeting with Šefčovič, lays out the concrete workstreams the two sides will pursue.

Chief among them is a joint exploration of reference-price mechanisms — including border-adjusted price floors, price-gap subsidies, offtake agreements, and standards-based markets — that would keep Chinese producers from undercutting Western output by dumping cheap material into the global market. The plan frames that work as a response to what the two sides describe as "pervasive non-market policies and practices" that have left market-oriented economies exposed to "economic coercion."

The agreement also commits Washington and Brussels to examine coordinated standards on mining, processing, recycling, and trade; technical and regulatory cooperation; joint investment promotion and screening; stockpile coordination; and rapid-response protocols for supply disruptions. USTR described the plan as the primary mechanism "to coordinate trade policies and measures on critical minerals supply chains with a view to concluding a binding plurilateral agreement on trade."

That last point matters. The United States wants to build a broader preferential trade bloc on critical minerals with allied economies, an idea Vice President JD Vance first floated publicly in February. Washington has already signed similar action plans with Japan and Mexico and has a parallel supply framework with Australia.

Why the urgency

The pact lands against a backdrop Brussels officials describe as economic security, not just trade policy. Šefčovič said the bloc is approaching the issue with the same framing it has applied to energy since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"For us, it's really a matter of economic security. It's a matter of overcoming dependencies," he said. "We know how dependencies could be expensive, and we have a huge price tag for being dependent on the sources of our fossil fuels. We simply want to learn from that experience and have a much more diversified portfolio of suppliers."

The numbers underlying that push are stark. China controls roughly 90 percent of global processing, smelting, and separation capacity for critical minerals, along with the production of the magnetic materials that end up in electric motors, wind turbines, and precision-guided munitions. Beijing has repeatedly used that leverage — curbing exports, suppressing prices, and slowing shipments — to weigh on rival economies during periods of geopolitical friction.

Rubio leaned on the combined heft of the two blocs in making the case for coordination. "If you look at the buying power and the economic productivity power of the combination of the United States and the European Union, it's extraordinary," he said. "We are, combined, the largest customers and users of the world."

Šefčovič dismissed the question of Chinese retaliation, framing the risk of doing nothing as the greater one. "Critical minerals," he said, "are the core of every industry shaping the future."

A rare moment of U.S.-EU alignment under Trump

The optics are notable. The Trump administration has publicly berated Brussels with regularity on trade and has built warmer ties with European right-wing populist leaders than with the Commission. Friday's signing was a rare embrace of the EU as an institutional partner and an acknowledgment that the critical minerals problem is too large for any single country to solve alone.

"It's a very concrete delivery on a very important basis we built over the last year," Šefčovič said during the ceremony, referring to a broader U.S.-EU understanding reached over the prior 12 months. He added that the "real test will be the execution of this project. How can we transform these agreements which we are signing into concrete, tangible projects to deliver for our business operators?"

President Donald Trump said in November 2025 that the United States would end its reliance on China for rare earths within 18 months under an emergency program. Progress since then has included private-sector movement: USA Rare Earth said on April 9 it was considering building a magnet plant in southern France after taking a 12.5 percent stake in French processor Carester.

Steel talks and the wider trade agenda

Friday's signing was not the only transatlantic item on Šefčovič's Washington schedule. The trade commissioner met separately with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and said the two sides agreed to "accelerate" technical-level work on steel.

The EU has been pressing Washington for relief from the 50 percent U.S. tariff on steel and aluminum imports that has hit European manufacturers since Trump's return to office. Last summer's broader transatlantic trade deal capped U.S. tariffs on most EU goods at 15 percent but did not cover steel and aluminum.

Brussels recently doubled its own tariffs on foreign steel to shield its producers from cheap Chinese exports, and Šefčovič said he wants to align European and American approaches toward third-country suppliers as a next step. "As a next step, we want to launch work with the U.S. on steel ring-fencing, aligning our approaches towards third countries," he said, describing the goal as building a "defensive mechanism against subsidised steel, against global overcapacities."

Šefčovič said those conversations were "going in a positive direction" but acknowledged that "we still have some issues with the remaining products which are listed" and called for "positive traction" before the next round of meetings.

What comes next

The most immediate deliverable from Friday's signing is the pilot-project phase that Šefčovič flagged. If those pilots run successfully before year-end and the two sides demonstrate the price-floor mechanism can work in practice, the framework becomes the template for the broader plurilateral agreement the Trump administration has been pitching to Western allies.

That broader bloc is the long-term ambition. Japan, Mexico, and Australia are already inside similar U.S.-led frameworks, and additional partners are likely to be brought in as the architecture is formalized. The mineral supply problem is structural, and neither side treated Friday's memorandum as a solution in itself — only as the point at which the structural response begins to take shape.

For now, the signing puts two of the world's largest economies on the record committing to coordinate on an issue that until recently had been handled largely through separate national industrial strategies. Whether that coordination produces the kind of supply-chain diversification both sides say they need will depend on how quickly the pilots move from paper to operation, and on whether Brussels and Washington can hold a common line when Beijing responds.

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