MACEDON STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

Strategic Intelligence Brief

The U.S. and China critical-minerals truce is not a resolution. It is a suspension with a date, sitting on top of controls that never paused.

01The announcement

Following the November 2025 trade truce, China formalized the suspension of its October 2025 rare-earth export controls, and the United States suspended its Bureau of Industry and Security "Affiliates Rule," the fifty-percent-ownership expansion of the Entity List. Headlines framed the step as de-escalation and, in market terms, a return to normal flow. Price action and sentiment have largely treated the dispute as closed.

02The gap

The truce is a temporary lid on one layer, not a settlement. Three things the framing omits:

• It is suspension, not repeal, and it carries hard expiry dates. The suspension of China's October 2025 controls and of the U.S. Affiliates Rule runs only through November 10, 2026. The separate suspension of export prohibitions on gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials runs to November 27, 2026. The U.S. rule auto-reinstates absent further rulemaking.
• The layer most relevant to magnets and defense never paused. China's April 2025 controls on seven heavy rare earths, samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium, remain in force and enforced through mid-2026, with military end-use applications rejected under licensing. The truce sits on top of active controls. It does not remove them.
• The domestic offset arrives late. The most-cited U.S. capacity answer, MP Materials' "10X" magnet campus in Northlake, Texas, does not commission until 2028.

03The window

Put the dates together and the structure is a countdown, not a resolution. From the November 2026 expiries to 2028 commissioning is roughly a fifteen-month window in which, if Beijing lets the suspension lapse or reinstates the October controls, nothing structural has changed on the U.S. side. The announcement is the truce. Durable domestic processing and magnet capacity is not yet the reality.

04The exposure map

The exposure concentrates wherever heavy-rare-earth magnets are a hard input and substitution is slow: permanent-magnet-dependent manufacturing across traction motors, wind turbines, and aerospace and defense actuators, and the tiers of the supply chain that depend on Chinese separation and metallization rather than on mined feedstock. The binding constraint is processing and magnet-making capacity outside China, not ore in the ground. Mapping which downstream operators carry single-source dependence on the still-controlled heavy-rare-earth layer is the analysis that pays, and it is cheaper to run now, before any November snap-back, than after one.

05The signals

• MOFCOM license-approval throughput: the pace and rejection rate of Chinese export-license approvals, especially for military-adjacent end-users.
• New non-China magnet and separation capacity coming online through 2026 and 2027.
• MP Materials' 10X build milestones, and any pull-forward or slip from 2028 commissioning.
• Any move to extend, renegotiate, or let lapse the November 10 and November 27, 2026 dates.

06The sources

1. Bloomberg, "China formalizes rare-earth curb suspension after trade truce," November 7, 2025.
2. European Parliament research briefing, "China's rare-earth export restrictions," November 2025.
3. Morrison Foerster, "US and China reach trade agreement: export and supply-chain takeaways," November 13, 2025.
4. Fastmarkets, "China suspends export prohibition on gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the US."
5. The Oregon Group, "China lifts export ban on gallium, germanium, antimony."
6. White & Case and China Briefing, on the April 2025 heavy-rare-earth controls remaining in force.
7. MP Materials, 10X (Northlake, Texas) magnet campus disclosures; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.