Picking Fights With Canada Is Hurting America's Minerals Push, Ex-Official Warns

Washington wants to escape China's grip on critical minerals. According to a former US sanctions official, it is getting in its own way.

Speaking Monday at a mining forum in Colorado Springs, Edward Fishman — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who previously worked on sanctions at the State Department — argued that the United States has the capital and the political will to invest in new mineral supply, but not the expertise to develop it. That knowledge, he said, sits in Canada and Australia. And the current hostility from Washington toward Ottawa, in his telling, directly threatens the American strategy.

It is a pointed critique of a policy contradiction: the US wants allied, non-Chinese supply chains, yet strains the relationship with the ally best equipped to help build them.

China dominates the processing and refining of many critical minerals and rare earths, and unwinding that dependence is a stated goal across the US political spectrum. Fishman's argument is that money alone doesn't close the gap — you need mines, engineers and project developers, and North America's deepest bench of that talent is Canadian.

For US precious-metals buyers, the connection to gold and silver prices is indirect. The minerals in question are largely industrial and battery inputs, not the bullion in a typical stack. But the wider theme resonates with why people hold physical metal in the first place: reducing exposure to a single geopolitical rival, keeping strategic supply on friendly soil, and hedging against the frictions that come with great-power competition.

Still, this is commentary, not a market event. Fishman didn't announce a deal or a rule change. For the price of an American Eagle, the drivers that matter remain the Federal Reserve's rate path, the dollar and global spot — not the state of US-Canada minerals diplomacy.