Sovereignty is a bill of materials
Europe buys 98% of its rare-earth magnets from China. A designer reads the continent’s bill of materials and finds the lines that can stop the factory.
Every product has a bill of materials, the list of all the parts it needs, down to the last screw. Designers learn early to read it for the dangerous line: the part with one supplier. A machine with three hundred parts ships when the three-hundredth arrives. How good the other 299 are makes no difference.
Europe has never read its own bill of materials. It should, because the dangerous lines are easy to find.
One supplier
According to the European Parliament’s research service, the Union gets 98% of its rare-earth magnets from China. These are the magnets in every electric motor, wind turbine and guided missile. China also supplies 97% of the magnesium Europe imports, without which there is no aluminium alloy, and 71% of its gallium, which goes into radar and power electronics. Chinese plants hold about nine-tenths of the world’s refining capacity for critical raw materials, wherever the ore was dug up.
In 2025 Beijing showed what one supplier can do. It made exports of rare earths subject to a licence. A survey by the European chamber of commerce in China found that of 141 applications from its members, 19 had been approved by early September. Car suppliers in Europe stopped production lines for want of a component that weighs a few grams.
A few weeks later came Nexperia. The company, based in the Netherlands, makes the simplest chips there are, the kind that switch a headlight or watch over a battery, and has belonged to a Chinese group since 2018. In October the Dutch government took control of it under an emergency law. China answered by blocking exports from Nexperia’s assembly plant in Guangdong. Honda stopped a factory in Mexico. European carmakers ran on their reserves and warned that the lines would stop. Nobody had thought of these chips as strategic. They cost almost nothing, which is why nobody had bothered with a second source.
It was not always so
The word I care about is again. Forty years ago a single plant in La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast, was one of the largest rare-earth refineries in the world, and its output set the world price. Europe let that business go to China because it was dirty and cheap, and because the spreadsheet said so. Today the plant produces about 4,000 tonnes a year. China produces roughly 300,000. The chemists are still in La Rochelle. What went missing was the will to pay for the unglamorous half of industry.
Brussels has since written a law. By 2030 the Union wants to mine 10% of what it uses of each strategic material, process 40% and recycle 25%, and to take no more than 65% from any single country. In February its own auditors looked at the plan and concluded that Europe is unlikely to get there in time. Ten of the materials on the list are not recycled at all.
What independence costs
Independence does not mean making everything at home. No designer wants that and no economy could pay for it. It means a second source for every line that can stop the factory. Some of those sources will be mines in Sweden, Portugal or Greenland, and people will object to them. Some will be refineries, which smell. Some will be recycling plants that pull the magnets out of old motors. All of them will cost more than buying from the cheapest seller, in the way a fire door costs more than a curtain.
The price of not paying is now known. It is a car plant standing still for want of a chip, and a foreign policy that has to be cleared with a supplier first.
I have spent my working life making complicated things simple to build. The rule that has never failed me is to design the supply before the product. If a part has one source, you change the part or you find a second source, and you do it before the launch. Europe is doing it after. That is more expensive. It is still cheaper than finding out in a crisis that your sovereignty was on back order.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.