For decades, allied nations operated under a comfortable assumption: extract the resource, export it and let someone else convert it into the materials that power modern industry. That approach produced short-term revenues and long-term dependencies. Today, roughly 90 per cent of global hard rock lithium refining sits in a single country, China. The story is similar for cobalt, rare earths and a growing list of materials that underpin electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage and an expanding range of defence capabilities. The G7’s commitment to reduce critical minerals dependencies on a single supplier to under 60 per cent by 2030 is an acknowledgment of how far allied nations have drifted from control of their own supply chains.