Episode #80
Heidi Crebo-Rediker: Securing American Critical Resources
My guest is Heidi Crebo-Rediker, and we are going to be talking about critical minerals, China, US innovation, and the allied defense-industrial challenge now coming into sharper focus after the G7 and NATO meetings. Heidi is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country’s leading voices on geoeconomics, economic security, and economic statecraft. Her new Special Report at the Council on Foreign Relations, co-authored with Mahnaz Khan, is Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance: How Innovation Can Secure U.S. Supply Chains. The report argues that the United States cannot simply out-mine, out-process, or outspend China. Instead, it must use its own strengths — innovation, substitution, recovery, recycling, finance, and allies — to reduce China’s leverage over the minerals that power advanced manufacturing, defense systems, AI infrastructure, robotics, batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and the technologies of the future.
