From Dependence to Dominance—How to Secure a Permanent American Magnet Future | Opinion

From Dependence to Dominance—How to Secure a Permanent American Magnet Future | Opinion

Jul 09, 2025 at 7:30 AM EDT

By Wade Senti – President and CEO of Advanced Magnet Lab (AML)

The United States is staring down a geopolitical crisis that could cripple everything from our military systems to the devices powering daily life—from cars, drones, and planes, to generators, and basic electronics. Specifically, our nation’s reliance on China for sourcing permanent magnets creates a vulnerability so significant that it threatens our national security and economy unlike anything since COVID-19—and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is showing that they intend to exploit it despite rhetorical agreements with the United States.

The U.S. and Japan were once leaders in rare-earth permanent magnets. In the early 1980s, General Motors (GM) researcher John Croat invented what is known today as one of the practical methods for producing neodymium permanent magnets, which led to the creation of Magnequench in 1986, a then division of GM located in Pendleton, Ind. Magnequench was sold off in 1995. GM was not alone in this pursuit of permanent magnets, others including Sumitomo Special Metals led by Masato Sagawa, developed newer classes of high-strength sintered neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets.

This innovation led to a permanent magnet industry that at its peak was largely outside of China. However, by the early 2000s, China gained superiority and dominance through missteps by the United States and aggressive strategies of the PRC beginning in the decades prior.

This was a calculated strategy by China. Deng Xiaoping, a leader within the People’s Republic of China throughout the 20th Century, once famously said in the early 1990s, “The Middle East has oil, and China has rare earths.” This vision was executed over time and China has since become a formidable choke point today with nearly all links in the permanent magnet and rare earth supply chain.

By 2005, the United States fell to approximately 5 percent of global production with China leading the way with over 60 percent of permanent magnet production output. Japan through several strategic moves, remained second globally with various parts of the rare earth supply chain.

A combination of regulatory mishaps in the 1990s, cheap labor and relaxed regulations abroad, a shifting emphasis on domestic manufacturing and innovation, and a rapidly changing world led the United States to lose these capabilities over time, specifically to China.

The domestic rare earth supply chain was essentially broken. The acquisition of the operations and assets of Magnequench by MolyCorp, Inc. in June 2012 was an attempt to fix this and buildout the unique assets of domestic mining, combined with Magnequench’s advanced manufacturing technology. By this time, Magnequench was spread out globally, including with significant operations in China due to the need for cheaper labor and reduced regulations, among other reasons.

However, just three years later MolyCorp proceeded through bankruptcy, this despite the rising prices for rare earths due to an incident involving a Japanese fishing vessel and a Chinese maritime patrol boat in the East China Sea, which led Japan to look for alternatives and a more aggressive strategy of reducing dependance on China for rare earth products.

We must learn from all these events and develop the American solution. The world is not the same as it was 50 years ago and nor will it be the same in the next 50. We must initiate an America First critical technologies and manufacturing strategy that catapults knowledge, technologies, and capabilities to build an industrial base that is unlike and not found anywhere else, but in America.

America has the assets, capabilities, and innovation to accomplish all of this, but an immediate, comprehensive response from industry, academia, and the U.S. government is needed. Every citizen, patriot, and elective official can positively impact the revitalization of a permanent magnet industry and supply chain in the United States.

We need aggressive policies and an all-hands-on helm effort that rapidly funds, rewards, and recruits talent and capabilities for the mission of rebuilding our industrial base for our needs as a country. This needs to be the Big Beautiful Comeback of the critical minerals and permanent magnet supply chain in America.

These capabilities include expansive development of technology, infrastructure buildout, and reduction of red tape for harnessing natural resources needed to support our supply chains.

We can accomplish this by leveraging the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 to the full extent and ability. This effort must be a national priority given the vulnerabilities of foreign influence to our domestic supply chains and the ability to source permanent magnets for critical defense applications.

We must learn from the past and this time America First means American-made technology and capabilities staying on sovereign soil.

Wade Senti is the president and CEO of Advanced Magnet Lab (AML).

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/dependence-dominancehow-secure-permanent-american-magnet-future-opinion-2096128