#48 Mineral War author Tomasz Nadrowski on the reasons behind China's mineral dominance

Most conversations about China’s grip on critical minerals stop at the “how” — the export controls, the smelting capacity, the twenty-plus restrictions since 2020. Tomasz Nadrowski, author of Mineral War and portfolio manager at Amvest Terraden, spends this episode on the “why,” and his answer isn’t really about markets at all. It’s about security. Nadrowski traces the legal machinery that makes Western free markets function — a contract-law tradition going back to the School of Salamanca — and argues it simply has no equivalent leverage against a state that treats mineral control as a tool for regime survival rather than profit. From there he walks through how China ended up owning the unglamorous, low-margin middle of the value chain that Western firms were happy to offload in the 1990s, why price floors (not just subsidies) are the only real lever the West has left, and why the distinction between “monopoly” and “weaponized monopoly” is the whole ballgame, illustrated with a live-fire example involving gadolinium and the Tomahawk missile that Eric spends a good five minutes trying to pin down.

The back half gets more philosophical and more personal. Nadrowski makes the case via the French philosopher Julien Freund that whether the West is in conflict with China isn’t actually the West’s decision to make, and points to Xi Jinping’s 2013 “Document Number Nine” as evidence the answer was settled years ago. He also gets candid about running a fund that profits from exactly the supply-chain gap his book describes (”isn’t that a false dichotomy? Can’t we just do both?”), and closes by connecting all of it to the deep-sea mining conversation: why the EEZ land-grab in the Pacific may matter less for the minerals themselves than for which geopolitical orbit small island nations end up in.

Follow Tomasz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadrowski/

Chapters

* 00:00:00 — Cold Open: “Price Floors Are Non-Negotiable”

* 00:00:18 — Welcome & Guest Intro

* 00:00:50 — From Career Accident to Mineral War: Tomasz’s Story

* 00:08:26 — Why the Free Market Fails on Critical Minerals

* 00:19:11 — Price Floors and Rebuilding Western Supply Chains

* 00:32:47 — Monopoly vs. Weaponization: The Gadolinium Example

* 00:41:05 — Junior Miners and the Exploration Funding Gap

* 00:46:39 — Inside the Fund: Profit, Purpose, and the Ethics of Mining

* 00:55:30 — Is the West Already at War? Document Number Nine

* 00:58:03 — Deep-Sea Minerals and China’s Seabed Ambitions

* 01:04:41 — Closing Thoughts

Resources & Links Mentioned

* Book — Mineral War: China’s Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction by Tomasz Nadrowski: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFNP46NB

* Tomasz’s podcast — Tyranny Today:

(also on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/tyrannytoday/)

* Amvest Terraden Critical Minerals Fund: https://www.amvestterraden.com/

* “Document Number Nine” (2013 CCP internal memo), full ChinaFile translation: https://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tradingoff.substack.com/subscribe