War by Other Means [Sovereignty]
1 min read
The contest for land became a contest for oil, which has become a contest for the supply chain. In April 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce added seven elements to a licensing list, within weeks, automotive assembly lines on three continents were slowing down for a magnet that weighs less than a coin. A customs form had accomplished what in an earlier century would have required a fleet.
For most of recorded history, the contested asset was land. Wealth lay in land value and in what you could extract from it. If you wanted more of it, you took it. Napoleon. Industrialization broke that. By the early 1900s it had moved to hydrocarbons. Japan's decision to move into Southeast Asia in 1941 was a response to the American oil embargo. The 1973 OPEC embargo humbled economies. And oil is still enormously important today, don’t get me wrong. But we've moved into a third stage, where the bottleneck is the material inputs that make energy usable and machines possible: rare earths, magnets, copper, lithium, molybdenum, potash half the periodic table you can't pronounce.
The interesting thing is that minerals are not oil, in the sense that these are incredibly small markets with enormous leverage that few people understand well. So sovereign financing matters, the U.S. DFC, the Canada Growth Fund, China's Belt and Road Initiative. These instruments are critical, and they are the instruments of the new war. Supply chain controls and restrictions are only going to continue. Sovereign equity is the normalcy of the next thirty years. Africa & South America who hold 1.3% and 3.3% of total world wealth respectively are the next frontier. It's really America versus China over who has influence, and different countries have different dynamics. Then there's the EU, miles behind, though they'll catch up eventually. These economies know that without the supply chain their countries are impoverished and they can't pay for their social programs. That's the bottom line.
The instruments of the new war are equity stakes, off-takes, prepayments, royalties, co- investments. These countries capital allocators both sovereign and private will have an outsized impact on your country's national security and affordability over the coming decades.
JC