Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Sunday that the United States must urgently reduce its dependence on China for critical minerals, calling Beijing an "unreliable partner" and vowing to move "at warp speed" to secure alternative supply chains.
"We don't want to decouple from China, but we need to de-risk," Bessent told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "They've shown themselves to be an unreliable partner in many areas."
Bessent said the Trump administration's new trade framework with China offers only temporary relief from the growing economic tensions between the two superpowers.
China's repeated attempts to restrict exports of rare-earth minerals — key components in semiconductors, smartphones, and defense systems — had united U.S. allies.
"It wasn't the U.S. versus China," he said. "It's China versus the world. They put it on the whole world, and the whole world pushed back."
The comments came days after President Donald Trump announced a one-year suspension of China's rare-earth export controls and a Chinese commitment to buy more U.S. soybeans as part of a preliminary trade deal.
Bessent also defended the administration's use of emergency tariff powers, arguing Chinese trade practices and fentanyl exports constitute "a national emergency."
He dismissed criticism from The Wall Street Journal editorial board as "naïve," saying China had been "putting this plan together for 25 or 30 years" while previous U.S. administrations "were asleep at the switch."
The Treasury secretary added the U.S. is rallying Western and Asian democracies, as well as India, to build non-Chinese supply chains for critical materials.
"This time we have rallied the allies," he said. "All the Western democracies, the Asian democracies, and India are going to join us."
Whether the fragile truce holds, Bessent said, will depend on how both sides implement the deal in the coming months — a test past trade frameworks have repeatedly failed.
