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For much of the twentieth century, oil diplomacy its extraction, transport, and pricing determined alliances, created conflicts, and structured the international global order. This paper argues that as the energy transition is underway, critical minerals become strategic assets; supply chain concentration, processing dominance, and reserve distribution are reshaping alliances. This paper is theoretically grounded in complex interdependence and balance-of-power theory to explain that great-power competition between the US and China will intensify, in which China's dominance over rare earth processing and refining capacity has become a strategic lever against Western efforts to secure supply chain resilience, prompting the United States and its allies to pursue ‘friend-shoring’. The shift in alliances towards mineral-technology-industrial coalitions will also elevate the importance of middle powers like India, making mineral diplomacy both an area of cooperation and rivalry.
Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative, case-study-based approach. It examines a set of bilateral and multilateral deals as primary case studies: China's Belt and Road-linked mineral investments, the Minerals Security Partnership as a US-led multilateral framework; the Quad Critical and Emerging Technology mineral cooperation initiatives, India's KABIL-brokered lithium exploration agreements in Argentina and its bilateral mineral cooperation frameworks with Australia and African states. Within this framework, the paper examines India's evolving position as an autonomous actor, applying the concept of strategic hedging to analyse its domestic policy architecture and mini-lateral partnerships.
The paper further investigates the risks of this broader reconfiguration through a dependency-theory lens: resource nationalism, supply chain weaponisation, and the potential for new forms of great-power rivalry over processing capacity rather than reserves alone. It concludes that critical mineral diplomacy is not only replacing oil diplomacy but reconstituting the logic of resource-based global order, with the comparative analysis of these bilateral and multilateral deals offering a revealing lens on how great powers and middle powers alike are negotiating access to the resources of the future.