Autos as an Economic‑Security Battleground

Harvard fellow Elaine Buckberg argues U.S. auto policy has quietly shifted from jobs and competitiveness toward economic security, treating EVs, batteries, chips and rare‑earth magnets as strategic dependencies.

The EV transition creates new supply vectors: battery materials, power electronics and, crucially, rare‑earth permanent magnets used in traction motors and many vehicle components. China’s dominance in refining, processing and magnet manufacturing has concentrated those choke points; automakers report volatile magnet availability described as “hand‑to‑mouth.”

Washington’s response mixes tariffs, tax credits, grants, procurement rules and national‑security controls. These tools can speed domestic capacity building but also risk sheltering firms from competition, raising costs and slowing innovation if protection becomes permanent.

Mining alone won’t deliver resilience. The strategic bottleneck sits in midstream and downstream activity-separating, refining, alloying and magnet production-where capacity and know‑how are most lacking.

A second security vector is vehicle computerization: connected‑vehicle software and hardware transactions with foreign adversaries are now subject to stricter controls, moving trade policy into the security realm.

Buckberg’s working paper is a policy synthesis intended to provoke debate rather than a peer‑reviewed technical study; some findings rely on secondary sources. The practical takeaway: without domestic midstream and magnet manufacturing, U.S. control of the EV era will be limited.