According to Reuters, G7 countries, led in part by France, have convened discussions aimed at curbing what they describe as China’s “grip” on critical mineral supply chains, even considering the creation of a permanent coordinating mechanism. Parallel reports by Euronews highlight cooperation among the European Union, the United States and Japan to restructure supply chains for the crucial raw materials.

Yet this is putting prescription before diagnosis.

The modern global supply system is facing obstacles at a time when the world’s largest economy has increasingly embraced tariffs, export controls and financial sanctions as instruments of statecraft. Trade has been weaponized; interdependence, once celebrated as a stabilizing force, is now treated as a vulnerability. Inevitably, such actions reverberate across supply chains that were built on assumptions of relative openness and predictability.

However, rather than acknowledging this underlying disease and strengthening their immunity, some developed economies are spreading the contagion. The implicit belief seems to be that disengaging from China will naturally deliver “security”.

This belief is, at best, incomplete. Within the EU itself, there is growing recognition that excessive reliance on the US — be it in energy, defense, finance and now industrial policy — poses its own strategic vulnerabilities.

Moreover, the premise that interdependence is inherently dangerous misreads how global markets function. Within a rules-based system, mutual dependence is precisely what disciplines behavior. It creates incentives for stability, predictability and cooperation. The risks arise not from interdependence itself, but from its politicization.

Unlike many economies, China is simultaneously a major importer of raw materials, a processor and exporter of refined inputs and a crucial market for high-end manufacturing equipment and semiconductors. Being so deeply embedded across multiple nodes of global supply chains, it has no appetite for causing systemic disruption.

To suggest, therefore, that China is the principal source of “instability” in global supply chains is to overlook both data and logic. The fragmentation now underway risks harming all participants. Resource-exporting countries would face collapsing demand if markets were artificially segmented and manufacturing hubs would struggle to sustain output without access to large, integrated markets.

The more uncomfortable question for some policymakers in the G7 and beyond is whether the “partners” they are now prioritizing truly represent more reliable, rule-abiding alternatives. Trust in international economic relations cannot be declared; it should be demonstrated through consistent adherence to agreed norms, which, in recent years, have been eroded not by emerging economies, but by the very actor that once championed them.

Within Europe, a cohort of policymakers has adopted a de facto adversarial stance toward China. Yet this stance often coexists with a willingness to acquiesce to pressure from Europe’s transatlantic ally. The result is a policy posture that is neither strategically autonomous nor analytically coherent.

A rational approach tells one that supply chain resilience cannot be achieved through bloc formation or ideological alignment. It requires restoring confidence in the openness and predictability of the global trading system. That, in turn, demands a recommitment to multilateralism.

This doesn’t imply passivity. Economies are entitled to safeguard legitimate security interests. But the indiscriminate expansion of “security” to encompass broad swaths of economic activity risks becoming self-defeating. China, for its part, has signaled that it will continue to pursue mutually beneficial economic relations with partners that engage on the basis of equality and respect. At the same time, it has made clear that discriminatory measures will invite proportionate responses. Such reciprocity is not evidence of risk; it is a predictable feature of sovereign interaction and rules defense.

The choice facing some developed economies is therefore not between dependence and independence, but between managed interdependence and unmanaged fragmentation. The former requires discipline, humility and analytical clarity. The latter offers only the illusion of control, at the cost of stability.