Tech sovereignty is fantasy. Control over choices is not.

A technician handles a wafer on a production line at Dutch semiconductor company Nexperia in Hamburg, Germany, in June 2024. | REUTERS

Oct 21, 2026

Pop quiz. How big is the global rare-earths market? For all the hullaballoo, handwringing and hyperventilating, the market this year is reckoned to total just $4.5 billion and is forecast to climb to about $8.7 billion by 2032. For comparison, the global coffee market is valued between $263 billion to $270 billion in 2026; revenue at Lawson, the ubiquitous convenience store, is ¥3.02 trillion, or about $19.10 billion.

The contrast between the size and significance of the global rare-earths market underscores the need for nuance when discussing economic security, especially as attention turns to “technology sovereignty,” a phrase that has become shorthand for an increasingly urgent and intense debate among governments as they race to assure access to critical technologies and insulate themselves from vulnerabilities created by ever-extended supply chains.

Sovereignty is a tough nut to crack in a deeply interconnected, digital world. Cyberspace sits poorly atop the virtual world, although the notion that physical borders have no impact is laughable. Bill Clinton’s famous crack that trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall has been repeatedly disproven. Just ask the protesters in, I don’t know, almost any authoritarian country — a couple of democracies, too — when they’ve had their connections cut.

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