This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.
This is the shorter version of this article (B1-B2 readers). It has shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary. If you prefer more research, more data and more voices from the classroom, there is a C1 for B2 version of this article here with the same argument, the same classroom quotes and the same question at the end.
In the spring of 1943, a quiet man in Lisbon ran two dining rooms.
In one room, buyers from Berlin. In the other, buyers from London and Washington. Both wanted the same thing: a heavy black rock from the same Portuguese hills. António Salazar sold to both sides. His neutrality was not a moral choice. It was a business model. Two dining rooms, two account books.
The rock was tungsten. Wolfram, in German, which is why the periodic table calls it W. And the story of who controls it has turned around completely. In 1943, Europe held the metal and set the price. Today it holds almost none, and pays the price it is given. The same old question is back: buy control of the metal, or trust the market to fix it?
I’ll be honest. I came to tungsten cold this week. I’m a language coach, not a metal expert, and I learned most of this a day or two before the people I was teaching. So let me show you what I found, then what the room said, then what I think. You don’t have to agree with the last part.
Key Vocabulary — The Metal You Can’t Replace
a chokepoint | a narrow point where all supply must pass through | Engpass, Nadelöhr
irreplaceable | impossible to replace with anything else | unersetzlich
preclusive buying | buying something only to keep it from a rival | Aufkauf, um es dem Gegner zu entziehen
to dictate (a price) | to decide the terms that others must accept | diktieren, vorgeben
a stockpile | a large store of supplies kept for later | Vorrat, Lager
to rhyme (of history) | to repeat in a similar pattern, not exactly | sich ähnlich wiederholen
The Metal You Can’t Replace
Start with the metal, because it is strange.
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal — 3,422°C. Mixed with carbon, it becomes almost as hard as diamond. About 60% of it goes into cutting tools. The rest goes into armour-piercing shells and computer chips. And it is nearly irreplaceable. There is no easy substitute. For its main jobs, nothing else works as well.
That makes it a chokepoint, a narrow gate that everything must pass through. Which is why, in 1943, both sides of a world war were buying it in the same market.
The Allies used a simple tactic called preclusive buying. They bought the ore at almost any price. Not because they needed all of it, but to keep it away from Germany. The price exploded. A ton cost about $1,144 in 1940. By the end of 1941 it hit nearly $20,000. Portugal sold to everyone, and Germany paid partly in stolen gold. Europe held the metal, and Europe dictated the price.
Did it change the war? Historians still argue. Germany simply rationed its supply, sat on a stockpile, and never really ran out. Worth remembering: chokepoints are real, but their power is often oversold. Still, the interesting part is not 1943. It is the mirror.
Because history does not repeat. It rhymes. In 2025, one country mined about 79% of the world’s tungsten. That country is China. The open market of 1943 is gone. This time, one player owns the hills.
Key Vocabulary — The Real Chokepoint Is the Refinery
the midstream | the middle stage between raw ore and finished product | die Verarbeitungsstufe, das Mittelglied
to refine | to clean raw material into a usable form | raffinieren, veredeln
to weaponise | to use something others need as a weapon | als Waffe einsetzen
leverage | power that comes from others needing you | Druckmittel
to re-shore | to bring production back to your own country | zurückverlagern
a shortage | when there is not enough of something | Knappheit, Mangel
The Real Chokepoint Is the Refinery
Here’s the thing most news stories miss: the real chokepoint is the factory, one step after the mine.
Getting tungsten out of the ground is only the start. The rock must be refined: turned into powder, then into hard metal. This middle stage has a name: the midstream. And China controls it even more than the mines — about 70% to 85% at every step.
Europe still owns about half of the world’s known tungsten. But it gave the factories away, because refining is dirty and makes little money. We called that “efficiency”. Rebuilding it is hard: it costs hundreds of millions and takes years of permits. This shortage is built to last. Open a new mine tomorrow, and the rock still has to travel to China to become useful.
And here it gets sharp. Whoever owns the midstream owns the leverage. In February 2025, China put tungsten under export control. Exports fell by about 70%. In some months they hit zero. The price jumped eight or nine times higher in a single year. A dependency, quietly weaponised.
The West has noticed, late. From 2027, American defence rules will block Chinese tungsten. The push to re-shore has begun, and old mines are reopening in Portugal, Spain and South Korea. Europe has set targets for 2030. But a new mine takes eight to ten years. That is the real problem: time.
One last thing. Tungsten is not only history and tools. A tungsten gas helps build the memory chips inside AI servers. Earlier this year, a rumour about tungsten changed the price of the whole chip industry in one afternoon, before anyone checked if the rumour was even true. That is how nervous this chokepoint has made people.
Key Vocabulary — What the Room Said
to underprice | to sell cheaper than rivals to push them out | unterbieten
to poach (staff) | to take skilled workers away from a rival | abwerben
a workaround | another way around a problem | Behelfslösung, Umgehung
to concede (a point) | to admit the other side is partly right | einräumen, zugestehen
self-correcting (of a market) | able to fix itself over time | sich selbst regulierend
a dependency | relying on one supplier you can’t easily replace | Abhängigkeit
What the Room Said
I taught this in only two groups this week, so I’ll keep it short.
In the first group, senior managers at a software company, one man opened with an aside I can’t forget. They make wedding rings from tungsten, he said. If you catch your hand in a machine, the doctor can’t cut the ring off. He has to take the finger, then reattach it. Hardest metal we have. He does not recommend the ring. Honestly, that explains irreplaceable better than any number.
Then came the sharpest hour of the week. One man argued there is no substitute for tungsten, so all you can do is find a workaround, and there isn’t one. Another pushed back: “does Europe really have the ability to do things quickly? I don’t think so.” Neither man conceded. That is the whole debate in one exchange.
They gave their own examples. One talked about China underpricing the German Mittelstand, and named a firm China can’t beat yet, Zeiss, while adding that Chinese rivals are poaching its engineers. He quoted a German boss: “China’s eaten most of the lunch there — we’re just waiting for them to eat our dinner.” Another was blunt: “Twenty years for an airport. China builds three in a year.”
The second group, at an IT-services firm, stayed closer to home. One man, Stefan, saw it in his own job at once. His company resells one big vendor’s hardware. With no second supplier, that vendor controls the price. The chokepoint in the reading was simply his Tuesday. A textbook dependency, described from the inside.
Someone asked the obvious question: why not just recycle? The short answer is a hard limit. Recycling covers only about a third of demand and can’t easily grow, because most old tungsten is simply lost. A self-correcting market, maybe. But not quickly, and not all the way.
Key Vocabulary — The Honest Trade-off
a trade-off | a choice where you gain one thing but lose another | Abwägung, Kompromiss
naive | too trusting; not careful enough | naiv
at a premium | at a much higher price than normal | mit Aufschlag
appetite (for a cost) | willingness to accept a cost | Bereitschaft, etwas mitzutragen
to be oversold | to be made to sound bigger than it really is | übertrieben dargestellt werden
expensive theatre | costly action that is mostly for show | teures Theater
The Honest Trade-off
Here’s where I land. You can take it or leave it.
My instinct is that owning the metal (the mine and the factory) is the right answer to a real chokepoint. Europe’s mistake was to give the dirty refining stage away and call it clever. That was naive, and we are paying for it now.
But I won’t give you a cleaner story than the facts allow. A Western mine takes eight to ten years. Reopening the mine alone barely helps while the factory sits in China. Prices are already eight times higher, and that cost lands on ordinary people, at a premium, just as the economy gets harder. Whether people have the appetite to pay is a real question. Build too fast, and you get expensive theatre, a costly show that fixes little.
And one honest point: even the 1943 story is argued over. Chokepoints are real, but their danger is often oversold by people who profit from the fear.
So I’ll leave it there: a trade-off, and the decision is yours. Pay much more for control, or bet that the high price itself will fix the shortage. I’ve told you which way I lean. I have not told you that you are wrong to lean the other way.
Tungsten is one small piece. The harder question is what happens when the same logic reaches the next thing we no longer make ourselves.
History does not repeat. It rhymes. And the leader who knows the tune reads the next tungsten headline calmly, without panic. The choice is yours.
Your Move
Skip the vocabulary drill this week. The task is a conversation.
Find someone you trust, and argue the side you do not believe — in English. If you think buying control is obvious, defend the market. If you think re-shoring is a waste, defend the wall. The goal is simple: hold a hard position calmly in your second language, with good arguments on both sides. Winning does not matter.
You will make a few mistakes. Good. That is how acquisition works.
I’ll go first, as always. I can explain eighty years of tungsten history, and I still pick the wrong gender for half my German nouns after nearly twenty years here. We all work with tools we don’t fully control. Mine is German grammar. Same struggle, different dictionary.
This article came from a week of teaching the same question across several groups. The companion three-level lesson (B1, B2 and C1) is published next to it. If you want to run this argument with your own team, start there.