This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.
This is the longer version of this article (C1 for B2 readers). It has more research, more data and more voices from the classroom. If you prefer shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary, there is a B1-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 a Lisbon office was running two dining rooms.
In one, buyers from Berlin. In the other, buyers from London and Washington. Both wanted the same thing: a heavy black rock dug out of the same Portuguese hills. António Salazar sold to both, invoiced both, and kept both waiting in separate rooms so they’d never have to shake hands. His neutrality was not a moral position — it was a business model. Two dining rooms, two invoice books.
The rock was tungsten. Wolfram, if you speak German, which is why the periodic table still files it under W. And the story of who controls that rock has quietly turned itself inside out. In 1943, Europe held the metal and set the terms. Today it holds almost none, and takes the terms it’s given. The same old argument — buy control of the stuff, or trust the market to sort it out — is back on the table, with the roles reversed.
I’ll be honest: I came to tungsten cold this week. I’m a language coach, not a metallurgist, and I learned most of what follows a day or two before the people I was teaching did. That turned out to be the fun of it. So let me walk you through what I found, then what the room made of it, then what I actually think. You’re under no obligation to agree with the last part. I’d rather you argued with it.
Key Vocabulary — The Metal You Can’t Invent Your Way Around
a chokepoint | a narrow stage where all supply must pass through one place | Engpass, Nadelöhr
unsubstitutable | impossible to replace with another material | nicht ersetzbar
refractory (of a metal) | able to withstand extreme heat without melting | hochschmelzend, feuerfest
preclusive buying | buying up a resource purely to deny it to a rival | Aufkauf, um dem Gegner die Ware zu entziehen
to dictate (terms/a price) | to impose terms that others must accept | diktieren, vorgeben
to stockpile | to build up a reserve supply in advance | Vorräte anlegen, horten
to rhyme (of history) | to repeat in pattern, though never exactly | sich dem Muster nach wiederholen
The Metal You Can’t Invent Your Way Around
Start with the metal itself, because it’s genuinely strange.
Tungsten is a refractory metal, which is a technical way of saying it laughs at heat. It has the highest melting point of any metal on earth — 3,422°C. Bond it with carbon and you get tungsten carbide, nearly as hard as diamond. Roughly 60% of the world’s tungsten goes into cutting tools, the drills and blades that machine everything else we build. The rest hardens armour-piercing shells and, increasingly, sits inside the chips that run the modern world. And here’s the uncomfortable part: it is very nearly unsubstitutable. There is no synthetic rubber waiting in a lab, no clever swap. For its core jobs, nothing else quite does what tungsten does.
That’s what makes it a chokepoint — a narrow gate that everything has to pass through. Which is exactly why, in 1943, both sides of a world war were bidding for it in the same neutral marketplace.
The Allies ran a campaign the strategists called preclusive buying: buying Iberian wolfram at almost any price, not because they needed all of it, but simply to keep it out of German hands. The effect on the price was spectacular. A ton of ore that went for around $1,144 in 1940 hit nearly $20,000 by the end of 1941. Salazar eventually seized control and fixed the official price at $6,000 a ton in early 1942. Portuguese output leapt from about 2,419 tons in 1938 to roughly 6,500 in 1942. Germany paid partly in looted gold — at least 123.8 tons of it flowed into Portugal’s reserves. Europe held the metal, and Europe dictated the price.
Did it decide anything? To be fair, historians still argue the point — Speer claimed the shortage genuinely bit, while others show Germany simply rationed, sat on a stockpile of around 1,200 tons, and never quite ran out. Worth remembering, that: chokepoints are real, and their importance is routinely oversold by whoever profits from the panic. But I’ll keep it to that one sentence, because the striking thing isn’t 1943. It’s the mirror.
Because history doesn’t repeat. It rhymes. In 2025, one country mined about 79% of the world’s tungsten — 67,000 tons out of 85,000, by the US Geological Survey’s 2026 count. That country is China. (The share wanders between 79% and 83% depending on the year you pick, so treat any single figure with a date attached.) The neutral marketplace of 1943 is gone. This time, one player owns the hills.
Key Vocabulary — The Real Chokepoint Is the Refinery
the midstream | the middle processing stage between raw ore and finished product | die Verarbeitungsstufe, das Mittelglied
to refine | to purify raw material into a usable form | raffinieren, veredeln
to weaponise (a dependency) | to turn another’s reliance on you into a political weapon | als Waffe einsetzen
leverage | power over others that comes from their need for you | Druckmittel, Hebelwirkung
to re-shore | to bring production back to your own country | (Produktion) zurückverlagern
a structural shortage | a lasting shortage built into the system, not a passing dip | strukturelle Knappheit
permitting | the official process of getting legal permission to build or mine | Genehmigungsverfahren
to reprice | to abruptly revalue something on the market | neu bewerten, umpreisen
The Real Chokepoint Is the Refinery
Here’s the thing most headlines miss: the real chokepoint is the factory, a step downstream from the mine everyone watches.
Getting tungsten out of the ground is only the start. The rock then has to be refined — turned into a chemical intermediate called APT, then into powder, then into carbide. That middle stretch of the journey has an ugly, unglamorous name: the midstream. And China’s grip there is even tighter than on the mines, running somewhere between 70% and 85% at every step. As one analyst put it: the ore is 80% Chinese, the APT is 80% Chinese, the carbide is 80% Chinese — every stage more Chinese than the one before.
Europe, meanwhile, still sits on roughly 52% of the world’s known reserves. It kept the geology and gave away the factories, because refining is dirty, hazardous and barely profitable, and somewhere along the way we decided that offloading it was the same thing as being clever. Rebuilding that midstream is harder than reopening a mine: think $200–500 million in capital, a decade of permitting, and a great deal of toxic effluent nobody wants in their valley. This is a structural shortage, not a passing one. Re-open a mine tomorrow and the rock still has to sail to China to become useful.
And here is where the modern part turns sharp. Whoever owns the midstream owns the leverage — and China has begun to use it. In February 2025 it put tungsten under export licensing. Late in the year it published a whitelist of just fifteen companies allowed to export at all. APT exports fell by around 70%; in some months they hit zero. The benchmark price in Rotterdam went from roughly $340 per unit in early 2025 to somewhere north of $3,000 in 2026 — eight or nine times higher, depending on where you start counting. A dependency, quietly weaponised.
The West has noticed, late and loudly. From 1 January 2027, American defence rules bar Chinese tungsten all the way back to the mine. The push to re-shore is on, and old mines are stirring back to life — Panasqueira in Portugal, Barruecopardo in Spain, Sangdong in South Korea, reopening after more than thirty years shut. Europe’s Critical Raw Materials Act sets 2030 targets: at least 10% of tungsten mined at home, 40% processed here, no more than 65% from any single country. Sensible goals. The trouble is time. A new Western mine takes eight to ten years, and the graveyard of tungsten projects — Hemerdon in Devon is the cautionary monument — proves that permits plus capital plus rock still doesn’t equal production.
One more thing, because it’s the quiet payload under all of this. Tungsten isn’t just wartime history and cutting tools. A tungsten gas lays down the microscopic contacts and word lines inside the memory chips stacked in AI servers — the very hardware everyone’s betting the next decade on. Earlier this year, a rumour about tungsten supply repriced the entire chip industry in a single afternoon, before anyone had bothered to check whether the rumour was even true. That’s how nervous this particular chokepoint has made the smartest money in the room.
Key Vocabulary — What the Room Made of It
to underprice | to sell below rivals in order to push them out | unter Preis anbieten, unterbieten
to poach (talent) | to lure skilled staff away from a rival | abwerben
a workaround | an alternative route around an obstacle | Behelfslösung, Umgehung
self-correcting (of a market) | able to fix its own imbalance over time | sich selbst regulierend
to hold the whip hand | to be in the controlling position | am längeren Hebel sitzen
to concede (a point) | to admit the other side is partly right | einräumen, zugestehen
a dependency | a reliance on one supplier you can’t easily replace | Abhängigkeit
What the Room Made of It
I taught this in only a couple of groups this week, so I’ll keep the classroom short. In the first — senior managers at a software company — one participant opened his turn with an aside I still can’t unhear. They make wedding rings out of tungsten, he told us, and if you catch your hand in a machine, the surgeon can’t cut the ring off. He has to take the finger, then reattach it afterwards. Hardest metal we’ve got, nothing else quite does the job, and he does not recommend the jewellery. Honestly, it’s a better argument for unsubstitutable than any melting point I could quote you.
That same group produced the sharpest hour of the week, right on the fault line of the story. It started with the “no synthetic rubber” idea — that tungsten, unlike the natural rubber of the Second World War, has no clever substitute waiting to be invented. One participant took that and ran: as long as there’s no alternative, he argued, all you can do is change your product or find a workaround, and on tungsten there simply isn’t one. Another pushed back at once. You need pressure to invent your way out, sure — “but does Europe really have the ability to do things quickly? I don’t think so.” Neither conceded. That’s the debate in miniature, and it stayed unresolved in the room, which is exactly as it should be.
They reached for their own examples, too. One talked about China underpricing the German Mittelstand into a corner, and named the firms it hasn’t managed to crack yet — Zeiss among them — while adding that Chinese rivals are now poaching its engineers with eye-watering salaries. He quoted a German chief executive he’d heard: “China’s eaten most of the lunch there — we’re just waiting for them to eat our dinner.” Another, asked whether Europe could even move fast enough to matter, was blunt about it: “Twenty years for an airport. China builds three in a year.” Whether or not the figures are exact, you can feel what he meant.
The second group, a team at an IT-services firm, stayed closer to the ground. One of them, reading the passage aloud, summarised the mine-versus-refinery point back perfectly without prompting — the rock still travels to China to become useful. Another delivered the Salazar line with real conviction. And a third, Stefan, pulled the whole dilemma straight into his own working life, unprompted: his company resells one dominant vendor’s hardware, and when there’s no second supplier, that vendor holds the whip hand on price. The abstract chokepoint of the reading turned out to be his Tuesday. A textbook dependency, described from the inside.
Someone also raised the obvious objection: why not just recycle our way out? Fair question, and the short answer is a hard limit. Recycling already covers only about a third of demand and can’t easily climb higher, because most end-of-life tungsten is simply lost — scattered, or diluted into scrap steel where no one ever gets it back. Gold survives the journey because it’s chemically noble: it doesn’t corrode, so it’s worth stripping off an old circuit board. Tungsten mostly hides in cutting-tool scrap, and what escapes into the wider waste stream is gone for good. A self-correcting market, maybe. Just not quickly, and not all the way.
Key Vocabulary — The Honest Trade-off
a trade-off | a choice where gaining one thing means giving up another | Abwägung, Kompromiss
naive / naivety | too trusting; lacking hard-headed judgement | naiv / Naivität
at a premium | at a much higher price than usual | mit Aufschlag, zum Höchstpreis
appetite (for a cost) | willingness to accept a cost or risk | Bereitschaft, etwas mitzutragen
to be oversold | to be exaggerated beyond what is actually true | übertrieben dargestellt werden
to hand (someone) the decision | to leave the final choice to them | die Entscheidung überlassen
expensive theatre | costly action that is more show than substance | teures Theater, teure Kulisse
The Honest Trade-off
Here’s where I land, and you can take it or leave it.
My instinct is that owning the material — the mine and the midstream — is the right answer to a genuine chokepoint. Europe’s mistake was self-inflicted. It handed away the dirty, low-margin refining stage and called that efficiency. That was naivety dressed as good sense, and we’re paying the bill for it now.
But I won’t sell you a cleaner story than the evidence supports, so let me lay the costs on the table plainly. A Western mine takes eight to ten years to bring on. Re-shoring the mine alone barely helps while the refinery still sits in China. Prices are already up eight or nine times since early 2025, and that premium doesn’t land on governments — it lands on ordinary people, buying ordinary things, at a premium, at exactly the moment the economy is tightening for everyone. Whether the public has the appetite to swallow that is an open question. Build the wall too fast and you’ve got expensive theatre — a costly gesture that reassures the headlines and fixes very little.
And a sentence of humility, because it belongs here: even the textbook case of 1943 is contested. Chokepoints are real, but their decisiveness is routinely oversold by whoever stands to gain from the fear. Keep that in your pocket the next time a supply scare reprices an industry before lunch.
So I’ll leave you with a trade-off rather than a verdict, and I mean it: I’m handing the decision to you. Pay many times the price for control and independence, or bet that the price itself (the eight-fold spike) is already doing the work, calling new mines into being and grinding the chokepoint down. I’ve told you which way I lean. I haven’t told you you’re wrong to lean the other way.
Tungsten is one tile. The harder question is what happens when the same logic reaches the next thing we’ve quietly stopped making for ourselves.
History doesn’t repeat. It rhymes. And the leader who knows the tune reads the next tungsten-shaped headline without panicking — which is, in the end, the whole point of learning the old verse. The call is yours.
Your Move
Skip the vocabulary drill this week. The task is a conversation.
Find someone whose judgement you trust and argue the side you don’t hold — in English. If you think buying control is obvious, defend the market. If you think re-shoring is expensive theatre, defend the wall. Winning is beside the point. The skill is holding a difficult position steadily in your second language, with real weight on both sides, without grabbing for the nearest slogan. That’s where fluency actually lives: in the middle of an argument you can’t fully close.
You’ll fumble a few sentences. Good. That’s acquisition doing its job.
I’ll go first with the vulnerability, as usual. I can walk you through eighty years of tungsten geopolitics, and I still, after nearly twenty years here, reach for the wrong gender on half the German nouns I need in a hurry. We’re all handling machinery we don’t fully control. Mine just happens to be German grammar rather than a refinery in Hunan. Same struggle, different dictionary.
This article came out of a week of teaching the same question across several groups. The companion three-level lesson (B1, B2 and C1 — with the reading, the vocabulary and the full discussion task) is published alongside it. If you’d like to run this argument with your own team, that’s where to start.