The US Critical Minerals Ministerial Summit on 4 February was the Trump administration’s most significant move to date to decouple from Chinese dominated minerals supply chains – and create an exclusive market where the US gets to decide participation.
The US does not want to overtake China in production and processing volumes. Attempting to do so would be a misplaced and costly ambition, given the scale of Chinese domestic demand. This is not a race for production. It is an attempt to create a new geopolitically exclusionary mining and processing ecosystem.
Attendees were directly invited to ‘form a trading bloc among allies and partners’ that ‘guarantees American access…expanding production across the entire zone’.
America is not alone in pursing this objective. There are more than 30 national critical minerals strategies worldwide. But the US is the first nation to rightly make minerals supply a national foreign policy priority and understand that disrupting the status quo requires a significant amount of cash.
Essential to success is corralling the private sector and international partners. That will require credible commitment from the Trump administration that its interventions will outlast this presidency. It therefore works against US interests when Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticize former president Joe Biden’s policies. Doing so risks making it appear more likely that a successor government will unpick Trump’s interventions, leading to stranded assets and unpaid bills.
The US has proved it is serious. Now it must prove it still will be in 10 years’ time.
Scale must be buttressed by bureaucratic vested interests
The US has pledged $12 billion to build a US strategic stockpile of critical minerals (‘Project Vault’) via public–private partnership, combining a large export import bank loan with private capital.
In parallel, Washington launched the FORGE initiative as a standing coordination platform for critical minerals policy between Washington and countries including Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ukraine – backed by State Department leadership and inter agency participation. A major element of the partnership is the creation of price floors for minerals ‘to uphold pricing integrity’.
Scale is obviously important. And the US has backed its domestic and partner industries to a greater degree than anyone else.
However, equally important to success will be the creation of the bureaucracies, departments, and agencies that can create a web of vested interests around implementation of Trump’s policy: such interests become very hard to undo by successor administrations and therefore give investors confidence that government policies will last as long as it takes to develop a mine and begin to produce.
The summit already points in this direction: framing critical minerals as national security and energy priorities will make it difficult for future administrations to take another course.
A deliberately political, hierarchical ‘club’
The desire for a preferential trade zone of friendly nations under the FORGE banner is important to expand participation. In reality, the best deals and access to US financial measures will be reserved for those with whom the US has the closest security relationships and highest political trust.
Australia, Japan, and South Korea will continue to receive larger investments more targeted to minerals processing, than Angola, or DRC for example – even if the latter countries are receiving notable investment.
Critical minerals are being slotted directly into the architecture of US security alliances and defence industrial cooperation. Indeed, the summit directly referenced the securitized structuring of oil flows in the previous century as a replicable model.
For now, FORGE is the most substantial Trump team attempt to create a multilateral arrangement on a discrete issue. Despite the administration’s often abrasive rhetoric towards its allies and partners, this demonstrates the awareness of the need for collaboration, albeit determined by geopolitical alliance rather than economic efficiency.
Notably, it was the Biden administration’s Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) that laid the bedrock for what is now FORGE. While the MSP has been on care and maintenance since Trump took over and had little to show in terms of operational successes, it was an important initial framework for cooperation.
FORGE was announced as the successor to MSP. That is at least one positive indication to industry and investors that minerals partnerships underpinned by security alliances represent enduring US government policy and will likely remain (with possible further name changes) for the long term and across administrations.
Redirecting existing supply or creating new supply
Project Vault and the proposed price floors aim to redirect and stabilize current flows of rare earths, battery metals and other listed critical minerals, giving US and allied manufacturers priority access at predictable prices.
This has been complemented by US government investment directly into operations, including the commissioning of two new smelters in the US for the first time in a generation.
Future US deals need to show that there is real desire to increase production, especially of copper, in addition to recycling strategies. Government backed demand and operational support needs to not only redirect existing supply, it also needs to help overcome the significant supply shortages expected in future.
De-risking the DRC
The immense resource base of the DRC, and the prevalence of Chinese mining in the country, have made it a focal point of the US–China rivalry on the ground.
With competing eastern and western railways pushing into central Africa, a US approach based on security deals for preferential minerals access is a very Trumpian ‘spheres of influence’ political play.
But Chinese dominance was largely a result of Western withdrawal over reputation risks and US legal requirements. Reversing this trend and de-risking investments requires a long-term political commitment – to provide diplomatic cover to international operators, and to support the development ambitions of DRC citizens.