(Christopher Vandome – Chatham House) 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.
Trump’s critical minerals commitment problem | Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank
