Launched with extraordinary fanfare at February's Critical Minerals Ministerial, FORGE replaced the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership as Washington's flagship multilateral vehicle for supply chain diversification. Six months on, with South Korea's founding chairmanship expired and China's rare earth export control suspension set to lapse in November, the forum has produced guiding principles, two working groups, and a dense web of bilateral agreements. Whether that amounts to an architecture or a waiting room is the question now.
Introduction
The room at the State Department on February 4, 2026, was designed to project inevitability. Secretary Marco Rubio stood alongside Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, a lineup that signaled, in the language of Washington stagecraft, that this was not a departmental initiative but a whole-of-government commitment. Forty-three foreign ministers and senior representatives from 54 countries and the European Commission had made the journey. The occasion was the Inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, and the announcement, delivered midway through a packed agenda of bilateral signings and industry dialogues, was the creation of the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement: FORGE.
The name was chosen carefully. Its predecessor, the Minerals Security Partnership, had been launched with similar ambitions in 2022, assembling 14 countries and the EU under a framework that, as one administration official put it, functioned more like a funding coordination vehicle than a genuine trade regime. FORGE was presented as something sharper: a plurilateral coalition with price floors, adjustable tariffs, and a preferential trade architecture that would make Chinese mineral dumping structurally unprofitable. Vance described it at the ministerial as an opportunity to create a 'preferential trading zone for critical minerals,' setting reference prices that would 'reflect real-world fair market value' at each stage of production.
Six months later, with South Korea's founding chairmanship having quietly expired in June and no successor publicly announced, the question has shifted from what FORGE intends to do to what it has actually done. The timing of that assessment is not academic. China's suspension of its sweeping October 2025 rare earth export controls expires on November 10, with a second deadline for gallium, germanium, and antimony falling on November 27. As I reported in 'Sixty-Two Days: The Rare Earth Truce That Never Really Was,' the countdown is exposing just how little has changed in the underlying geography of supply-chain dependency. The question now is whether FORGE has done anything in six months to change that geography, or whether it remains, as one analyst warned in February, a coalition that 'will falter unless it becomes an enforceable trade regime.'
The Architecture Assembled: Bilateral Agreements, Guiding Principles, and the July Working Groups
To understand what FORGE has delivered, it helps to separate the layers. The first layer, the most visible, is the bilateral agreement network assembled at and around the February ministerial. The United States signed eleven new bilateral critical minerals frameworks or memoranda of understanding in a single day, with Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. Rubio and Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar signed a separate critical minerals pact. The U.S. and EU signed a cooperation MOU and action plan. Combined with agreements concluded in the weeks surrounding the event, the total reached more than twenty bilateral frameworks in roughly five months. The week also produced coordinated Action Plans with the EU and Japan, both oriented toward a future plurilateral agreement on trade in critical minerals, though neither document explicitly referenced FORGE by name.
The second layer is the formal architecture that FORGE itself has built since February. On July 10, the U.S. State Department published the FORGE Guiding Principles, a document in which member partners recommit to collaborating at the policy and project levels to advance diversified, resilient, and secure critical minerals supply chains. The language is careful and notably qualified: the principles 'are not legally binding.' Two working groups were formally established in July: a Projects Investment Working Group, tasked with identifying, evaluating, and coordinating support for strategic investment opportunities and maintaining a shared registry of high-priority projects; and a Policy Coordination Working Group, tasked with advancing shared policy objectives, coordinating messaging, and promoting high standards across supply chains.
Those working groups represent the most concrete structural development FORGE has produced since its launch. They provide, in theory, the institutional bones through which price mechanisms can be debated, investment opportunities matched to capital, and the seventeen original MSP member states connected to the thirty-eight newer FORGE partners. In practice, the working groups are weeks old and have produced no publicly disclosed project list. The Resources for the Future issue brief published on August 25 put the situation plainly: 'While allies have broadcast their intention to coordinate through FORGE, details regarding how it will operate are limited.'
The third layer is the legal and financial scaffolding that runs alongside FORGE rather than inside it. On January 14, President Trump issued a Section 232 proclamation directing the Secretary of Commerce and the Trade Representative to negotiate agreements on imported critical minerals and deliver a report within 180 days, a deadline that fell on July 13. The administration proposed minimum import prices as a deterrent to underpriced imports from state-subsidized competitors. On February 26, USTR opened a public docket for a proposed Plurilateral Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals, seeking stakeholder input on border-adjusted price floors, price gap subsidies, joint offtake agreements, and strategic stockpiling. The comments are under review. No agreement has been concluded.
Project Vault and the Proof-of-Concept Problem
The most capitalized component of the February ministerial week was not FORGE itself but Project Vault, the civilian strategic stockpile announced by executive order on February 2, two days before the ministerial opened. At a White House ceremony attended by General Motors CEO Mary Barra, among others, President Trump framed Vault in terms that would have been familiar to any student of the petroleum reserve: 'We're launching what will be known as Project Vault to ensure that American business and workers are never harmed by any shortage.' The EXIM Board approved a direct loan of up to ten billion dollars, more than double the largest financing in EXIM's history, paired with roughly two billion dollars in private capital from Hartree Partners, Traxys, and Mercuria Energy Group. Participating original equipment manufacturers, including Boeing, GE Vernova, Clarios, General Motors, and Western Digital, committed to long-term participation in exchange for guaranteed access during supply disruptions.
Project Vault is best understood as the demand-side complement to FORGE's supply-side ambitions. GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik captured the industrial logic: 'As we rise to the challenge of meeting America's and the world's rapidly growing needs for key power and grid equipment, the need to grow supply chains and access to critical minerals has never been more important.' The stockpile provides a buffer against short-term supply shocks; FORGE is supposed to provide the long-term trade architecture that ensures non-Chinese supply chains remain commercially viable. But the administration has stepped back, at least for now, from domestic price-floor mechanisms that would have supported individual producers directly, citing legal and fiscal complexity and a preference for market-based solutions. If the border-adjusted minimum import price tools available under Section 232 become the primary price stabilization instrument, their effectiveness will depend heavily on the breadth of the coalition enforcing them.
The JARE-Lynas model offers the most concrete early example of what the FORGE architecture could eventually look like in practice. In March 2026, Japan's JARE and Australia's Lynas revised their supply agreement to include a firm offtake commitment for 5,000 metric tons of neodymium-praseodymium, backed by a 110-dollar-per-kilogram price floor. That combination of state-backed finance, offtake security, and price support is precisely the logic that FORGE's Projects Investment Working Group is designed to replicate at scale. It is one bilateral deal. The working group has not yet published a registry of comparable projects. The administration's total mobilized support, covering letters of interest, investments, loans, and other instruments across U.S. government agencies, is cited at more than thirty billion dollars over six months, a substantial figure that includes EXIM's fourteen-point-eight billion dollars in letters of interest for critical minerals projects. But letters of interest are not closed transactions, and the gap between expressions of intent and deployed capital is precisely where the MSP spent four years without closing it.
South Korea's Chairmanship, the Leadership Vacuum, and the Enforcement Problem
South Korea held the FORGE chair through June 2026, a founding decision that carried both symbolic and substantive weight. Seoul brought to the role a genuine industrial stake in the outcome: Korean battery manufacturers and defense contractors are among the most exposed in the world to Chinese rare earth and critical mineral supply disruptions. The chairmanship also provided geographic balance, signaling that FORGE was not purely an Anglo-American project dressed in multilateral clothing. When South Korea's term expired, however, no successor was publicly announced. Four months after the transition date, the identity of the current FORGE chair, if one exists, is not a matter of public record. For a forum explicitly designed to function on a consensus basis through regular collaborative meetings, that silence is at minimum an optics problem and potentially a governance one.
The enforcement question cuts deeper. The Atlantic Council's Reed Blakemore and Alexis Harmon, writing shortly after the February launch, noted that the MSP's struggles with similar challenges 'counsel caution,' while crediting the current administration's willingness to back frameworks with capital and concrete mechanisms as potentially giving FORGE 'more bite than its predecessor.' The Foundation for Defense of Democracies was more direct in its warning: FORGE 'will falter unless it becomes an enforceable trade regime.' The distinction matters because multilateral coordination on price floors requires that participating nations adhere to the agreed framework even when defection offers short-term advantage. A country that quietly accepts below-floor-price mineral imports from China, whether to placate domestic industry or manage a bilateral relationship, undermines the entire price stabilization logic without formally withdrawing from the forum.
The USTR's February public docket acknowledged this explicitly, stating that the proposed plurilateral agreement would require 'a commitment by all parties to implement minimum prices or other price mechanisms, with appropriate border measures.' But FORGE's Guiding Principles, published in July, are explicitly non-binding. The gap between the aspirational plurilateral agreement that USTR is consulting on and the non-binding coordination document that FORGE has actually produced is where the enforcement question lives. CSIS's Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program, captured the tension in June: 'While tariffs used for price support may improve the relative competitiveness of U.S. and allied producers vis-a-vis Chinese competitors, they do not resolve the underlying balance sheet challenges facing many projects.' Operating costs, labor, energy, transportation, and chemical reagents vary enormously across jurisdictions, and a price floor calibrated for a high-cost allied producer may be irrelevant to a project in a lower-cost partner country trying to justify expansion investment.
There is also the question of producing-country equity. The Heinrich Boll Foundation, reviewing FORGE-adjacent bilateral arrangements through a development lens in May, concluded that 'these arrangements have thus far indicated stronger gains for the U.S.' strategic and supply security objectives than for industrial benefits for producing countries.' The UKTPO and TESS Forum analysis from March was similarly pointed, warning that price support 'does little to diversify supply, leaves industrialization objectives unaddressed, and provides limited guarantees on sustainability standards.' For countries like Guinea or Paraguay, which signed bilateral frameworks in February and sit within FORGE's broad membership, the question of whether FORGE delivers processing capacity and industrial development, or simply secures feedstock access for downstream manufacturing in wealthier member states, has no clear answer yet.
The November Clock and What FORGE Must Prove
The geopolitical context in which FORGE must now demonstrate its value is, if anything, more acute than it was in February. As I reported in 'Forty-Seven Days: Why the Xi-Trump Washington Summit Is the Last Clear Exit Ramp Before the Rare Earth Cliff,' the November 10 expiry of China's rare earth export control suspension and the November 27 lapse of the gallium, germanium, and antimony bans represent the most consequential near-term test of Western supply chain resilience. China controls approximately ninety percent of global rare earth refining and eighty percent of tungsten refining. Its export of key heavy rare earths remained fifty percent below pre-control levels even during the suspension period, confirming that the truce was never a return to the status quo. China's rare earth exports to Japan fell fifty-one percent year-on-year in the first half of 2026, collapsing eighty-one percent in June alone, with yttrium shipments reaching zero.
Those figures illuminate the stakes for FORGE's member states. Japan, one of the forum's most consequential participants and a signatory to the trilateral action plan with the U.S. and EU, has experienced the most severe supply disruptions of any major allied economy. The DoD's August 31 announcement of a 174-million-dollar equity investment in a gallium production facility at Alcoa is precisely the kind of domestic capacity investment that FORGE's architecture is meant to complement and accelerate internationally. But gallium capacity at one plant, however strategically significant, does not constitute a resilient supply chain across fifty-five nations. Analysts at CES Intelligence have observed that 'the truce is a countdown, not a settlement,' and that what the West does with the time it buys matters as much as the extension itself.
FORGE's two-month-old working groups will face their first genuine test not in a conference room but in the market conditions that follow November. If Beijing allows the suspension to lapse without renewal, the price signals and offtake security that the Projects Investment Working Group is meant to coordinate will suddenly become urgently operational rather than aspirational. If Beijing selectively renews, targeting certain materials or certain countries, the Policy Coordination Working Group will need to respond with coherent, coordinated messaging rather than fragmented bilateral diplomacy. Neither working group has had time to develop the institutional reflexes those scenarios demand. The European Parliament's questions to the European Commission, asking what FORGE membership or non-membership would mean for the EU's ability to secure critical raw materials for clean energy, industry, and defense, remain formally unanswered. The Commission's assessment of FORGE's price mechanisms has not been published. The 180-day Section 232 report from Commerce and USTR, due July 13, has not been made public in its conclusions. Considerable machinery is in motion; much of it is not yet visible.
Conclusion: The Architecture and the Clock
On the morning of February 4, before the formal ministerial sessions began, industry executives and government officials gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies for a government-industry dialogue that was, by several accounts, more candid than the set-piece announcements that followed. The conversations in that room circled a question that the afternoon's speeches did not quite answer: whether a forum built on consensus and non-binding principles could produce the kind of enforceable coordination that markets and supply chains actually require. The Atlantic Council analysts who covered the event put it diplomatically, noting that the administration's willingness to back frameworks with capital gives FORGE more potential bite than its predecessor, while counseling caution given the MSP's similar struggles.
Six months on, the honest accounting looks something like this. FORGE has a membership roster of fifty-five nations and the EU, a density of bilateral agreements unmatched in the history of Western critical minerals diplomacy, a working stockpile vehicle in Project Vault, a live USTR consultation on a plurilateral agreement, and two working groups that began meeting in July. It does not yet have an enforceable price regime, a closed flagship project investment, a publicly identified chairmanship successor to South Korea, or a legal agreement among its members. The Guiding Principles are explicitly non-binding. The plurilateral agreement remains a public docket. The bilateral action plans with the EU and Japan, the most economically substantial of the forum's diplomatic outputs, do not mention FORGE by name.
The question that Rare Earth Exchanges posed after the Trump-Xi Busan summit in October 2025 has not lost its edge: 'What additional non-Chinese capacity did the West secure with the time it bought?' For FORGE specifically, the equivalent formulation is sharper still. The ministerial week of February 4, 2026, bought something real: political momentum, a broad membership, a financial architecture in Project Vault, and a set of policy instruments in the Section 232 toolkit. Whether that purchase converts into operational supply chain resilience by the time the November clocks run out is the test that no guiding principle, however well-worded, can substitute for.
In a corridor outside the State Department's Loy Henderson Conference Room on February 4, as delegations gathered for the formal group photograph, a senior official from one of the newly signed bilateral partners offered a summary that has aged better than most of the day's prepared remarks. 'Signing is the easy part,' he said. 'Now we see who shows up.' The working groups are meeting. The projects registry is empty. The November deadline is forty-nine days away.