Secretary of State Rubio's launch of FORGE, the successor to the Minerals Security Partnership, alongside a $10 billion strategic reserve called Project Vault and a push for binding plurilateral trade agreements, marks the most ambitious single-day realignment of allied minerals diplomacy in history. With the U.S.-China critical minerals truce set to expire in November 2026, Washington is racing to construct an architecture resilient enough to survive whatever comes next. The question is whether it can move fast enough.
Introduction
On the morning of February 4, 2026, the Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department filled with the representatives of 54 nations and the European Commission, many of them cabinet-level ministers who had flown overnight to attend what the administration was quietly billing as the largest diplomatic gathering on critical minerals ever convened. Vice President JD Vance opened the proceedings. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer. Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the room last, and when he did, the tone was less diplomatic pleasantry than strategic confession.
"We fell in love with the design of these things," Rubio told the assembled ministers, gesturing broadly at the devices and technologies that define modern life. "But forgot that to design something, you have to be able to build it, and to build it, you have to have the fundamental materials to make it. Today, it's heavily concentrated in the hands of one country."
The admission was striking not because it was new, but because of what accompanied it. In a single day, Washington signed eleven new bilateral critical minerals frameworks, launched a $10 billion strategic reserve, unveiled a successor institution to the Minerals Security Partnership, and put on record its intention to negotiate a binding plurilateral trade agreement with enforceable price floors. The cumulative weight of those actions was not accidental. It was the product of a deadline that everyone in that room understood: a U.S.-China minerals truce, brokered in Busan in October 2025 and set to expire by late November 2026, that has been the central load-bearing constraint on American minerals policy for the past year.
FORGE: From Coordination Forum to Strategic Ecosystem
The Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, announced by Secretary Rubio as the day's headline institution, was formally positioned as the successor to the Minerals Security Partnership, the fourteen-nation framework established under the Biden administration in 2022. The MSP had brought together Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the European Union, and nine other partners to coordinate investment in critical mineral projects. It was useful, in the way that most coordination forums are useful: it built relationships, shared information, and occasionally catalyzed capital toward projects that private markets were reluctant to fund. What it did not do was move fast, set prices, or possess any enforcement mechanism that a hostile state actor would have reason to respect.
FORGE is explicitly designed to be something different, though exactly how different remains, as of this writing, genuinely unclear. The Republic of Korea, which had been active in MSP governance, assumed the chairmanship of FORGE through June. Rubio's language at the Ministerial was notably more aggressive than anything the MSP ever produced. FORGE, he said, would "lead with bold and decisive action" on ongoing challenges in the global critical minerals marketplace, with partners collaborating "at the policy and project levels" to advance supply chain resilience.
Vance went further. He announced the administration's intention to pursue what he described as a "preferential trading zone for critical minerals," protected from external disruptions through enforceable price floors. The concept, if realized, would function less like a traditional multilateral forum and more like a commodity cartel operating in reverse: a buyer-side bloc using reference prices and adjustable tariffs to establish floors that prevent Chinese producers from undercutting the market during periods of deliberate oversupply. The Atlantic Council, in its assessment of FORGE, put it plainly: "By attempting to align trade policy, price signals, and market access across partner economies, FORGE aims to elevate cooperation itself as a strategic asset that could reshape minerals markets in a way no country, not even the United States, could achieve on its own."
The structural details, however, have been slow to follow the ambition. A new declaration of principles, working groups, and governance documents had not been made public by the time of the Ministerial or in the weeks that followed. Analysts at CSIS noted that while the Trump administration has complemented bilateral engagements with a more plurilateral strategy, the question of whether FORGE will take on a comparable role to the MSP in catalyzing pooled investment or dealmaking, which was the primary focus of the MSP's associated public-private network MINVEST, remains genuinely unanswered. The institution has been declared. Its architecture is still being built.
Project Vault: Insurance, Collateral, and the $10 Billion Bet
Two days before the Ministerial, on February 2, President Trump gathered Cabinet secretaries and Export-Import Bank Chairman John Jovanovic in the Oval Office to announce Project Vault, a supply chain security initiative establishing what the administration called the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. The EXIM Board had approved a Direct Loan of up to $10 billion for the initiative, more than double the largest financing commitment in the bank's 92-year history, with approximately $1.67 billion in seed capital from participating manufacturers bringing the total to roughly $11.67 billion in initial capitalization.
The reserve covers all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey's 2025 Critical Minerals List, including cobalt, gallium, graphite, lithium, and titanium, with initial emphasis on rare earth elements, aluminum, antimony, copper, germanium, silver, and zirconium. The architecture is unusual. Unlike the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is a government-owned stockpile activated by executive decision, Project Vault is an independently governed public-private partnership in which manufacturers drive the stockpiling decisions. Companies identify which materials they need, at what grades and volumes, commit financially to ensure those materials are available during disruptions, and pay a commitment fee structured explicitly as an insurance premium. Private commodity trading firms, including Hartree Partners, Mercuria, and Traxys, source the materials and take a cut of the fees.
The insurance analogy is more than rhetorical. Participants pay a commitment fee, storage costs, and interest on the financing in exchange for guaranteed access to specified materials when pre-defined market disruptions occur. A sixty-day emergency buffer is built into the design, intended to provide enough time to adjust production schedules, activate alternative sources, or, as the administration obliquely acknowledges, await diplomatic resolution. The precedent that animates the whole structure is uncomfortable but concrete: in 2025, Ford was forced to halt production of its Explorer model due to a rare earths shortage, demonstrating that supply disruptions now impose material risks not only on defense contractors but on civilian manufacturers.
Perhaps the most structurally interesting feature of Project Vault is its integration into project finance. EXIM is actively engaging companies seeking to use the reserve as collateral or a demand anchor to bring mining and processing projects to financial close, embedding the stockpile into upstream capital formation as an offtake mechanism. A junior mine or a rare earth processing facility that might struggle to attract private debt could, in theory, point to a committed Project Vault offtake as evidence of demand certainty. Whether that mechanism will prove sufficient to unlock the capital stack for genuinely new production is the central question analysts have been circling. PIIE has warned that voluntary participation may hollow out the risk pool, as large firms self-insure and small firms remain unaware of their exposure. ORF has raised the storage complexity problem: stockpiling sixty highly differentiated minerals and their processed derivatives is fundamentally unlike storing oil, because many degrade over time and require further processing to be usable in a crisis. Jovanovic, for his part, is unambiguous: "Project Vault is exactly the kind of transaction EXIM was built to deliver, one that revitalizes America's industrial base, strengthens our supply chains, and ensures U.S. manufacturers have the critical inputs they need to compete on a global stage, all while delivering an expected positive return for American taxpayers."
The Plurilateral Track: USTR, NAM, and the Architecture of Price Floors
While FORGE and Project Vault dominated the headlines coming out of the Ministerial, a quieter and in some respects more consequential institutional development was unfolding in parallel. On February 26, 2026, USTR published a Federal Register notice opening a public docket to seek stakeholder input for a proposed "Plurilateral Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals." The notice was narrow in its procedural framing but sweeping in its ambitions. USTR was evaluating, it said, policy actions to enhance domestic production of critical minerals and improve the overall resilience of U.S. supply chains, including a potential plurilateral agreement with like-minded partners that would create investment incentives for expanding supply chains and, critically, implement binding minimum prices with appropriate border measures.
The legal foundation is a January 20, 2026 Section 232 proclamation addressing national security risks associated with imports of processed critical minerals, in which President Trump instructed USTR to enter negotiations with U.S. trade partners to adjust imports of certain mineral products. As I noted in my analysis of the administration's new legal architecture for mineral control last month, the forced pivot away from IEEPA tariff authority following the Supreme Court's February 2026 ruling has pushed the White House toward more durable statutory hooks. Section 232 is one of them, and the proposed plurilateral agreement would sit within that framework.
Ambassador Greer was direct about the mechanism. "We welcome comments from interested parties to help develop strategic trade policy and border mechanisms, such as price floors and tariffs, to build a resilient and non-distorted marketplace among aligned trading partners," he said. The USTR notice anticipates that any agreement will include a commitment by all parties to implement minimum prices or other price mechanisms with appropriate border measures, designed to ensure that Chinese producers cannot use state-subsidized oversupply to undercut market-based investment in allied-country production.
The National Association of Manufacturers moved quickly to engage. On March 20, 2026, the NAM shared with USTR a formal framework to rebalance global critical mineral supply chains with plurilateral partners, a submission that NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons framed as existential: "The stakes are clear: manufacturers depend on secure, reliable, and sustainable supply chains to make things in America. Critical minerals and rare earth elements are essential for automotive parts and vehicles, electrical grid components, robotics and industrial automation, defense technology, electronics and more." The NAM's recommendations were structured on two tracks: domestic permitting reform and permanent strategic energy incentives on one side; binding plurilateral trade negotiations on the other. USTR has acknowledged that NAM's comments directly informed its approach to the negotiations.
Along a separate diplomatic track, Ambassador Greer announced on February 4 the U.S.-Mexico Action Plan on Critical Minerals, one of only three such action plans to emerge from the Ministerial alongside those with Japan and the European Commission. The plan committed both governments to identify priority mineral projects for joint development, with copper, silver, lithium, graphite, and zinc named as initial priorities; to explore border-adjusted price floors on critical mineral imports; to share geological data between the U.S. Geological Survey and its Mexican counterpart; and to consult on how price floor mechanisms could be folded into a broader binding plurilateral agreement. Greer explicitly linked the plan to the USMCA Joint Review process, framing it as an opportunity to strengthen bilateral cooperation ahead of a treaty renegotiation that will reshape the economic relationship between the two countries in any case. Mexico's Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade, Luis Rosendo Gutierrez, echoed that framing, emphasizing that Mexico's minerals agenda integrates directly into USMCA frameworks to strengthen regional supply chain resilience.
A trilateral U.S.-EU-Japan joint statement added a third layer. The three parties announced their intention to develop action plans and explore a plurilateral trade initiative with like-minded partners on trade in critical minerals, specifically including border-adjusted price floors. "The United States and the European Union share a commitment to addressing the non-market policies and practices that have distorted critical minerals supply chains," Greer said. The USTR track, the bilateral action plans, and the trilateral statement are not legally redundant. They represent distinct but reinforcing instruments: the bilateral frameworks generate political commitment, the trilateral statement establishes a coalition of the willing among the largest consuming economies, and the USTR plurilateral process is designed to convert those political commitments into enforceable legal obligations.
The November Clock: Truce Arithmetic and the Cost of Delay
None of this activity is happening in a vacuum. Every institution launched at the February Ministerial, every bilateral framework signed, and every USTR docket opened carries the shadow of a single date: late November 2026, when the critical minerals provisions of the U.S.-China Busan truce begin to expire.
The truce was brokered during Trump-Xi talks in Busan, South Korea on October 30, 2025. As part of the agreement, Beijing suspended export controls on certain rare earth elements, lithium battery materials, and processing technologies for roughly one year. Washington reciprocated by lowering tariffs on Chinese imports by ten percentage points and suspending heightened reciprocal tariffs until November 10, 2026. The loosening of Chinese restrictions was scheduled to run until November 27. Those dates are not identical, and the gap between them is one of several structural tensions that analysts have flagged as potential flashpoints.
Building on my reporting in August on China's direct targeting of MP Materials and USA Rare Earth on its export control blacklist, the pattern that has been emerging throughout 2026 is one of Beijing treating the truce not as a reset but as a pause. The blacklisting of those two companies by name, timed within the window of the truce, demonstrated a willingness to push at the edges of the agreement without formally breaching it. Treasury Secretary Bessent, for his part, has signaled that Washington is aware of the calibration. "China has been satisfactory, but not excellent in terms of their fulfillment on their side on critical minerals," he said in May, noting that further talks were scheduled. He described the administration as "not in a rush" to extend the truce, adding that "things are stable."
The stability Bessent described is real but fragile. The United States remains 100 percent import-dependent for twelve critical minerals and more than 50 percent import-dependent for 28 additional minerals. China leads in 21 non-fuel mineral commodities for which the U.S. is more than half reliant on imports. China controls approximately 90 percent of global rare earth refining and nearly all processing of the heavy rare earths critical to advanced technology manufacturing. Those numbers have not moved materially since the truce was signed. What has moved is the institutional architecture surrounding them. Project Vault provides a sixty-day buffer. FORGE provides a coalition framework for collective pricing response. The USTR plurilateral process provides a legal mechanism for binding allied coordination. Together, they represent the most serious attempt the United States has made to shift from dependency management to dependency reduction.
The urgency is not lost on the administration's critics, who note that the November deadline creates a perverse incentive: the more publicly Washington presses its allies toward price floors and preferential trading zones, the more clearly it signals to Beijing that it expects the truce to collapse. Interior Secretary Burgum captured the underlying logic with uncharacteristic plainness. "We just can't be in a position where our entire economy is in a position to be held hostage by someone that could change the world economy through a form of export controls," he said. That is precisely the position the United States currently occupies, and the entire February architecture is an attempt to claw out of it before November forces the question.
What the Architecture Reveals, and What It Still Lacks
Step back from the individual instruments and a coherent strategic logic emerges. The administration is running three parallel tracks simultaneously: a diplomatic track through FORGE and bilateral frameworks designed to build political coalitions among producing and consuming nations; a financial track through Project Vault and EXIM's broader critical minerals portfolio, designed to de-risk private investment and provide short-term supply shock absorption; and a trade policy track through USTR's plurilateral agreement process, designed to convert political alignment into legally enforceable market architecture.
The ambition is genuine and the speed of execution has been remarkable. In roughly five months between October 2025 and the February Ministerial, the administration concluded frameworks with more than twenty countries, launched a reserve mechanism with no domestic precedent at this scale, and put on the record a legal theory for binding allied price coordination. CSIS has assessed that the Trump administration is "recognizing that meaningful market influence requires collective scale among major consuming and producing countries," a recognition that marks a real departure from the unilateralism that characterized the administration's first-term approach to trade.
The gaps are real, however, and they matter at the pace events are moving. FORGE's governance documents have not been published. Its relationship to MINVEST, the public-private investment network that was the MSP's primary delivery mechanism, has not been defined. Project Vault has been approved and announced but has not yet disclosed which manufacturers have signed commitment agreements or at what volumes, making it difficult to assess whether the risk pool is sufficient to sustain the reserve through a major disruption. The USTR plurilateral process has received public comments but has not yet produced a negotiating text or even a formal list of intended parties. The Mexico action plan is not legally binding and had produced no concrete public implementation steps in the weeks following its announcement.
None of this means the architecture will fail. It means the architecture is incomplete at precisely the moment when the pressure on it is about to intensify. The November truce expiry does not simply create a risk of disruption. It creates a moment at which China will assess whether the allied minerals bloc that Washington has been assembling represents a credible constraint on Beijing's leverage. The eleven bilateral frameworks signed on February 4 were real. The $10 billion EXIM commitment was real. The FORGE launch was real. Whether the countries in that Benjamin Franklin Room, from the Cook Islands to the United Arab Emirates to Peru, will hold together when Beijing applies pressure through pricing, access restrictions, or the kind of company-specific blacklisting I reported in August is the question that no press release can answer.
Rubio ended the Ministerial not with a diplomatic peroration but with something closer to an industrial reckoning. Critical minerals, he told the delegates, are vital to "the devices that we use every single day, they power our infrastructure, our industry, and our national defense." It was a statement of the obvious dressed as an epiphany. The real message, delivered through the sum of everything announced that day, was less comfortable: Washington has spent decades forgetting what it takes to make things, and it now has, at most, several months to build an architecture capable of surviving the moment it is tested.