On February 4, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced FORGE, the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, as the successor to the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership, at a ministerial attended by 54 countries and the European Commission. The new body promised sharper teeth than its predecessor: price floors enforced by adjustable tariffs, a preferential trade zone for critical minerals, and the most concentrated burst of bilateral diplomacy in American history. But as South Korea's founding chairmanship expires in June 2026, the alliance faces a governance vacuum, a credibility problem, and questions that no MOU can resolve.
Introduction
The Loy Henderson Conference Room on the seventh floor of the State Department is not a place designed for intimacy. Its long oval table, its row of flags, and its view toward the Lincoln Memorial all speak to the language of formal ceremony. On the morning of February 4, 2026, the room held something rarer: a genuine sense of urgency. Delegations from 54 countries and the European Commission had assembled, many of them represented at the ministerial level, and the air carried the particular tension of people who suspected they were watching something consequential take shape in real time.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened the proceedings with a warning he was careful not to over-specify. He spoke of the risks that flow from concentrating critical mineral supply in a single country: the geopolitical leverage it confers, the vulnerability it creates during pandemics, the way it can hollow out entire industrial sectors before anyone quite notices what has happened. He did not name China. He did not need to. Everyone in the room understood that the concentration he was describing controlled somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of global rare earth processing, according to Government Accountability Office estimates, and that the assembled nations had gathered precisely because that fact had become intolerable.
By the time Vice President JD Vance took the podium to announce the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, known by the acronym FORGE, the room had absorbed the morning's other revelations: eleven new bilateral memoranda of understanding signed before noon, trilateral action plans with the European Union and Japan, and the framework of what the administration was calling the most ambitious coordinated minerals architecture the Western world had ever attempted. "To those of you still on the fence," Vance told the assembled ministers, "I say: let's move together." The applause was warm. The hard questions, as they usually do, came later.
The Inheritance: From MSP to FORGE
To understand what FORGE is, it helps to understand what it replaced, and why that replacement was judged necessary. The Minerals Security Partnership, launched in June 2022 on the margins of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto, was in many respects a genuine achievement. Fourteen countries and the European Union signed on. Working groups reviewed more than 200 projects and supported over 30 of them in the partnership's first two years. When China imposed export restrictions on germanium in 2023, the MSP helped broker a deal with Japan that increased global germanium supply by nearly 25 percent. China's state media, characteristically, called the MSP a "Metals NATO," which its architects privately treated as a compliment.
But the MSP had a structural limitation that its admirers rarely disputed: it was built primarily to align capital flows and connect projects, not to reshape the market conditions that made those projects viable or unviable in the first place. Chinese producers, operating with state support and unconstrained by the cost structures facing Western miners, could undercut any project the MSP endorsed simply by flooding the relevant commodity market with below-cost supply. Germanium, cobalt, lithium, nickel: the pattern repeated. The MSP could identify good projects. It could not protect them from a determined adversary with longer time horizons and shallower commercial constraints.
FORGE was designed to address exactly that gap. Where the MSP focused on connecting projects to capital, FORGE aims to reshape the price environment in which those projects must survive. Vice President Vance described the mechanism with unusual specificity for a multilateral forum: reference prices for critical minerals at each stage of production, enforced through adjustable tariffs, calibrated to "reflect real-world fair market value." The goal, as he framed it, was to prevent companies from flooding markets with cheap minerals, undercutting Western producers before raising prices once the competition had been eliminated. The word "dumping" appeared in multiple official documents. The word "China" did not, but the logic was unmistakable.
All seventeen members of the MSP reportedly signed onto FORGE's broader mandate, a clean institutional transfer that the administration was careful to present as continuity rather than rupture. South Korea, which had chaired the MSP, carried its chairmanship directly into the new body, providing at least the appearance of seamless succession. But beneath that continuity, the ambition had expanded dramatically, and with it the difficulty of the task.
The Diplomacy Blitz and Its Architecture
What made February 4, 2026 extraordinary was not any single announcement but the sheer density of diplomatic activity compressed into a single morning. Eleven bilateral frameworks or memoranda of understanding were signed before lunch: with Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. These agreements added to ten similar frameworks concluded since October 2025, including arrangements with Australia, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Saudi Arabia. The administration announced that negotiations on similar agreements with seventeen additional countries had been completed but not yet made public, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum disclosed that twenty more countries had expressed interest in signing.
The bilateral MOUs were, in a sense, the scaffolding. The structural ambition lay in three multilateral action plans announced alongside them. The U.S.-Mexico Action Plan on Critical Minerals committed both governments to developing coordinated trade policies and mechanisms to mitigate supply chain vulnerabilities, with a sixty-day implementation timeline that pointed toward early April 2026 as the moment when price floor mechanics might become concrete. More striking still was the joint press statement from the United States, the European Commission, and Japan, which sketched the outlines of a potential plurilateral trade initiative covering "border-adjusted price floors, standards-based markets, price gap subsidies, or offtake agreements." Within thirty days, the United States and European Union committed to concluding a separate memorandum of understanding on supply chain security.
The day before the ministerial, Deputy Secretary Landau witnessed the signing of an MOU between Glencore and the U.S.-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium regarding potential asset acquisitions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, operationalizing the U.S.-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement in ways that connected the bilateral diplomacy to actual ore deposits. Following the ministerial itself, Landau and Under Secretary Helberg convened a task force of mining industry leaders to advance priority projects. The administration simultaneously placed the entire initiative within a broader financial context: more than thirty billion dollars in letters of interest, investments, loans, and other support committed over the preceding six months in partnership with the private sector, anchored by Project Vault, the twelve-billion-dollar domestic stockpile backed by the largest loan in Export-Import Bank history.
As I examined in my June 2026 analysis of Project Vault's structural paradox, the stockpile initiative and the FORGE diplomatic architecture are designed to reinforce each other: the reserve creates domestic demand signals while FORGE attempts to align international supply conditions. Whether the two mechanisms actually function as a coherent system, rather than as parallel initiatives that share a press conference, remains the organizing question of U.S. critical minerals strategy.
The Price Floor Problem and the Credibility Gap
The core mechanism FORGE is built around, coordinated price floors enforced through tariffs, is also the mechanism most likely to strain the alliance. The Peterson Institute for International Economics identified the fundamental tension with unusual candor in its February 2026 analysis: for the price floor strategy to work, participating countries must accept near-term costs in the form of higher input prices, on the grounds that reducing dependence on Chinese supply is worth the premium. That calculation requires trusting that the coordinating power will sustain its commitment across multiple election cycles, budget negotiations, and geopolitical pivots. And for the first time in recent memory, PIIE argued, U.S. policy continuity is itself a variable that allies must price into their risk models.
The structural arithmetic that makes allied cooperation necessary is stark. The United States represents approximately 3.6 percent of global cobalt consumption, 5.1 percent of nickel consumption, and 1.7 percent of rare earth element consumption, according to CSIS analysis. Unilateral American price floors would therefore have limited market impact. Only by coordinating with major consuming economies in Europe and Asia does the mechanism carry enough weight to alter Chinese export incentives. But coordination requires credibility, and credibility requires the allies to believe that the framework they are being asked to restructure their supply chains around will still exist in 2028 or 2030.
That belief has grown harder to sustain in the current environment. The same administration that launched FORGE imposed sweeping tariffs on the allies it was simultaneously asking to coordinate price policy with. The Section 232 proclamation that provided the legal architecture for FORGE's tariff enforcement mechanism referred to "trading partners" rather than "allies" or "like-minded countries," a distinction that PIIE flagged as telling. Canada, a founding MSP member and one of the world's leading cobalt, uranium, lithium, nickel, and graphite producers, had faced annexation rhetoric from the same administration now inviting it into a preferential minerals trading zone. The EU had been subjected to tariff threats that complicated its trade relationship with Washington even as officials were signing action plans pledging coordination. Japan had pursued independent bilateral supply agreements partly as a hedge against exactly this kind of American unpredictability. None of this made FORGE unworkable. But it meant that participation in the framework carried its own political risk calculus, one that Chatham House analysts described as evidence that Washington's allies were being asked, simultaneously, to trust the United States more and less than they had before.
The Atlantic Council's Reed Blakemore and Alexis Harmon offered a more optimistic reading, arguing that FORGE "reflects a belief that the hardest challenges in the minerals markets are better addressed with partners." The Minerals Security Partnership's struggles with similar coordination challenges counseled caution, they acknowledged, but the administration's willingness to back the framework with capital and concrete mechanisms, including the EXIM loan, the bilateral MOUs, and the trilateral action plans, gave FORGE more institutional substance than its predecessor. The central question was whether that substance would prove sufficient to bridge the gap between framework and function.
The Leadership Vacuum: Korea Steps Down, and No One Steps Up
South Korea's chairmanship of FORGE was, in important respects, the alliance's most important piece of scaffolding. Seoul had chaired the MSP through the transition, providing institutional continuity that allowed the new body to inherit relationships, working group structures, and diplomatic habits from the old one. Korea Economic Institute analysts writing in February 2026 described Seoul's position as strategically coherent: South Korea is simultaneously one of the world's most mineral-dependent manufacturing economies and one of the most technically sophisticated processors of rare earth and battery materials. Chairing FORGE allowed Seoul to shape the alliance's priorities toward the parts of the supply chain, refining and processing, where its own vulnerabilities are greatest.
But Korea's chairmanship was always time-limited. The Korea Herald and Korea Times both noted on February 5, 2026, the morning after the ministerial, that Seoul's role extended only through June 2026. The Fuse, in its February 11 analysis, flagged the succession question explicitly, noting that "who will assume the chair following the ROK" remained one of FORGE's core unresolved governance questions. As of the last week of June 2026, four months after the ministerial and with the chairmanship technically expiring, no public announcement has identified a successor. The alliance that was announced with maximum fanfare as the most consequential minerals coordination framework in Western history is entering its first major governance transition without a publicly named leader.
This is not a trivial gap. The chairmanship shapes FORGE's agenda, its diplomatic priorities, and its negotiating calendar. The price floor mechanisms that Vice President Vance described with such precision in February require sustained technical work across multiple working groups and bilateral channels. The trilateral action plan with the EU and Japan needs a convening authority. The twenty countries that expressed interest in signing bilateral frameworks need a point of contact for what comes next. In the crowded international landscape that already includes the G7 Production Alliance, the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, Pax Silica, and the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, with its 47 strategic projects and 14 country partnerships, a forum without a chair is a forum at risk of being crowded out by the forums that do have functioning governance structures.
As I reported in my June analysis of FORGE's governance inflection point, the expiration of Korea's term coincides with a broader moment of institutional fragility in the Western minerals architecture. The G7 Evian Declaration's commitment to reducing any single country's rare earth share below 60 percent by 2030 sets an ambitious target. But targets without functioning coordination mechanisms are aspirations, and aspirations without chairs are silences. The next appointment matters more than the architecture suggests.
The Architecture and Its Discontents
The February ministerial produced something genuinely new: a coordinated attempt to use market access, price signals, and diplomatic architecture simultaneously, rather than treating each as a separate policy tool. The administration's framing, that FORGE would cover two-thirds of the global economy and permanently transform the critical minerals landscape, reflected an understanding that the geology was never the binding constraint. China's dominance in critical mineral refining, estimated at 70 to 80 percent of global rare earth processing, did not emerge from exclusive access to ore bodies. It emerged from decades of patient investment in processing capacity, tolerance for environmental and financial losses that Western companies could not absorb, and the systematic application of below-cost pricing whenever competitive alternatives appeared. Countering that strategy requires matching its patience and scale, and no single country, not even the United States, has demonstrated the capacity to do that alone.
FORGE's plurilateral design is the correct response to that diagnosis. By distributing the burden of price support across multiple major consuming economies, the framework makes the strategy more sustainable and the price signal more credible. The EU-U.S.-Japan trilateral, in particular, represents a demand base large enough to meaningfully alter the economics of non-Chinese processing capacity. CSIS analysts noted that allied coordination is not merely preferable to unilateral action; it is the threshold condition for the strategy to work at all. A U.S.-only price floor on cobalt would barely register in a market where American consumption represents less than four cents of every dollar spent globally.
But the critics are not wrong about the risks. PIIE's central argument, that allied governments are now pricing both Chinese supply disruption risk and U.S. political unpredictability into the same calculation, identifies a genuine structural problem that no diplomatic text can resolve. The EU's independent partnerships, Japan's bilateral hedging, Canada's parallel mineral strategy: these are not expressions of disloyalty. They are rational responses to an environment in which the coordinating power has demonstrated that its tariff policy, its annexation rhetoric, and its bilateral pressure tactics do not always align with its multilateral commitments. For the mining and processing companies that must make thirty-year investment decisions on the basis of today's price signals, this dual uncertainty is not an abstraction. It shows up directly in the financing gap that PIIE describes as the "bankability" problem: the recognition that building critical mineral supply chains independent of China is as much a credibility challenge as a geological or technical one.
The Chatham House observation that FORGE has led some Washington analysts to wonder whether the Trump administration has "rediscovered multilateralism" is both accurate and slightly unfair. The administration's approach is not classical multilateralism; it is something more transactional and more conditional, a preferential zone built on bilateral leverage and aggregated into something that resembles, but does not quite replicate, a traditional alliance. Whether that distinction matters in practice depends almost entirely on whether the participating countries find the framework credible enough to restructure their supply chains around it.
Conclusion: The Chair Sits Empty
On the morning of February 4, as delegations filed into the Loy Henderson Conference Room, a Korean official passed in the corridor outside carrying a folder embossed with the FORGE logo. It was a small detail, the kind that journalism notices and history forgets, but it carried a certain weight. South Korea had built the institutional memory of the MSP, carried it through the transition to FORGE, and lent the new body the credibility that comes from continuity. Its chairmanship was, in a sense, the warranty on the architecture.
That warranty expires this month. The sixty-day U.S.-Mexico Action Plan timeline has passed without a public accounting of its price floor mechanics. The thirty-day commitment to conclude a U.S.-EU MOU was announced in February; as of late June, the details remain sparse, in the words used by multiple analysts who have been tracking the implementation. FORGE's operational details, including its declaration of principles, its working group structure, and its membership conditions, have not been made public. The most consequential question, who chairs the forum next, has no announced answer.
None of this means FORGE has failed. The architecture assembled on February 4 was genuinely unprecedented in its density and ambition: eleven bilateral frameworks, three multilateral action plans, a domestic reserve backed by twelve billion dollars, and a plurilateral price floor mechanism designed to make Chinese dumping economically irrational at scale. The intellectual case for the approach is sound. The participating countries, whatever their reservations about American predictability, have strong independent reasons to want the strategy to succeed. And the alternative, accepting permanent Chinese dominance over the refining bottleneck that controls the entire downstream supply chain, is widely understood to be worse than the costs of coordination.
But the Korean official with the folder in the corridor understood something about critical minerals diplomacy that the February press releases did not quite capture: the difference between announcing architecture and operating it. Vance told the fence-sitters to "move together." Rubio said the purpose of FORGE was to build "a network of partners across the world." Both statements were true, and both pointed toward the same unglamorous requirement. Networks require nodes. Forums require chairs. Strategies require someone, in a specific building, in a specific city, answering a specific phone. As June ends and Seoul's tenure formally closes, the most urgent question in Western critical minerals coordination is the one nobody has answered publicly: who picks up the phone next.