On February 4, 2026, the United States launched FORGE, a successor to the Minerals Security Partnership, and signed eleven new bilateral frameworks in a single day, bringing the total to over twenty-one deals in five months and mobilizing more than thirty billion dollars in commitments. But as Washington builds what it hopes will become a preferential trading bloc covering two-thirds of the global economy, its own partners are quietly hedging their bets, signing deals with each other that conspicuously exclude the United States. The result is a minerals diplomacy landscape of remarkable complexity: ambitious, energetic, and shadowed by a deep credibility problem.
Introduction
The room at the State Department on February 4, 2026, was the kind of gathering that foreign policy veterans describe in superlatives. Fifty-five delegations, forty-three foreign ministers, and a full complement of senior American officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright had assembled for what the administration was billing as the most consequential minerals diplomacy event in American history. By the time the day was over, the United States had signed eleven new bilateral frameworks with countries stretching from the Cook Islands to Guinea, announced the creation of a sweeping new multilateral forum, and unveiled a domestic stockpiling initiative backed by the largest loan in the Export-Import Bank's ninety-two-year history.
It was, by any measure, an extraordinary display of institutional energy. The administration had spent the preceding five months quietly negotiating ten additional agreements with countries including Australia, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia, meaning that by the close of business on February 4, Washington had locked in at least twenty-one bilateral critical minerals deals, with negotiations reportedly concluded with seventeen more countries waiting to sign. The sheer velocity of the diplomatic push reflected something the Trump administration had been telegraphing for months: that the race to break China's grip on the materials underpinning modern industrial civilization had entered a new, more urgent phase.
But diplomacy, even when conducted at impressive speed, is not the same as strategy. And beneath the spectacle of the February ministerial, a more complicated story was taking shape: one in which the United States was simultaneously the architect of a new global minerals order and, in the eyes of many of its partners, one of the primary sources of uncertainty that order was meant to address.
FORGE and the End of the MSP Era
The Minerals Security Partnership had been a creature of a different diplomatic moment. Launched in June 2022 on the margins of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto, it had brought together fourteen countries and the European Union around a shared diagnosis: that China's dominance over critical mineral processing, estimated at between forty and ninety percent of global capacity for lithium, cobalt, and copper, posed an unacceptable strategic risk. The MSP's approach was collaborative and deliberate, centered on joint project development and the mobilization of pooled investment through its associated public-private network, MINVEST.
FORGE, the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, represents a conscious break from that model. All seventeen MSP members agreed to transition into the new framework, which the Trump administration has explicitly described as having sharper teeth and a commitment to speed. But what FORGE actually does, and how it differs from its predecessor, is a question that analysts are still working through.
The most arresting element of the FORGE design, as articulated by Vice President Vance at the ministerial, is its ambition to function as a preferential trading zone for critical minerals, one that would set reference prices at each stage of production and enforce them through adjustable tariffs. The explicit target is Chinese dumping: the practice of exporting minerals at below-market prices that undercuts Western producers and deepens global dependence on Beijing. "Reference prices" would, in Vance's formulation, reflect "real-world fair market value," insulating the zone from external market manipulation.
Reed Blakemore and Alexis Harmon of the Atlantic Council, writing shortly after the ministerial, were measured in their assessment. FORGE, they argued, appears more likely to operate on a "membership by trade" model, in which participation is conditioned on adherence to shared trade rules rather than joint capital deployment. Investment, under this approach, would remain largely bilateral, conducted within a plurilateral market framework designed to reinforce and de-risk those investments rather than to pool capital directly. Whether FORGE will ultimately catalyze the kind of project-level dealmaking that the MSP aspired to remains, for now, an open question.
South Korea holds the chair through June 2026, a choice that signals the administration's desire to anchor the forum in a credible industrial partner with its own acute dependence on Chinese mineral supply chains. Rubio, at the ministerial, was characteristically direct: "The purpose of FORGE is to foster collaboration and to build a network of partners across the world." The administration hopes FORGE will eventually link its proliferating bilateral agreements into a functioning plurilateral system covering two-thirds of the global economy. The ambition is genuine. The mechanisms for achieving it remain, in places, aspirational.
Twenty-One Deals and Counting: The Bilateral Blitz
If FORGE represents the multilateral superstructure of America's minerals diplomacy, the bilateral agreements are its foundation. The eleven frameworks signed on February 4 ranged across a geography that reflected the administration's deliberate effort to diversify supply sources: Argentina, with its vast lithium deposits in the Puna plateau; Guinea, which holds some of the world's largest bauxite and iron ore reserves; Morocco, a significant producer of phosphates and cobalt; the Philippines, a major nickel supplier; the United Kingdom; and six others including the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.
Added to the ten agreements reached in the preceding five months, including specialized deals with Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Ukraine, the total reached at least twenty-one frameworks by February, with negotiations concluded on seventeen more. The sheer breadth of the list is striking, as is its geographic logic: the administration has been methodical about targeting both upstream producers and countries with refining or processing potential, attempting to address not just where minerals are found but where they can be transformed into the battery-grade materials that American industry actually needs.
The Australia deal illustrates the scale of financial commitment involved. The bilateral minerals agreement with Canberra was valued at eight point five billion dollars, a figure that underscores how seriously Washington is treating the relationship with a country that projects critical minerals export earnings of eighteen billion Australian dollars in 2026 to 2027 alone. The U.S. government separately committed six hundred million dollars into the Orion Critical Minerals Consortium, which has mobilized an additional one point two billion in non-government funding, five hundred and sixty-five million dollars for rare earth extraction in Brazil, and a letter of interest exploring up to seven hundred million dollars for tungsten development in Kazakhstan.
In total, the administration claims to have mobilized more than thirty billion dollars in letters of interest, loans, and investments in critical mineral projects over six months. The financial architecture underpinning this commitment draws heavily on Project Vault, the twelve-billion-dollar public-private stockpiling initiative announced on February 2 and backed by a ten-billion-dollar EXIM loan. As I detailed in my analysis of Project Vault in May, the initiative represents a fundamental doctrinal shift: mineral supply security is now being treated as a civilian economic continuity problem, with manufacturers like Boeing, General Motors, and GE Vernova committing financially to ensure materials are available when disruptions occur.
Not all of these agreements fit the same template. The arrangement with Mexico stands apart. Rather than a State Department framework, it took the form of a Critical Minerals Action Plan signed by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Mexican Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, reflecting what officials described as a distinctly trade-centered orientation tied to the USMCA review process. Greer called it "an important step to strengthen bilateral cooperation and increase supply chain resilience with like-minded partners." Conspicuously absent from the arrangement: Canada, which has not yet committed to the initiative, a diplomatic gap made more awkward by the Trump administration's history of public antagonism toward Ottawa.
The Trilateral Dimension: EU, Japan, and the Standards Question
Alongside the bilateral blitz, the administration announced what may prove to be its most structurally significant diplomatic initiative: a trilateral framework with the European Commission and Japan to develop coordinated trade policies on critical minerals. The framework, announced at the ministerial, set ambitious timelines: thirty days for the United States, European Union, and Japan to negotiate coordinated mechanisms including border-adjusted price floors; sixty days for similar talks with Mexico; and six months for the three parties to identify specific projects for investment in mining, processing, reprocessing, and recycling.
The EU-U.S. relationship on minerals had been maturing quietly. In April 2026, European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security Maros Sefcovic and Secretary Rubio signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding in Washington, formalizing what Brussels described as a strategic partnership to build secure, sustainable critical minerals supply chains. The MOU was the EU's sixteenth bilateral instrument on critical raw materials, a number that itself tells a story about how seriously Brussels has taken the diversification imperative. Sefcovic, acknowledging the significance of the moment, issued a characteristic caution: "Now comes the real test: execution, by turning shared ambition into concrete, high-impact projects."
Greer, for his part, was direct about the shared diagnosis: "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." The language was pointed, even if the word "China" went unspoken. The reference to border-adjusted price floors echoes the FORGE design logic: the idea that coordinated tariff policy can function as a defensive mechanism against adversarial market manipulation, creating a zone where Western-aligned producers can operate with some insulation from Chinese dumping.
The Natural Resource Governance Institute has raised important questions about what happens next. With timelines ranging from thirty days to six months promised for the development of MOUs and action plans, the institute noted that ensuring transparency and public engagement on these initial steps would be essential. Previous bilateral efforts have shown that limited transparency and consultation on the terms of mineral partnerships can lead to public opposition that ultimately delays implementation. The joint EU-U.S.-Japan press release opened the door for the proposed trading mechanism to incorporate criteria from the G7 roadmap on standards-based markets, including performance-based criteria on labor rights, local consultation, anti-corruption measures, and environmental protections. Whether those criteria will be enforced rigorously, or treated as aspirational language, will determine much of the framework's credibility with both partner governments and domestic publics.
The Credibility Gap: How Washington's Partners Are Hedging Against Washington
There is a tension at the heart of America's minerals diplomacy that no amount of bilateral framework signing can fully resolve. The same administration that is aggressively building a coalition to challenge China's supply chain dominance has, in a period of roughly eighteen months, imposed on-again, off-again tariffs on key trading partners, threatened annexation of Canada and Greenland, boycotted a G20 summit hosted by South Africa, and pursued trade policies that have injected profound uncertainty into the global economic system. The result, as a May 5, 2026, Foreign Policy analysis made plain, is that many of the countries Washington is courting are simultaneously signing deals with each other that deliberately exclude the United States.
Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, put the dynamic with characteristic bluntness: "Because of the political risk associated with aligning with China or with the United States, there's developing this patchwork of critical minerals agreements that have nothing to do with either" country. As I explored in my May analysis of the patchwork effect on the global minerals map, this phenomenon is not incidental to Washington's diplomatic push. It is a direct response to it, a form of strategic hedging by countries that want access to the benefits of the U.S.-led system without becoming dependent on its continued coherence.
Australia and Japan announced a strengthening of bilateral critical minerals cooperation even as both countries remained engaged with Washington. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese framed it plainly: "Australia and Japan are taking action to protect our economies from future economic shocks and uncertainty." Japan has similarly deepened ties with Britain and France. France has pledged to strengthen ties with Canada. Canada, facing Trump's annexation rhetoric, has made minerals deals with Australia and signed a joint declaration with Greenland. The architecture being constructed on the diplomatic periphery of the U.S.-led system is, in aggregate, a vote of no confidence in Washington's reliability as a long-term anchor.
Gracelin Baskaran, Director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at CSIS, captured the predicament of countries navigating between Washington and Beijing. They are walking a "precarious line between strengthening collaboration with the Trump administration and risking angering Beijing." Every country, she noted, is cautious of Chinese retaliation, a concern that Japan's experience illustrates with particular force. Japan has been building critical minerals resilience since China imposed rare earth export controls in 2010, investing continuously in alternative supply chains, strategic stockpiles, and diplomatic partnerships. Yet, as Baskaran observed, Japan remains highly impacted by Chinese export controls. If sixteen years of sustained effort has left Tokyo still vulnerable, the timeline challenge facing the broader FORGE coalition comes into sharp relief.
The situation with South Africa adds another layer of complexity to the picture. U.S. and South African officials conducted their highest-level bilateral meeting of 2026 in Johannesburg on May 8, exploring potential minerals agreements despite a diplomatic relationship strained by Trump's accusations of "white genocide" and the American boycott of the G20 summit Pretoria hosted. The fact that talks are happening at all reflects what observers have called a pragmatic willingness to compartmentalize political disputes in service of resource access. But it also illustrates the limits of the approach: agreements forged in such an atmosphere carry their own fragility, dependent on the continuation of a pragmatic calculus that could shift with the next inflammatory statement from Washington.
Hendrix's warning about American mineral coercion deserves to linger. Speaking to Foreign Policy, he argued that European partners have "pretty reasonable and understandable reasons to believe that the United States could turn around and engage in precisely the same kind of mineral coercion that China has engaged in." That concern is not hypothetical. Project Vault, for all its civilian-sector framing, creates a large and independently governed reserve of materials that could, in a future crisis, become a tool of American leverage rather than a shared resource. The legal structure of the bilateral MOUs does nothing to resolve that concern. Most of the twenty-one agreements are framed as non-binding soft-law instruments, a design choice that accelerates their conclusion but strips them of the enforcement mechanisms that would give trading partners genuine confidence in their durability.
Conclusion: The Coalition and Its Contradictions
On the afternoon of February 4, 2026, as the final signatures were being affixed to the last of the day's eleven bilateral frameworks, an administration official offered a phrase that has since circulated widely in policy circles: this coalition, they said, could become a "mines-to-metals" alliance that challenges China's dominance while stabilizing the supply of elements essential to twenty-first-century innovation. The aspiration is genuine, and the ambition behind it is not trivial. A coalition anchored by the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and a growing roster of major producing nations from Argentina to Guinea represents, at least on paper, a formidable counterweight to Beijing's processing monopoly.
But the gap between aspiration and architecture remains significant. FORGE has yet to demonstrate that it can move from framework to functioning market mechanism. The thirty-billion-dollar in commitments, impressive as a headline figure, are distributed across dozens of projects at varying stages of development, in jurisdictions with varying degrees of political stability and institutional capacity. The EU-U.S. MOU on critical minerals is, as Sefcovic himself acknowledged, a beginning rather than an achievement. The DRC partnership, one of the marquee deals of the U.S. bilateral push, is currently facing a legal challenge in the Congolese Constitutional Court from lawyers arguing that it violates sovereignty provisions and bypasses parliamentary approval. The soft-law design that made signing twenty-one agreements in five months possible is precisely the design that makes those agreements least reassuring to the partners they are meant to bind.
China, meanwhile, is not waiting. Beijing controls an estimated ninety-one percent of global rare earth refining capacity and ninety-four percent of rare earth magnet manufacturing. By 2035, it is projected to supply over sixty percent of refined lithium and cobalt, around eighty percent of battery-grade graphite and rare earth elements, and approximately seventy percent of battery-grade manganese. These are not figures that a collection of non-binding MOUs and price floor proposals can shift in a matter of years. The structural dominance China has built over decades of deliberate industrial policy will require an equally deliberate, equally sustained counter-effort to meaningfully erode.
In Geneva last month, a trade lawyer who has worked on several of the bilateral frameworks described the current moment with a metaphor that has stayed with me. Building FORGE, she said, is like laying track for a high-speed rail line while the train is already moving. You can make extraordinary progress if everyone pulls in the same direction. But if even a few of the crews decide they would rather build their own spur line, the main track never gets finished. Standing in the atrium of the State Department on February 4, watching the flags of fifty-five nations arranged in careful diplomatic order, it was possible to believe that everyone was, at last, pulling in the same direction. The months since have complicated that picture considerably.