Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday made a full-throated pitch to 54 countries and the European Union to join a U.S.-led trading bloc for critical minerals.
“This morning, the Trump administration is proposing a concrete mechanism to return the global critical minerals market to a healthier, more competitive state,” Vance said at the State Department’s inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington. The U.S. is creating a “preferential trade zone for critical minerals protected from external disruptions through enforceable price floors,” the vice president added.
The White House is angling to convince allies to sign a nonbinding agreement, which calls on signatories to identify and support key projects — within six months — that can deliver material to the U.S. and allies. The administration is hoping to bring nations together to counter China’s dominating global control of mining and processing.
Vance — without mentioning China — laid out the White House’s plan, dubbed the “Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement,” or FORGE, which would establish “reference prices” for critical minerals at each stage of production and “pricing that reflects real-world fair market value.”
Those prices will operate as a floor — using adjustable tariffs — with hopes of preventing companies from flooding the markets with cheap minerals, undercutting U.S. miners and processors before jacking up prices, said Vance. The initiative replaces the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership, which was also driven by the State Department to financially and diplomatically support critical mineral projects around the world.
“To those of you still on the fence, I say … let’s move together,” said Vance. “I’m pleased that so many of you here today have already signed on to this plan, some of you have not. … We hope that today’s discussions will encourage you to finalize those agreements as quickly as possible.”
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is slated to lead a session on price floors at the event, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other top Trump officials also appearing.
And yet the administration faces skepticism among allies still stung from President Donald Trump’s aborted threats to acquire Greenland, the mineral-rich autonomous Danish territory.
Beijing currently has a lock on the minerals market.
China’s position on maintaining the stability and security of global critical mineral industrial and supply chains remains unchanged, said Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. “China maintains that countries need to follow the principles of market economy and international economic and trade rules, step up communication and dialogue, jointly keep the industrial and supply chains stable and unimpeded, and advance the steady growth of [the] world economy,” said Liu.
The move builds on the administration’s multipronged strategy of investing and taking equity stakes in private mineral companies, stockpiling minerals in the recently announced $12 billion “Project Vault” stockpile and protecting domestic mining companies from overproduction that sinks pricing. The administration, said Vance, has also provided up to $100 billion in lending authority for critical minerals.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vance said global mineral prices are erratic and unpredictable, and the international market is failing to create healthy markets or increase national security.
Supply chains are “brittle and exceptionally concentrated,” commodity prices are depressed, and dozens of mining and processing projects can’t compete and have been suspended or abandoned across North America and Europe, Vance said.
And yet allies at the ministerial account for close to two-thirds of the world’s GDP, he said, and can become independent and create “diverse centers of production” and a stable investment environment within the bloc.
“Let’s make the prices more predictable and less erratic, so that we can support the domestic supply chains and the investment that makes those supply chains possible,” said Vance.
The U.S., Rubio said, ceded global authority when it let the nation’s mining sector languish. Advancing a bilateral critical minerals framework will revive the market and protect each link in the supply chain, from mining to refining and processing, he said.
“And so, we stand ready and intend to work with each country here today to find a specialized role that you can play,” Rubio told attendees before noting that the room includes countries that have the buying power to build a more resilient and diverse global market.
Allies who spoke during the summit expressed support for the effort, noting that they too have suffered from China’s dominance of supply chains.
“We have come to understand that we are in the same boat,” said Horii Iwao, the state minister for foreign affairs of Japan, which signed a minerals framework agreement with the U.S. last year.
“No single country can overcome fragility of critical mineral supply and overdependence on specific countries on its own,” he added.
Experts praised the effort to work with allies on securing mineral supplies, especially in setting price floors.
“The U.S. ultimately cannot finance price floors, by itself, for an extended period of time,” said Samantha Carl-Yoder, principal and co-chair of Brownstein’s critical minerals practice.
She said the Trump administration has come to realize that it does not control most of the world’s major mining companies and will need to work with allies to develop mines and processing facilities in other countries.
Abigail Hunter, executive director of the SAFE Center for Critical Minerals Strategy, said that given the long timelines and capital expenditure required to develop mines and processing facilities, international diplomacy must be a “cornerstone” of minerals efforts.
Hunter said the summit exemplified the Trump administration’s approach on critical minerals: prioritizing supply chains for American companies, which it believes can benefit allies at the same time.
“The U.S. has been uber-clear to its allies, we need to steer the stuff for us, for our industry,” Hunter said. “Making sure that those expectations are set is really helpful to kind of empower other nations to also pursue similar measures, while also being able to join in when it makes sense under this large market player who’s making these sizable differences in the supply chain through investments and through regulations.”
