The Mineral Pacts Nobody Builds On

Two weeks in May capture the whole pattern. India was finalizing a critical-minerals pact with Russia on May 12, with a draft already shared and signing expected within two months ^[1]. BRICS ministers gathered in New Delhi the same week, and Russia's foreign minister made the relationship explicit.

Our two nations have a shared interest in strengthening multipolarity. — S. Jaishankar

Fourteen days later, in the same city, India signed a minerals framework with the United States, with Secretary Rubio framing it as protection for allied economies against monopolized mineral supply — meaning China ^[2]. Multipolarity with Russia, alliance with the United States, same file, same city, same month. That two-week window is the clearest instance of something visible only when you line up a dozen separate stories. The bilateral critical-minerals scramble is not building allied supply chains. It is producing a tangle of non-binding commitments in which every nation hedges against every other — including its own partners' adversaries — while the actual supply chain gets built somewhere else entirely. India now has mineral partnerships with 24 countries and is negotiating with 11 more, spanning every continent ^[3]. The yield so far: one lithium exploration agreement, in Argentina. The country India was negotiating with in that May window — Russia — holds 28.5 million metric tons of rare-earth reserves but produces 50 metric tons a year and imports 98 percent of what it consumes ^[1]. Two countries with large ambitions and negligible production signing a minerals pact is a diplomatic photograph, not a supply chain. The structure is the thing. These bilateral instruments are memorandums of understanding — non-binding statements of shared intent that include no capital and no offtake guarantee. The US-EU critical minerals partnership, signed in April, is candid about its own aspiration.

For us, it's really a matter of economic security. — Maroš Šefčovič

It follows similar US frameworks with Japan, Mexico, and Australia — each a separate bilateral MoU, each aspirational ^[4]. The Quad announced its own framework pledging up to $20 billion to diversify supply chains from China ^[5]. India's bilateral pact with the US sits on top of the Quad framework and India's membership in Pax Silica, a separate US-led coalition — three overlapping structures covering the same minerals goal, none binding ^[2]. What actual supply-chain construction looks like is different in kind, and it is not happening through the pact machinery. Lynas Rare Earths has begun commercial production of heavy rare earths and samarium oxide in Malaysia — the first non-Chinese separated heavy rare-earth output in two decades — backed by a $96 million Defense Department agreement ^[6]. USA Rare Earth's $2.8 billion acquisition of Brazil's Serra Verde mine is underwritten by $1.6 billion from the Commerce Department and $565 million from the US Development Finance Corporation, anchored by a 15-year government offtake commitment ^[7]. The G7's Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance has selected 13 specific projects with concrete investment, including a mine-to-battery phosphate supply chain in Quebec ^[8]. Capital committed. Offtake secured. Production underway. None of it flows through a bilateral minerals pact. The disconnect is a function of what each instrument is designed to do. An MoU signals intent; a defense contract commits capital. A framework launches a pledge; an offtake guarantees a buyer. The diplomacy celebrates the instruments that do not build mines. And every major actor is hedging across adversary and partner lines at once — not by inference, but in plain action. During the same Delhi visit where the US signed the India minerals pact, Rubio also signed a separate partnership charter with Armenia, a Russian CSTO ally ^[2]. The US reinstated full oil sanctions on Russia on April 11, then reversed itself six days later with a 30-day waiver after India, Indonesia, and Malaysia requested alternative energy supplies ^[9][10] — the same India negotiating a minerals pact with Russia. Nigeria and Türkiye signed a mining MoU in Istanbul on May 25, a transactional resource pairing with no allied-bloc logic ^[11]. India signed a minerals working group with France on July 6 and an MoU with Indonesia's state mineral company on July 7 ^[12] — France already covered by the US-EU pact, Indonesia non-aligned, each deal layered on top of and outside existing frameworks. China, the shared foil in every "counter-China" pact, hedges by counterpart too. On July 7, Beijing blocked rare-earth shipments to Japan in retaliation for Prime Minister Takaichi's comments on Taiwan defense ^[13] — weaponizing mineral supply against one country while offering cooperation to another. At a Beijing summit in May, the White House said China agreed to address rare-earth shortages; China's Commerce Ministry omitted rare earths from its own summit summary entirely ^[14]. Two contradictory accounts of the same meeting, each calibrated for a domestic audience. Meanwhile, China's rare-earth export value surged 44.9 percent in the first five months of 2026 while export volume rose only 2.2 percent ^[15]. Global buyers are paying a premium. The diversification effort, for all its diplomatic volume, has not dented China's pricing power. A House subcommittee hearing in late April laid the gap bare: the US is fully import-dependent for at least a dozen critical minerals, and China controls over 80 percent of lithium-ion recycling ^[16]. The hearing produced partisan disagreement about environmental regulations, not a supply-chain plan. Zimbabwe's May 22 ban on raw critical-mineral exports, with mandated government shareholding in all projects ^[17], is a reminder that resource holders can unilaterally rewrite terms — which makes non-binding MoUs fragile in exactly the way a 15-year offtake contract is not. The question worth watching is not whether more pacts will be signed. They will, on every continent, with every counterpart, in every format. It is whether any of these MoUs mature into the capital and offtake commitments that move ore out of the ground — or whether the real supply chain keeps getting built quietly, through defense budgets and corporate balance sheets, while the signings remain what the cameras cover.