What America Wants Now

We are open for business and we are serious about doing business the right way. — Felix Tshisekedi

For eighty years, the question America asked when it looked abroad was some version of "how do we secure this place?" The answer was alliances: NATO, bilateral defense treaties, forward bases, blanket security guarantees. Economic interests followed behind, often as a secondary benefit of the security architecture. That order is now being dismantled and replaced by its inverse. The question the United States now asks is "what do we own here?" — and every institution of American foreign policy is being rebuilt to answer it. The machinery of acquisition is now the administration's most active foreign-policy project. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation — a development agency by charter — has become a strategic acquisition vehicle. It is leading a government-backed consortium to purchase 40% of Glencore's $9 billion copper-cobalt operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the right to appoint directors and direct production to nominated buyers ^[1]. It financed exclusive U.S. rights to rare-earth production from Brazil's Serra Verde mine through 2030, preempting a parallel European effort ^[2]. It is managing Uzbekistan's entire mineral value chain — gold, uranium, copper, lithium, tungsten — through a bilateral Joint Investment Holding Company structured for direct equity and infrastructure control ^[3]. And when the federal deal with Brazil stalled, the State Department simply went around President Lula and signed bilateral agreements directly with the states of Goiás and Minas Gerais ^[4]. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has taken direct equity stakes in domestic mining operations — becoming the largest shareholder in MP Materials Corp. and guaranteeing minimum prices for its California rare-earths mine, while the Department of Energy acquired a 5% stake in the Thacker Pass lithium project ^[5][6]. The State Department has signed more than a dozen bilateral mineral pacts — Chile was the twelfth, in March — and in February convened 54 countries plus the European Union under a new institutional bloc called FORGE, the Forum on Resource, Geostrategic Engagement, explicitly designed to diversify critical mineral supply chains for artificial intelligence and robotics ^[7][8]. The administration has unilaterally permitted deep-seabed mining in international waters under a 1980 U.S. law, bypassing the International Seabed Authority and over the objections of forty nations and companies including Apple and Google ^[9]. The Interior Department expanded the official critical minerals list from fifty to sixty materials, adding copper, uranium, and metallurgical coal, which Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called a "road map to reduce our dependence on foreign adversaries" ^[10]. These are not separate initiatives. They are the same function — acquisition — distributed across every agency that once had a different purpose. While this machinery is being assembled, the old architecture is being taken apart. The administration has cut NATO force contributions by a third of fighter jets and half the Reaper drones, with the general in charge calling it an end to "unhealthy co-dependence" and a refocusing for "simultaneous conflict in multiple theatres" ^[11]. The pursuit of Greenland's mineral wealth — through credit lines and offtake agreements with Amaroq Minerals, alongside the standing threat to acquire the territory outright — prompted Trump to declare himself "finished with NATO" when Denmark resisted ^[12]. On Taiwan, Trump said "it is up to President Xi how he deals with Taiwan," demanded Taipei pay for its own defense, and repositioned U.S. assets away from the Indo-Pacific, prompting Taiwan's opposition party to seek rapprochement with Beijing directly ^[13]. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged Trump to block Volodymyr Zelensky's entry to the White House until Ukraine agreed to U.S. terms on a minerals deal ^[14]. The two movements — acquisition and dismantling — are not always explicitly linked, and the distinction matters. In some cases the connection is direct and documented: the U.S.-brokered peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda was signed alongside the minerals partnership ^[15]. The U.S. mediation of the Pakistan-India conflict led to Pakistan offering preferential access to Balochistan's rare-earth minerals, and in exchange the U.S. approved AMRAAM missile sales and designated the Balochistan Liberation Army as a terrorist organization ^[16]. Bessent's conditioning of presidential access on mineral terms was an explicit quid pro quo ^[14]. In other cases — the NATO cuts, the Taiwan withdrawal, the Greenland dispute — the link to minerals is a pattern visible across the administration's actions rather than a stated policy. The same government cutting NATO fighter jets by a third is the one buying copper-cobalt equity in the DRC. These are not separate stories; they are the same government operating on a single logic, even when it does not announce the connection. The old model has not vanished entirely, and the exceptions are worth examining. The United States still provided $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel between October 2023 and September 2025, and approved $18.67 billion in arms sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia in early 2026 ^[17][18]. The administration surged 10,000 troops toward the Middle East and requested $200 billion in supplemental funding for a potential conflict with Iran ^[19]. These are not mineral plays. The Saudi arms sales in particular are the clearest case of traditional security cooperation persisting without a critical-minerals dimension — though they sit within the older logic of energy security and oil, a resource frame of a different kind. The Iran confrontation is primarily about nuclear proliferation and Israel's security, with the Strait of Hormuz and oil transit as one dimension among several. And even in Israel, the old model is fraying: Benjamin Netanyahu is now calling for Israel's independence from U.S. military aid, and Vice President Vance has noted that the United States finances "two-thirds of the defensive weapons" protecting the country ^[20]. The old security architecture is shrinking, and what is growing in its place is something different. That the United States chose acquisition was not foreordained. The European Union faced the same Chinese rare-earth export controls and chose a different path: negotiating directly with Beijing to suspend the controls for twelve months, establishing a special communication channel, and developing domestic processing capacity in Estonia ^[21]. The U.S. chose equity stakes, bilateral pacts, and unilateral permitting. China chose processing dominance — it controls roughly 92% of global rare-earth refining, and Goldman Sachs estimates it could take a decade for the West to challenge that position ^[22]. Three different answers to the same problem. The American answer was acquisition. The mines may be years from producing. The DRC deal was signed with a government that does not control the mineral zones — M23 rebels hold key areas, and the rebel leader called the agreement unconstitutional, signed with "an illegitimate regime, and a corrupt one at that" ^[23]. The DRC is creating a 20,000-person paramilitary mining guard to secure mineral transport routes, a security force built for extraction logistics rather than territorial defense ^[24]. The Ukraine minerals deal grants the U.S. preferential access to lithium, titanium, graphite, and uranium in a country where BlackRock's vice chairman has warned it is "nearly impossible to invest into a war zone" ^[25]. The gap between the deals being signed and the minerals being extracted is wide, and it may never fully close. But the alliances being traded away took decades to build. NATO was seventy-seven years in the making. The Taiwan deterrence architecture was constructed over half a century. The trust that undergirded the postwar order was accumulated across generations of diplomacy and mutual defense. Mines can be opened in years. Alliances, once broken, are not rebuilt on the same timeline.