Mines to Markets: A Critical Minerals Strategy for the Western Hemisphere

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Access to critical minerals, rare earth elements (REEs), and their midstream and downstream products is becoming instrumental to the shape of the future world order due to the importance of these minerals to military capabilities, energy and communications infrastructure, and the semiconductors and data centers behind artificial intelligence (AI). The United States has reached a dangerous inflection point in its overdependence on China: diversification away from China is, and will remain, a top national and economic security priority over the next decade. The Western Hemisphere is key to that diversification strategy, particularly as China’s actions in the hemisphere have evolved from commercially oriented to an overt effort to counter the United States.

To build independence, the United States should embrace a “mines to markets” supply chain with Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and others, whereby Washington treats these resource-rich countries as development and industrial partners rather than just sources of raw materials. Such a strategy includes competitive investments in processing, refining, downstream manufacturing, and infrastructure in partner countries as well as robust support for U.S. and allied companies beyond the mining sector. The United States should avoid forcing countries to make binary choices between itself and China, instead presenting countries with a more compelling alternative to Chinese projects.

To attract Latin American countries, the United States should expand Pax Silica—the U.S. State Department initiative launched in December 2025 to build resilient critical mineral supply chains among allied nations to secure the AI technology stack. It should focus on investable projects with transparent reporting and strict congressional oversight. To that end, the United States should seek Western Hemisphere infrastructure opportunities designed to connect inland mines with processing centers and the Atlantic and Pacific markets. It should also build a wider allied investment coalition, in particular repairing and then expanding on a renewed U.S.-Canada mining partnership that includes joint financing and investment. It should also fully engage international financial institutions to provide technical assistance, support for macro-stability, and project cofinancing, and encourage deeper relations between advanced industrialized countries and the Western Hemisphere.

INTRODUCTION

Access to critical minerals, rare earth elements (REEs), and their midstream and downstream products is becoming instrumental in determining the outcome of geopolitical competition and the shape of the future world order. Those materials sit at the beginning of the supply chains that underpin advanced industrial economies, modern military capabilities, energy and communications infrastructure, and the artificial intelligence (AI) technology stack. In this competition, China controls critical chokepoints, with a near total monopoly on key minerals, processing, technologies, and the related manufacturing ecosystem. Regaining sufficient control over U.S. supply chains is essential to the United States’ economic, technological, and military power and its ability to realize a reindustrializing agenda.

The United States has reached a dangerous inflection point. It must urgently reduce its overdependence on China to protect its defense and commercial industrial bases from coercion. Beijing’s weaponization of its critical minerals dominance through export controls over the past several years has created a national emergency, not only for the United States but for all advanced allied economies. Diversification away from China is, and will remain, a top national and economic security priority over the next decade, not just a commercial objective. The Western Hemisphere is key to that diversification strategy.

The United States is fortunate to have regional neighbors with an abundance of the world’s critical minerals, metals, and REEs. Vast copper mines in Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and potentially Panama produce not only copper but also valuable by-products such as gold and silver, and Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile contain the world’s richest lithium deposits; the opportunities to support deeper cooperation for U.S. companies in these countries across the sector are robust. Brazil, home to the world’s second-largest rare earth deposits after China, is emerging as one of the few countries that can help the United States diversify sourcing of REEs essential to manufacturing permanent magnets—used in precision weapons, turbines, drones, medical equipment, cars, and hard drives. In October 2025, Beijing significantly expanded its export control regime, restricting global access to REEs and permanent magnets made from heavy REEs, related processing technologies, and know-how, nearly bringing vast swaths of the global economy to a standstill. Brazil’s Serra Verde mine is the only active producer outside Asia that can supply all four magnetic heavy REEs—neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium—making it an essential part of the United States’ push to free itself from Chinese interference.

To the north, Canada remains the top U.S. mineral trading partner and source of critical minerals, metals, and some rare earths, in spite of the significant disruption to the relationship caused by the second Trump administration. Canada itself ranks among the top five global producers of cobalt, gold, indium, nickel, niobium, palladium, platinum, titanium concentrate, and uranium, and Canadian companies are also longtime investors in South American and Caribbean mining and processing operations. Canada is a leader in mining finance, legal services, accounting, environmental, technology, and other expertise underpinning the global mining industry. The hemisphere is rich with opportunity for developing a robust, secure supply chain and minerals financing architecture to anchor the future of U.S. critical minerals strategy in the region.

The Western Hemisphere can serve as a more resilient “mines to markets” supply chain but only if the United States treats resource-rich countries in the region as development and industrial partners rather than just sources of raw materials. To be successful, the United States should adopt a strategy of competitive attraction to support U.S. and allied company investment. Countries expect investment in processing, refining, downstream product manufacturing, and enabling infrastructure to accompany access to their minerals. For the United States to compete against China in the coming decade, it will also need to support investment by U.S. and allied companies beyond the mining sector to develop advanced manufacturing facilities, energy infrastructure, and technology systems that connect critical minerals to the broader U.S. AI tech architecture, which includes semiconductors, data centers, and energy grids. Canada, already a developed mining giant, will expect a credible return to true partnership with the United States; it also needs to counter Chinese weaponization of certain processed and refined critical minerals and REEs, and will want the United States to reprioritize co-investment in these types of facilities on both sides of the border, as well as co-development of recycling alternatives and new mining technologies.

Parts of the Trump administration’s current critical minerals strategy can and should anchor a future U.S. strategy in the Western Hemisphere, beginning with the pivot to the region itself. The creation of a Pax Silica alliance connecting an allied mining-to-AI supply chain, the expanded use of government development finance and investment tools, and ambitious critical mineral investments provide helpful foundations. The Trump administration’s second-term National Security Strategy [PDF] placed the Western Hemisphere at the top of its priority list. It also stated, “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains.” This last ambition is problematic and unrealistic.

For the United States to succeed, a Western Hemisphere mines to markets strategy must recognize that demands for exclusive relationships—binary decisions to work with either the United States or China—could push important partners in the region to choose China. Instead, it needs to place a more compelling alternative on the table than what China has offered over the past two decades and avoid the recent coercive approach to engagement the United States has taken, which risks playing further into China’s hands.

THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT: FROM MINERAL COMPETITION TO THE AI ECONOMY

The United States’ global leadership has long rested on the combined strength of its military and economy, its technological and innovative capacity, its network of alliances and partnerships, the global reach of the dollar and U.S. financial markets, and its historic role in anchoring an international order built on shared values, principles, rules, and institutions. Maintaining the strength of both U.S. military and economic power will depend on reducing dependence on China for critical inputs, especially critical minerals, and shoring up its own industrial capacity. As the U.S. State Department explained in December 2025, “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it.” The United States is not alone in its need to decrease Chinese dependence and will need to work with allies and partners to achieve a shared diversification strategy over the next ten years. The Western Hemisphere already has investments from mining companies from around the world, and crafting a shared future for nonhostile investment is key to maintaining U.S. leadership in the decades ahead.

Lessons From History: Mineral Access and Geopolitical Power

Geopolitical competition for the Western Hemisphere’s mineral wealth is anything but new. Spanish pursuits of El Dorado in the 1500s led to extraction of vast silver wealth that funded the Spanish Empire through the 1820s. The hemisphere funded European wars, while control of Caribbean bullion trade routes became key chokepoints in the region until South American independence in the nineteenth century.

During the early twentieth century, American companies became major mine owners, in particular of copper interests in Chile and Peru. To facilitate mineral exports, American banks and markets financed mines, railways, ports, and smelters, often reinforcing their political influence. The world wars made South American minerals strategically important, chiefly to the Allies, who controlled the sea lanes to access them and could choke Germany’s supply lines. Competition for nitrates, bauxite, copper, tin, and other materials played out on the high seas; Germans attacked shipping routes while the Allies set up blockades. Ultimately, the Allies’ access to minerals and ability to deny German access helped them win both wars. After 1945, resource nationalism intensified, producing tighter control by local governments and eventually nationalization.

Strategic competition in the twenty-first century will similarly depend on assured access to minerals processing, energy, compute, and platforms to deploy technologies that bolster American power. The Western Hemisphere has played a key resource role in the past and should be central to anchoring U.S. economic and national security in the future.

China’s Rising Mineral Dominance in the Hemisphere

More recently, China’s rise as the dominant source of demand for many minerals and metals, combined with its own massive state-supported domestic investment in smelting and downstream processing and the need for feedstock, brought Chinese companies into the competition for Latin American mineral assets. Since the 2000s, Chinese state or state-backed companies, facilitated by China’s state-backed policy banks, acquired interests in substantial Ecuadorian and Peruvian copper mines, Brazilian, Guyanese, and Surinamese gold mines and processing facilities, Brazilian niobium and phosphate mining and processing businesses, and minority or controlling interests in Argentine and Chilean lithium companies and projects. Chinese companies also signed recent lithium-development agreements in Bolivia, and negotiated significant recent gold concessions in Nicaragua.

To support mining operations and more efficient commodities exports and imports of manufactured goods, Chinese-owned operators financed or acquired infrastructure across the region, including access roads, bridges, transmission lines, logistics corridors, and ports. The most strategically important ports include Peru’s Chancay Port, a Chinese majority-owned multipurpose port that provides a direct maritime connection between Asia and South America. Chinese President Xi Jinping hails the port as the start of a new maritime-land corridor between China and Latin America. Two others are Hong Kong–headquartered and privately owned CK Hutchison operations: Balboa and Cristóbal. Those ports were on the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the Panama Canal, until Panama revoked its concessions in 2026 and took over their operations. U.S. officials and lawmakers raised concerns about all three ports: that Chancay could potentially serve as a dual-use port for Chinese naval operations and that the Panama Canal ports could serve as chokepoints for maritime transit, or create commercial, intelligence, cybersecurity, or logistical vulnerabilities should tensions with China escalate.

China is also beginning to challenge the global reach of the dollar in the hemisphere. Although the dollar remains structurally dominant there, China’s commodity financing operations are increasingly denominated in renminbi (RMB) and settled through Chinese clearing channels. Beijing regards the expansion of its RMB trade finance, payment and clearing infrastructure, and central-bank swap lines as a strategic counter to a dollar-dominant global financial system and as soft power diplomacy. China’s increasing RMB operations in Latin America, including the expansion of Chinese bank branch networks, are key to the country’s RMB internationalization agenda.

China’s Grand Strategy in the Western Hemisphere

At the same time, to blunt Western sanctions and export controls and prevent supply chain diversification away from China, the country is ramping up its own extraterritorial economic statecraft toolkit. Current and future investment in regional mineral midstream refining and processing by Chinese companies using proprietary Chinese technology in the Western Hemisphere could compromise these countries’ ability to export their own minerals without explicit Chinese state approval and permission under current export licensing control laws. This situation could create new worldwide chokepoints.

More worrying, Chinese strategy in the hemisphere has evolved over the last two decades from a transactional and commercial project to an overt effort to counter the U.S.-led order. The Western Hemisphere plays a central role in China’s strategic competition with the United States. Within this context, China is increasingly demanding that Latin American countries align geopolitically with Chinese policies, especially related to Taiwan, as prioritized in the Chinese State Council’s recent official “Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean.” Beijing is also directing leader-level attention to the hemisphere. Xi visited the region ten times in the past decade, whereas U.S. presidents made only five visits. Beijing is also increasingly shaping standards, digital governance, and financial and economic architecture, and views the region as central to its vision for global governance.

Many countries in Central and South America have deep ties to both the United States and China and prefer to avoid choosing sides; they are aware they sit at the nexus of U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry. The United States cannot realistically eliminate ordinary Chinese commercial investment from the hemisphere. The most relevant objective should be to decrease U.S. overdependence on Chinese critical mineral supply chains, diffuse chokepoints, and prevent Chinese control over genuinely critical assets. As such, the United States must approach a critical minerals strategy through the lens of U.S.-China strategic competition with the view that, as in prior centuries, minerals could once again become instrumental in determining the outcome of geopolitical competition and the shape of the future world order.

Allied engagement in the region has changed. In 2026, the European Union concluded a long-negotiated agreement with the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), including Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, connecting seven hundred million consumers across the two regions. In addition to Chinese investors, mining companies from Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe invested extensively in Caribbean and Latin American copper, gold, silver, nickel, and lithium projects. Canadian firms dominate exploration and mine development, while diversified global mining companies financed operations, processing facilities, and associated infrastructure. U.S. mining investment in Latin America and the Caribbean is formidable but has been more selective, concentrating in copper, gold, silver, and lithium projects in Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru. U.S. companies in general prioritized mine expansion and extraction, with more limited investment in local refining and processing.

China’s chokehold is most problematic in heavy REE extraction, separation, and processing and related technology. To counter this chokehold today, the United States must work with allies and partners in the Western Hemisphere. For example, Solvay, a Belgian company, has decades of experience refining REEs using its own technology and operates the largest rare earth separation and processing plant outside China in France. Together with France’s Carester—another leader in the separation and production of valuable magnetic heavy REEs—they are securing REE offtake from South American mines and sharing deep expertise with countries such as Brazil that are developing their own domestic REE refining capacity. These allied REE companies are natural partners for U.S. companies in the region. USA Rare Earth, a U.S. company with substantial U.S. government support, recently initiated a relationship with Carester and is set to become a new shareholder, supplier, and customer, alongside anticipated support from the French government. Future production from USA Rare Earth’s Serra Verde mine acquisition in Brazil will provide feedstock to the new combined venture. This type of collaboration is a strong template for collective allied partnership to develop secure REE supply chains from the Western Hemisphere to counter China’s chokehold.

AMERICAN INTERESTS AND OBJECTIVES

Competition with China is not the only reason for the United States to support deeper regional mineral engagement. The United States should also maintain the material foundations of American military power; protect advanced industrial sectors and communications, energy, semiconductor, and AI supply chains; and support American reindustrialization and high-value manufacturing. It must preserve the central role of the U.S. dollar and the reach of its financial markets, platforms, and institutions. To achieve those goals, it must maintain a stable, prosperous, and politically independent hemisphere, which will also help alleviate long-standing challenges caused by drug trafficking and illegal migration.

Even without Chinese competition in the hemisphere, demand for minerals and REEs will rise substantially because of the build-out of data centers, energy systems, electrical grids, communication and data infrastructure, and other technology systems underpinning AI. Concentrated supply chains would remain an economic security risk even without geopolitical rivalry. Working with partners in the hemisphere to build out their own processing, infrastructure, and manufacturing bases would create greater resilience, shorter supply chains, new markets for U.S. companies, and stronger, more stable neighboring economies. But China’s ambitious agenda adds urgency; its scale, pricing power, and demonstrated willingness to further weaponize its dominant mineral position have transformed an existing diversification need into an acute strategic priority.

A NEW APPROACH: COMPETITIVE ATTRACTION

The United States should reserve military and economic coercion for antagonistic countries that pose a genuine threat. In other cases, it should pursue a strategy of competitive attraction, offering more carrots rather than relying primarily on sticks. Tariff wars, threats to sovereignty, and political interference may command attention, but they weaken trust, most damagingly with Canada, whose cooperation is indispensable to hemispheric mineral security. U.S. government bullying also risks pushing countries in the region into China’s hands down the line. A future mines to markets strategy should preserve U.S. leadership by emphasizing investment, institution-building, and durable partnerships that make U.S.-aligned opportunities more attractive than Chinese alternatives.

The second Trump administration’s regional pivot was directionally sound and is ambitious in the minerals and mining sector. This should, in several countries, place the United States and American companies in a far stronger position upon which a future administration can build. Moving forward, however, the core strategic logic of a competitive attraction approach rests on leaning into U.S. strengths that can benefit the region, including deep capital markets and dollar dominance, innovation and leadership in the technologies of the future, and allied and multilateral collaboration to support public-private partnerships to develop mineral supply chains. The United States and its allies do not need to outspend China. They do, however, need to provide a better economic proposition.

To a great extent, the Pax Silica international partnership launched in December 2025 by the Trump administration aims to achieve this goal. It recast a previous minerals-only agreement created by the Biden administration—the Minerals Security Partnership—into a broader multilateral partnership to combine the strategic stacks of the global technology and AI supply chain, and includes minerals refining and processing within it. Anchoring minerals security in this wider context and broadening membership criteria now offers promise to commodity exporters who want to not only increase investment in processing and refining but also partner on advanced manufacturing and AI-enabled technology platforms to develop their own economies. It treats supply chain security as a “full technology stack” challenge, rather than a minerals-only challenge. Although Pax Silica is not specific to the Western Hemisphere, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Panama are already signatories. Notably missing are mining powerhouses Brazil, Canada, and Mexico, for reasons specific to each country.

Although Pax Silica is only a declaration, it is a helpful step to align like-minded countries in a future that can exist outside of Chinese supply chains and technology infrastructure. The challenge for many countries is having to choose between working with the United States or China. In addition to its rising dominance in the Western Hemisphere, China is offering its own platform to access Chinese AI technology through the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. To succeed, Pax Silica will need to compromise and not demand exclusivity, allowing countries to work with both U.S. and Chinese supply chains and investment.

CONSTRAINTS AND RESOURCES

Prioritize Minerals and Investable Projects

To channel taxpayer funds most efficiently, the United States should identify the specific minerals most important to national and economic security and resilience, as well as the countries and companies that are most likely to cooperate and can develop those projects. This approach would produce a prioritized regional pipeline of viable mining, processing, recycling, and manufacturing projects, rather than a haphazard collection of country-specific investments. Government incentives can support U.S. companies and allied investments that especially target these minerals, especially where minerals are strategic but uncommercial to develop, and could also help prioritize the projects for multilateral financial and other partners.

Balancing national security and commercial viability in critical minerals investments is challenging, especially given China’s dominance in pricing power and its willingness to use that power as a weapon. Still, before investing taxpayer funds in companies and projects, policymakers should identify the obstacles preventing private investment and solve for them specifically. Public resources are better utilized when they address clearly defined market failures and catalyze private investment, rather than subsidize projects that cannot become commercially viable.

Broader Economic Toolkit, Bolder Creative Approach

The U.S. government should build on the Trump administration’s broader use of economic tools to catalyze private investment, maintain the administration’s boldness and creativity, and ensure there is sufficient expertise within government to use the toolkit, but it should also ensure transparency and robust congressional oversight and avoid conflicts of interest. The United States has long used economic tools to support its national security through multiple federal agencies, in both advanced and developing markets. As attention to vulnerabilities in critical mineral supply chains grew over the past decade, so too did the use of investment tools including grants, technical assistance, loans, guarantees, purchase agreements, and equity to secure greater resilience alongside private partners. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), under the second Trump administration, in particular, is leaning hard into financing critical mineral security in the Western Hemisphere.

Congress significantly empowered the DFC in the fiscal year 2026 budget, increasing its investment capacity, equity authority, and mandate. In the Western Hemisphere, the DFC used its new authorities to build on the Biden-era $30 million investment in TechMet’s critical minerals fund, which supports Brazilian Nickel’s Piauí operations. In 2026, the DFC participated in the combined $1.6 billion package to support USA Rare Earth’s broader domestic “mine to magnet” strategy in a parallel international financing in Brazil. The DFC invested in the expansion of the Serra Verde rare-earth mining and processing operations ahead of USA Rare Earth’s acquisition of Serra Verde, while the Commerce Department financed the company’s U.S. mining, processing, and magnet-manufacturing chain, and other U.S. government agencies provided offtake agreements and price floors for magnetic rare-earth production. This cross-agency approach to Serra Verde, while financially complex, was ambitious, timely, and at scale. It could serve as a model for future combined economic public-private tools.

The USA Rare Earth transaction also illustrates the Trump administration’s capacity for interagency coordination in structuring unconventional investment to support critical mineral security. This required relevant expertise at the agencies involved and execution of transactions at a scale and speed unusual for the federal government, and can be used as a blueprint for projects going forward, provided transactions remain lawful, within each agency’s statutory authorities, transparent, and subject to congressional oversight.

Other regional investments illustrate the need to define those safeguards.

For example, in August 2026, the Department of Defense announced an $85.5 million equity investment in Strategic Bauxite USA, LLC, an independent private equity sponsor, together with $64.5 million in non-disclosed private co-investment, to acquire and expand a Guyanese bauxite mining operation, develop processing, and contribute to an alumina facility in the United States. The State Department will support associated infrastructure. Although the transaction advances stated regional supply chain and national security objectives, the limited public disclosure of private co-investors and lack of transaction details raise legitimate questions about the transparency and oversight standards that should govern such creative public-private transactions.

Build a Catalytic Private Finance Architecture

The United States must play to its financial strengths: the ability to mobilize deep capital markets, sophisticated institutional investors, and multilateral financial institutions, and to support an already substantial existing investment presence in the region with catalytic government investment. The U.S. government must extend its support for U.S. banking operations in the region.

Many large U.S. banks pulled back operations from certain countries over the past decade due to real risks associated with anti‒money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism controls and lack of sufficient commercial promise to maintain expensive and strict oversight. The United States should support technical assistance to local government regulators and local banks to maintain high enough standards to draw U.S. banks, their corresponding bank relationships, and payment systems back to the region. As minerals and related infrastructure projects increasingly require banking services, the United States should use the opportunity to facilitate reintegration of U.S. banks where it makes sense.

Build Infrastructure Platforms Connecting Mines to Markets

Likewise, the United States should replicate the 2022 Lobito Corridor example of co-investing in a large-scale infrastructure platform to connect critical minerals to Atlantic markets. The project, which connects the copper and cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with Angola’s Atlantic port of Lobito, included port, rail, road, electricity, and digital connectivity, and was launched in order to diversify mineral export routes away from Chinese-linked networks. The DFC worked with multiple European multilateral and bilateral public investors as well as Portuguese and Swiss companies to finance the build-out.

An excellent first step in this direction is the recently announced Andean-Atlantic Corridor in Argentina. The proposed joint U.S.-Argentine initiative aims to strengthen and modernize road, rail, power, port, pipeline, and digital infrastructure to connect critical mineral sites and energy to Atlantic ports for export. Although much of this infrastructure is already in place, it is capacity constrained and deteriorating. New investments will include power transmission and pipelines, which will likely attract private investment.

Other potential opportunities to invest in infrastructure platforms could include improving Brazil’s existing infrastructure connections between mines producing rare earths and existing Atlantic ports, and developing infrastructure in northern Colombia to better connect nickel and emerging gold and copper mines. A longer-term initiative would be to support build-out in mining, processing, power, and export infrastructure in Guyana, which has bauxite and gold mining potential but is far less developed than its neighbors. China, however, is already a significant investor in Guyana’s mining sector and is investing in mining-related processing and export infrastructure.

By catalyzing and unlocking private capital investment and pairing strategic investment in the Western Hemisphere’s mining sector, the United States can put a better, integrated value proposition on the table. It will need to include local community involvement and benefit, development finance support—together with multilateral partners—and connection to the ambition of Pax Silica.

Anchor Canada as the Essential Critical Minerals Partner

To implement a mines to markets strategy in the hemisphere, the United States must restore and strengthen its currently dire relationship with Canada. Canada is a mining giant. It is home to globally active mining companies and leads in mining expertise and innovation. It also has processing facilities the United States does not and brings capital to the table through private mining-centered markets and significant government support. On the infrastructure side, Canada is also the United States’ best ally. Canada’s pension funds lead the world in public-private infrastructure investment in Canada and around the world. The United States can only benefit from Canadian expertise, experience, and relationships.

In the five years before Trump took office, the United States funded five Canadian mine projects and processing plants, including the first cobalt refinery in North America, using the Defense Department’s Defense Production Act Title III authorities. Canada qualified in 1992 as a “domestic source,” which allows the U.S. government to provide grants, purchases, purchase commitments, loans, and loan guarantees to expand qualifying Canadian industrial capacity. The United States should significantly expand Defense Production Act support for Canadian mining, processing, recycling, and manufacturing, building on previous U.S. support for investments in cobalt, graphite, tungsten, and battery materials facilities throughout Canada.

Build a Wider Allied Investment Coalition

The U.S.-Canada partnership should form the core of a wider coalition that includes other trusted mining and technology partners active in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and European partners.This coalition can easily build on preexisting Group of Seven initiatives to coordinate joint public and private financing of mining supply chains, including for extraction, refining, and recycling and new mining technologies to use recycled tailings and waste. Each country brings rich experience with financing, risk distribution, and offtake agreements, as well as high environmental and governance standards. A joint approach also provides commodity-producing countries in the hemisphere with an alternative to depending on a single external partner.

Leapfrog China’s Chokehold: Technology, Processing, and Recycling

A hemispheric strategy should make technological cooperation and development of future mines a central pillar. U.S. national laboratories, universities, and technology companies should partner with regional institutions, mining companies, and individual projects to improve geological surveying and analysis while reducing water and energy use. In particular, the United States should support and encourage the use of innovative new U.S. mining technologies to recover minerals from tailings and retired mines and to process minerals with less environmentally toxic methods, essentially leapfrogging the traditional approach to mining.

The strategy should also support rapid development of local battery recycling, especially given the increasing prominence of electric vehicle use in the Western Hemisphere, and mineral recovery from the region’s robust mine tailings.

Strengthen Governance and Macroeconomic Foundations

Mineral investment cannot succeed without credible institutions, macroeconomic stability, and predictable rules. The United States should continue to encourage the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, International Finance Corporation, Inter-American Development Bank, IDB Invest, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to provide technical assistance on fiscal policy and revenue management, debt sustainability, procurement best practices, environmental controls, community consultation, contract transparency, and responsible state-owned enterprise governance.

Encouraging deeper relationships between the OECD and countries in the hemisphere presents a unique opportunity. The OECD is a Paris-based forum of predominantly advanced, market-based economies that conducts research, develops policy and governance standards, and works with countries to facilitate international cooperation and share lessons learned. Joining the OECD is already a mark of strong ambition to reform and improve economic outcomes and governance in member countries.

Members from the Western Hemisphere, in addition to the United States and Canada, already include Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, as well as accession candidates Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. China is not an OECD member; it is not aligned with standards supporting democracy, the rule of law, human rights, transparency, open markets, competitive neutrality, and responsible state-owned enterprises.

Approaching the region through multilateral institutional frameworks is especially important in countries confronting debt distress, governance failures, or political transition, and will be especially important in Venezuela. U.S. engagement should also continue to recognize the strategic leverage Chinese lending provides across the region. It would be shortsighted to ignore the connection between Chinese debt and the political leverage it provides, including in otherwise distinct areas of critical minerals and REE investments. The United States should encourage greater transparency, both before and during resolution of bilateral debt problems given that opaque creditor practices can obstruct IMF and World Bank programs and restructuring agreements. Such issues with bilateral Chinese policy-bank loans have posed challenges in the past.

What Needs to Change

The current approach to implementing the Western Hemisphere pivot leaves a complicated legacy, especially in Venezuela. The Trump administration adopted an interventionist approach, using military intervention to pursue strategic and political objectives: capturing the government, its petroleum industry and revenue streams, and access to mining investment. Previous efforts to reestablish constructive relations with Venezuela all fell short, leaving the country corrupt and a failed state. The ouster of Nicolás Maduro presents a real opportunity. However, a future strategy in the Western Hemisphere will have to contend with a myriad of issues facing Venezuela that will continue long after the end of the Trump administration, especially in extractive industries. Responsible development of Venezuela’s gold, iron ore, bauxite, and potentially nickel, copper, and REE mines will be difficult; they are underdeveloped, state-dominated, institutionally weak, and heavily penetrated by informal miners, criminal networks, corruption, and armed groups. Developing those resources, especially given the fragile legal basis for any contractual agreements under the current Venezuelan government, leaves a hornet’s nest of challenges for future U.S. policymakers and U.S. companies.

The Trump administration also intervened with a financial maximalist approach in Argentina’s currency markets, using Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) to support President Javier Milei’s government and taking risks with American taxpayer funds with little transparency and oversight. This sets a challenging foreign policy precedent for using Treasury’s ESF funds in high-credit-risk countries to support political allies. The Treasury’s currency intervention in Argentina was in many ways misguided; its reported purpose was to encourage a broader U.S. effort to secure preferential investment opportunities in critical minerals and reduce Chinese influence, but neither of these goals, while important, depended on a Treasury swap line. The real goal was more likely a political one, to strengthen Milei’s political standing in the run-up to Argentina’s legislative elections.

U.S., Australian, British, Canadian, French, Japanese, South African, South Korean, and Swiss companies, in addition to Chinese competitors, however, already owned or financed many of Argentina’s leading mines and development projects before Trump was elected in 2024. Argentina’s existing mining industry is expanding rapidly, while vast copper resources remain largely untapped. Increasing U.S. company investment in Argentina should be central to U.S. supply chain resilience. The U.S. government should use the full range of government support mechanisms to facilitate investment in Argentina, as long as safeguards and appropriate oversight remain in place.

Second, the Trump administration’s attacks calling Canada, a close U.S. ally and peaceful neighbor and one of the world’s mining giants, the “fifty-first U.S. state,” prompted Canada to strategically redirect its own critical mineral exports away from the United States to other markets. Often overlooked in strategic conversations about the Western Hemisphere that tend to focus only south of the border, the United States and Canada are each other’s top minerals trading partners [PDF], with almost $150 billion in annual two-way minerals and metals trade. Between tariffs and threats on sovereignty, Canadian government and public support for closer engagement with the United States fell precipitously; the fallout may complicate de-risking from China’s supply chains and implementing a whole-of-hemisphere strategy. In addition to bilateral trade in metals and minerals, Canadian mining companies have long been major foreign investors in South American mines and associated processing operations. While the United States has maintained sanctions on Cuba, Canadian miners invested in Cuban nickel and cobalt mines and processing over the past three decades, preserving an opportunity for potential future engagement. Canadian companies should be natural partners for the United States in any hemispheric mines to markets strategy moving forward.

CONCLUSION: MAKING THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE THE UNITED STATES’ “MINES TO MARKETS” SUPPLY CHAIN

The Trump administration’s pivot to the Western Hemisphere is sound for many reasons. In the case of critical minerals, geopolitical competition is reshaping global alliances. The Western Hemisphere offers the resources, capabilities, and ambition needed to build resilient supply chains and reduce vulnerability to China’s weaponization of its near-total control over key critical-mineral and REE technologies and supply chains. The United States should use this regional pivot to collaborate with and invest alongside allied countries to secure these critical mineral supply chains with urgency. As was the case during World War I and World War II, the Western Hemisphere could prove a linchpin of U.S. economic and national security.

A durable U.S. mines to markets strategy in the Western Hemisphere should replace coercive primacy with competitive attraction: offering countries a more compelling partnership than either dependence on Chinese supply chains or a narrow extract-and-export relationship with the United States. The United States should preserve the urgency, creativity, scale, and interagency coordination of recent investments in the hemisphere, while urgently restoring the relationship with Canada and centering a broader coalition with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Europe around it.

Fundamentally, this strategy must help commodity-producing countries retain more value through processing, workforce development, infrastructure, and participation in the wider technology and AI economy. To do this, the United States must begin by restoring trust. By respecting sovereignty, strengthening governance, distinguishing ordinary Chinese commerce from genuine strategic chokepoints in the mineral supply chain, and making U.S.-aligned investment the more reliable option, the United States can build resilient supply chains while renewing its leadership in the hemisphere.