Trump Unveils $12 B 'Project Vault' Strategic Critical-Minerals Reserve

Project Vault reprises the logic of the 1975 U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and echoes Beijing’s own metal stockpiles formalised in the 2010s: when China choked rare-earth exports to Japan in 2010 and again to the U.S. in 2025, it exposed the leverage embedded in resource concentration. The new U.S. reserve signals a broader turn toward state-backed industrial policy and resource nationalism that has been growing since the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-era supply shocks. Whether it reshapes power or merely blunts emergencies will hinge on processing capacity, not inventory—a lesson from Britain’s tin buffer stock collapse in 1985. Viewed on a 100-year horizon, the move underscores the shift from oil to minerals as the strategic commodity of the digital-electric age, accelerating the slow decoupling of Sino-American supply chains and the re-emergence of stockpiling as a central tool of great-power competition.