US Unveils Critical Minerals Preferential Trade Zone Plan at 55-Nation Ministerial

Commodities have long been wielded as geopolitical levers—from the 1939 US stockpile program aiming to secure rubber and tin, to OPEC’s 1973 oil embargo that re-priced energy politics for decades. Vance’s proposal echoes those episodes: a cartel-like effort by consumers/producers to manage prices and insulate supply, but directed this time at lithium, cobalt and rare earths—the lifeblood of AI chips and electrification. It reflects two converging megatrends: (1) de-globalisation and friend-shoring as states internalise lessons from COVID-19 and the 2025 Chinese export curbs; and (2) the shift from hydrocarbons to mineral-intensive technologies, where control of processing, not wells, confers power. If the bloc matures into a rules-bearing institution, it could rewrite trade norms much as the 1947 GATT did, yet along narrower, strategic lines. Over a 100-year horizon the move may mark the start of a bifurcated resource order—one supply chain orbit anchored in Washington, another in Beijing—reviving spheres-of-influence economics last seen before the 1990s hyper-global era. Whether this moment endures hinges on enforcement and on rival producers’ ability to scale mines without repeating the boom-bust cycles that doomed earlier US rare-earth ventures in the 1980s.