On February 4, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened 54 countries and the European Commission in Washington for a single purpose: to coordinate an exit strategy from China’s stranglehold on critical minerals processing. The result wasn’t another paper agreement. It was the launch of FORGE: the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement: a multilateral framework designed to rewire global supply chains from lithium to cobalt to rare earths.
The strategic calculus here isn’t subtle. China controls the refining bottleneck for 19 of the 20 most important energy-related minerals, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s not a competitive advantage. That’s a chokepoint. And in Vice President JD Vance’s opening remarks, he didn’t mince words: the international market is “failing,” supply chains remain “brittle and exceptionally concentrated,” and prices are “persistently depressed” because of coordinated oversupply.
Welcome to the geopolitical scramble for the raw materials that power everything from EV batteries to F-35 fighter jets. This wasn’t a photo-op ministerial. It was the formalization of what industry insiders have been warning about for years: either allied economies build parallel supply chains now, or they remain structurally dependent on Beijing for the next industrial era.
The Dominance Problem Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
China doesn’t just mine critical minerals. It processes them. That distinction matters enormously. You can discover a lithium deposit in Argentina or a rare earth project in Wyoming, but if the only economically viable refining capacity sits in Jiangxi Province, you’re still dependent on Chinese industrial policy.
The numbers are grim. China accounts for roughly 60% of global rare earth mining, but closer to 90% of rare earth processing. For lithium refining, the split is similar: China controls about 75% of global lithium chemical production despite holding less than 10% of reserves. The same pattern repeats across cobalt, graphite, and manganese.
That concentration isn’t accidental. It’s the result of decades of strategic investment, subsidized overcapacity, and a willingness to tolerate environmental externalities that Western jurisdictions won’t. The result is a processing bottleneck that can’t be bypassed with a few MOUs and press releases.
Which is why FORGE represents a structural shift: or at least an attempt at one.
What FORGE Actually Is (and Isn’t)
FORGE replaces the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), a more ad hoc arrangement that struggled to move beyond project-level coordination. The new forum is explicitly plurilateral, meaning it operates outside traditional multilateral institutions like the WTO or OECD, with members opt-in based on shared strategic interests rather than geographic proximity or existing treaty obligations.
The Republic of Korea will chair FORGE through June 2026, but make no mistake: the United States is driving policy and project-level implementation. That includes setting timelines, coordinating bilateral agreements, and pushing trade mechanisms that would have been politically radioactive five years ago.
FORGE’s mandate is straightforward: coordinate policies, standards, and investment flows so that critical minerals can be mined in one jurisdiction, processed in another, and manufactured into components in a third. The goal is supply chain modularity: a system where no single country (read: China) can shut down production by restricting access to one processing node.
That’s easier said than done. You can’t build a lithium hydroxide plant in 18 months. You can’t fast-track rare earth separation facilities through permitting in two years. And you can’t magically create the skilled labor force required to operate these complex chemical processes at scale. But FORGE is betting that coordinated policy pressure, targeted subsidies, and preferential trade frameworks can accelerate what market forces alone haven’t been able to deliver.
The Mechanisms: Bilateral Deals, Trade Floors, and Project Vault
The ministerial wasn’t just talk. The U.S. signed critical minerals cooperation frameworks with 11 countries: Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. Separate frameworks were inked with the EU, Japan, and Mexico.
These aren’t symbolic. They’re structured agreements that facilitate investment screening, regulatory alignment, and preferential access to U.S. financing mechanisms: including Export-Import Bank loans and Development Finance Corporation equity stakes. The idea is to de-risk upstream mining projects in resource-rich but capital-scarce economies by pairing them with downstream processing commitments in allied jurisdictions.
But the most controversial mechanism is the proposed border-adjusted price floor for select critical minerals. This is a coordinated trade framework designed to prevent China from dumping low-cost minerals onto international markets to undercut Western production. The U.S. Trade Representative and Mexico’s Secretariat of Economy have a 60-day coordination window to hammer out design, enforcement, scope, and timelines.
If implemented, this would represent a fundamental break from decades of free-trade orthodoxy. The logic is simple: if China can flood markets with subsidized lithium carbonate or electrolytic manganese at below-cost prices, no private capital will finance competing projects in Australia, Canada, or the American Southwest. Price floors create a minimum economic threshold that makes Western production viable: even if it’s higher-cost.
The domestic component is Project Vault, a strategic stockpile initiative backed by what officials described as “the largest Export-Import Bank loan in history.” The program will purchase and warehouse cobalt, lithium, nickel, and other critical inputs to buffer against supply shocks and price manipulation. It’s the 21st-century version of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but for the materials that underpin electrification and defense manufacturing.
Taken together, these mechanisms signal a shift from asset-specific dealmaking to systemic market intervention. That’s a big departure from the rhetoric around “free and fair competition” that dominated trade policy for the last three decades.
Why This Time Might Actually Be Different
Past attempts to break China’s processing dominance have failed for predictable reasons: high capital costs, long project timelines, regulatory uncertainty, and the simple fact that Chinese state-owned enterprises can tolerate losses that private equity and public mining companies cannot.
But 2026 looks different for three reasons.
First, the policy environment has fundamentally shifted. The Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and Defense Production Act Title III funding have created a domestic subsidy architecture that didn’t exist five years ago. European nations are following suit with their own critical raw materials acts and strategic autonomy frameworks. When that policy support is coordinated through FORGE, it creates investment certainty that individual country initiatives couldn’t deliver.
Second, China’s own industrial policy is creating fractures. Rare earth export restrictions, lithium carbonate quotas, and processing permits tied to downstream manufacturing requirements have made allied governments acutely aware of supply chain vulnerability. When Beijing uses access to refined materials as a geopolitical lever: as it has repeatedly: it validates the strategic case for expensive redundancy. You can view our detailed analysis of recent rare earth export controls for context on how these restrictions are reshaping trade flows.
Third, commodity prices are cooperating. Lithium hit $6,000/ton in late 2025 before stabilizing in the mid-$7,000s. Copper is trading above $4.50/lb, and cobalt has recovered to $17/lb after bottoming at $10 in mid-2024. Those prices make marginal Western projects economically viable: especially with the subsidy stack now available. Our lithium price outlook explores how sustained demand from EVs and grid storage is supporting this recovery.
That said, the implementation timeline is brutal. Most greenfield lithium projects require 7-10 years from discovery to production. Rare earth separation facilities take 5-7 years to permit and construct in Western jurisdictions. FORGE members are trying to compress that timeline to 3-5 years through regulatory fast-tracking and modular construction, but you can’t disrupt geology or metallurgy with PowerPoint slides.
What Happens Next
The 60-day coordination period between the U.S. and Mexico will determine whether the preferential trade framework has teeth or becomes another aspirational document that goes unenforced. If border-adjusted price floors are implemented with real penalties for circumvention, they’ll reshape global trade flows. If they’re watered down to avoid WTO challenges, FORGE risks becoming MSP 2.0, well-intentioned but structurally irrelevant.
Meanwhile, bilateral agreements will move to implementation. That means site visits, feasibility studies, environmental impact assessments, and the hard work of identifying which projects get financing priority. The Export-Import Bank has already allocated $2.3 billion for critical minerals projects in its FY2026 budget, with another $1.8 billion earmarked for processing infrastructure. That’s real money, but it’s a fraction of what’s needed to build parallel supply chains at scale.
FORGE’s success will ultimately be measured not in ministerial communiqués but in metric tons of refined lithium hydroxide, cobalt sulfate, and neodymium oxide produced outside Chinese control. The alliance has identified the problem clearly. Whether it can execute the solution: across 54 jurisdictions with competing domestic interests: is the question that will define critical minerals geopolitics for the next decade.
The clock is already ticking. China isn’t standing still. It’s expanding processing capacity in Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo: jurisdictions where environmental standards are negotiable and labor costs are minimal. FORGE members are trying to compete with subsidies, policy coordination, and preferential trade access. The uncomfortable reality is that even with all those tools, Western supply chains will remain structurally dependent on Chinese processing for at least another 5-7 years.
That’s not pessimism. That’s the timeline required to build separation plants, refining trains, and the skilled workforce needed to operate them. FORGE can accelerate that process, but it can’t eliminate the physics of industrial construction or the economics of capital-intensive chemical engineering.
The 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial marked a turning point: not because it solved the China chokehold, but because 54 countries formally acknowledged that market forces alone won’t fix it. What comes next will determine whether FORGE becomes a meaningful counterweight to Chinese processing dominance or just another multilateral forum that holds annual meetings while supply chains remain unchanged.
For mining operators and policymakers, the message is clear: this is the opening act, not the resolution. The hard work starts now.
Source: Skillings Mining Review (Data as of February 17, 2026)
