And resource-rich countries are eager to come out on top.

Producer countries want “to take maximum advantage of this moment,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources in the Biden administration.

It’s an all-too familiar story for many of the world’s mineral-rich powers—such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, and South Africa—which have been flooded by interest before and carry fraught legacies of extraction and exploitation.

“Resource-rich countries have been used as extractive giants,” said Heidi Crebo-Rediker, who was the U.S. State Department’s first chief economist under the Obama administration and is currently at the Council on Foreign Relations. Many “have not seen the benefits of the extraction of many resources over many decades,” she said.

This time around, they want to reap the rewards.

A photo released in 1960 shows a mining site in the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).AFP via Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump has made no secret of his mineral ambitions as he has scoured the world for new deals, from Ukraine to Japan. In a clear signal of U.S. priorities, earlier this year U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened the first-ever critical minerals ministerial, where U.S. officials pitched representatives from more than 50 countries on a global minerals trading bloc.

As these resources are increasingly seen as a vital national security issue globally, the United States is far from the only power to go all-in on minerals. That surge in interest has been welcomed by the world’s mineral-rich, who are eager to use their growing geopolitical leverage to take greater control over their strategic industries in a wave of resource nationalism.

“Developing countries very much are trying to engage with these different powers,” said Eric Olander, the editor in chief of the China-Global South Project. “The key question is: Who’s actually going to get something done?”

The answer to that question has long been China, which after decades of pouring resources and investments into the sector has now established a commanding chokehold over the world’s mineral supply chains. Beijing is the biggest financier of global critical mineral projects, according to the AidData research group at the College of William and Mary, which tracked how China has doled out some $98 billion for extraction and processing across 47 countries for more than two decades.

“The Chinese have shown that they’ve got an ecosystem of finance, state-backed insurance, and state-backed mining companies that can go ahead and get things done,” Olander said.

But now, more and more offers are on the table, and no one wants to be tied down to just one trade partner.

In dealing with Trump in particular, countries have learned that leveraging their mineral riches can help curry favor and unlock investment. Add elections into the equation, and governments have even more interest in harnessing their resource wealth and foreign interest to score political wins at home.

It’s against this backdrop that the Trump administration has chased deals around the world, including with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the United States helped broker a peace agreement that would also give American companies access to minerals. (Washington, in turn, has remained quiet as Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has floated bypassing the country’s two-term limit for a third term in office in what critics say would be a blatant power grab.)

“As long as the U.S. has access to critical minerals, nothing else matters for the [Trump] administration now,” said Christian-Géraud Neema, the Africa editor of the China-Global South Project.

Yet Trump’s transactional approach hasn’t always won friends. In one of the most charged cases, talks between the United States and Zambia soured last month amid a diplomatic spat that saw the latter accuse the Trump administration of conditioning health aid on mineral access.

Zambia is a copper powerhouse and part of the Lobito Corridor, the sprawling railway project that Washington has long touted as its answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. With elections looming in August, the Zambian government had been eagerly courting overseas investment in its bid to pump up copper production by 2031.

But in a sharply worded six-page statement, then-Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe accused Washington of insisting on preferential mineral access and tying a minerals deal to about $2 billion in health aid.

“The Zambian Government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others,” he said.

U.S. officials have pushed back. “There are no critical minerals provisions in any of the America First Global Health MOUs including the one we have proposed with Zambia,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email to Foreign Policy.

“The proposed MOU offered to Zambia is based solely on data-driven impact and accountability metrics and is intended to build durable healthcare infrastructure that will empower Zambia to reduce its dependence on external health assistance,” the spokesperson added. “The Department continues to discuss a health MOU with Zambian authorities, and we are optimistic that a positive result will be reached.”

Across the Atlantic, the United States has also been pressing Brazil for a critical minerals agreement, to no avail. The South American country has a long history of gold mining and claims the world’s second-largest rare earth reserves, which Brasília has previously tried—and largely failed—to unlock.

Washington and Brasília have for years mulled critical-mineral cooperation, although the Trump administration has in recent months reportedly ramped up the pressure for a deal.

But Brazilian officials have thus far balked at Washington’s push for preferential mineral access over China and signing any kind of exclusive agreement, the New York Times has reported. Brasília has also made its global ambitions clear as it has sought mineral cooperation with India, South Korea, Japan, and European countries.

Still, U.S. companies have made big inroads. USA Rare Earth recently announced a $2.8 billion deal that would see it purchase Serra Verde, a Brazilian company that owns a rare earths mine and processing plant. That mine is notably rich in heavy rare earths, the very materials that China has weaponized its processing chokehold over in its recent trade spat with the United States.

“I believe Brazil is sitting right at the nexus of the critical supplies we need outside of China to fuel the world’s economy,” Barbara Humpton, the CEO of USA Rare Earth, told Foreign Policy in April.

There may be some hurdles ahead, especially as the country gears up for elections for later this year. Brazilian politicians have railed against the deal, citing national security, and Brazil’s antitrust watchdog announced last month that it would begin a probe into the proposed acquisition, including by reviewing its terms for a 15-year U.S. offtake agreement.

USA Rare Earth declined to comment.

If Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s own words are any indication, the country is proceeding with caution. “After taking everything we had, now they want to own the critical minerals and rare earths that we have,” Lula declared in March, referring to an unspecified “they.” “They want to colonize us again.”

U.S. President Donald Trump (center) gestures as he hosts the signing ceremony of a peace deal with Rwandan President Paul Kagame (left) and Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington on Dec. 4, 2025.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Now, though, the world’s mineral-rich are no longer content with simply exporting their raw materials—they want to process them, too. But the road ahead isn’t easy.

“One big issue is: Can any of the extraction be structured in a way that better provides for the countries themselves?” said Crebo-Rediker, the Council on Foreign Relations expert. “And then the bigger question: Are countries able to move up the value chain?”

Indonesia wrote the playbook years ago when it banned exports of raw nickel and imposed other commodity export restrictions as part of its effort to build out processing and manufacturing capacity and attract investment. Jakarta is now going even further, with new plans to establish a state-run agency that would centralize the country’s commodity exports and tighten control over strategic sectors.

Other countries are watching closely. Indonesia’s measures have inspired similar moves by African governments, who are increasingly pushing for investments further down the value chain in processing, refining, and manufacturing—not just in exploration, extraction, and mining, said Zainab Usman, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Zimbabwe has halted all exports of raw minerals and lithium concentrates. Ghana plans to halt exports of raw mineral ores by 2030. Mozambique is mulling legal reforms that would give the state a stake in mining projects and impose mineral export restrictions, following similar steps in Mali and Burkina Faso.

“These African countries now have decided they want to do things differently,” Usman said. “They want to see if they can export processed and refined minerals instead of the unprocessed ore.”

Big challenges loom. Engineering new supply chains requires expertise, technology, time, and sustained capital, but it’s not so easy to attract long-term investment or build out resilient supply chains when commodity prices can whipsaw—as they are known to do—and when there are questions of good governance and political stability.

Past exploits reveal just how challenging it can be to unlock mineral wealth. From Venezuela to the Pacific island nation of Nauru, a long list of governments have tried and failed to turn their resource riches into economic engines, as their industries have fallen to volatile prices, mismanagement, and corruption.

For all of the momentum in the space, there’s also no quick answer to challenging Beijing’s processing might, and it’s not clear whether the United States or other countries will follow through on their commitments.

“The U.S. and Europe, in almost all of their deals, keep focusing on the extraction side of the equation,” Olander said. “There is almost no talk about the refining and processing side, where China still has a formidable chokehold over huge parts of the critical mineral supply chain.”

And then there’s the price that local communities pay. Mining is a notoriously dirty sector globally, with a long track record of pollution, environmental destruction, safety risks, and fatalities, all of which have sparked resistance from communities worldwide.

That pushback has stranded some projects: Last year, tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Ecuador in demonstration against a Canadian firm’s gold-mining project, arguing that it would negatively impact a vital water reserve. That public pressure ultimately pushed Ecuador’s government to revoke its environmental license to the company.

Mining and the downstream development have a “really intense environmental and social cost,” said Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College whose latest book is Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

But with the global resource race moving full-speed ahead, these countries’ leaders appear laser-focused on expansion.

“A lot of these countries in Africa and Latin America, they need jobs, they need infrastructure investment, they need economic growth—and minerals are their best avenue to do that,” said Gracelin Baskaran, the director of the Critical Minerals Security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.