Resource Hunters: How Trump and Biden’s Focus on Minerals Became Core to U.S. Foreign Policy

Edward Wong

President Donald Trump’s intense interest in Ukraine’s minerals seemed to come from out of the blue. He dispatched his Treasury secretary to Kyiv, Ukraine, this month to negotiate with Ukraine’s leader, then began ratcheting up the pressure publicly in what appeared to critics like a Mafia don’s extortion scheme. “I want security of the rare earth,” he said.

But critical minerals have been on Trump’s mind since at least 2017, when he signed an executive order on them during his first term. They also caught the attention of President Joe Biden. And Trump’s recent comments on Ukraine’s assets were not the first time in his new term that he has mentioned taking over a country’s mineral holdings.

The president has talked about acquiring minerals in Greenland and Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada told a group of business leaders that Trump’s focus on Canada’s minerals meant his threats to annex the country were “a real thing.” Seizing mineral wealth overseas has become a core foreign policy goal of Trump’s and an impetus for his most imperialistic remarks since taking office. His instincts hark back to the drives of fallen empires, when resource extraction motivated rulers to expand territory.

On Tuesday, after nearly two weeks of difficult talks, Ukrainian and U.S. officials said they had reached agreement on a framework for sharing revenue from Ukraine’s critical minerals.

Critical minerals are nonfuel substances that are essential for energy technologies and at high risk of supply chain disruption, according to the U.S. Energy Department. They are found around the world — including in Chile and Argentina, the Chinese-controlled Tibetan plateau, and Congo — and are integral to common technologies (electric car batteries) and specialized ones (missile systems). In 2022, the U.S. Geological Survey released a list of 50 critical minerals that ranges from aluminum to zirconium.

Because of competition with China, the search for critical minerals has been important to the United States for nearly a decade. Biden, on the final overseas trip of his presidency, visited a U.S.-supported railway in Angola that would help transport critical minerals from Central Africa to the coast for export.

State Department officials in his administration earlier set up a group of allied nations to discuss creating or reinforcing critical mineral supply chains outside China. And they established a sister forum so that mineral-rich countries could speak to potential client nations and foreign companies about developing mines and processing plants.

Ukraine, Greenland and Canada were all part of that. In fact, Ukraine and the United States came close to signing an agreement last fall in which Ukraine would have promised to give the United States a heads-up on potential projects, allowing American companies or those of allied nations enough lead time to bid for contracts. The State Department would also have given Ukraine technical assistance on mapping and writing regulations. That has not been Trump’s approach.

“Trump and his aides are talking in a way that is unnecessary,” said Jose W. Fernandez, who was an architect of the State Department’s initiatives on critical minerals in the Biden administration. “These are countries that want investment. But they want partnerships. They are not looking for a colonial relationship.”

He added that these countries were attracted to American financial and commercial partners because they did not like more coercive options, including proposals from China.

In September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine began presenting a “victory plan” against Russia to allied governments as well as to Trump, who was running for president, that, among other things, offered partnerships on critical minerals.

Fernandez was scheduled to sign a memorandum of understanding in October with a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Svyrydenko, the State Department said in an email sent to reporters at the time. But on Oct. 29, the day of the scheduled signing, she did not show up in Washington.

Svyrydenko was then supposed to sign the agreement at a Ukraine reconstruction conference in Warsaw, Poland, on Nov. 13, but again did not appear. By then Trump had won the election, and Ukrainian officials told U.S. diplomats that they preferred to wait to sign an agreement with the incoming administration, according to two former U.S. officials and a Ukrainian official with knowledge of the events.

Ukrainian officials had already been talking with some foreign businesspeople, including Ronald S. Lauder, a cosmetics heir who is a friend of Trump’s, about investment opportunities in Ukraine’s mineral sector.

Earlier this month, Zelenskyy balked at the terms that Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, presented to him in Kyiv. The proposal called for Ukraine to give the United States half of its revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as earnings from ports and other infrastructure.

Trump also initially demanded $500 billion for the United States. He said America deserved payment for the billions in weapons and budget aid it gave Ukraine during the Biden administration, even though the amount was a tiny fraction of annual U.S. federal spending. Critics called Trump’s terms rapacious, colonialist and mercantilist.

U.S. officials tempered some of the demands while continuing to pressure Svyrydenko and other Ukrainian negotiators to sign a deal. The current draft framework has a vague reference to security guarantees for Ukraine, which Zelenskyy has said are essential for preventing Russia from trying to launch another invasion after any future ceasefire to end the war. Trump said Wednesday that he does not plan to give “very much” of a guarantee.

China has been on a yearslong push to develop global dominance in extracting and processing critical minerals. At the same time, the United States has had to import substantial amounts of critical minerals for commercial and military use.

A report released this month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that the United States imports 50% to 100% of each of 41 of the 50 critical minerals listed by the U.S. Geological Survey. China is the top producer for 29 of the minerals.

The disruptions in global supply chains during the coronavirus pandemic heightened anxieties within the U.S. government. Biden issued an executive order in early 2021 that, among other things, told the defense secretary to identify risks to the flow of critical minerals from abroad.

The next year, Fernandez, then the top economic official at the State Department, oversaw the agency’s creation of the Minerals Security Partnership, a group of 15 nations looking to broaden global supply chains for critical minerals. The Trump White House and the Indian government mentioned that group in a joint statement when Trump met this month with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, saying their nations, both members of the group, could collaborate on critical minerals.

Last year, the State Department created a sister forum with 15 producer nations, including Ukraine and Greenland, looking for investors to help grow their industries.

“The bottom line is Ukraine has been pursuing investments for a long time,” Fernandez said. So has Greenland.

The forum held a meeting in November in Nuuk, Greenland, where companies presented seven projects in the country to about 100 potential investors who called in by video.

In his first term, Trump became fixated on the idea of buying Greenland after prodding by Lauder, the cosmetics heir.

Another Trump business ally, Howard Lutnick, the president’s commerce secretary, has ties to a mining project in Greenland, via an investment made by his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, in a New York-based company called Critical Metals Corp., according to securities filings reviewed by The New York Times.