FORGE, the US-backed critical minerals trade and investment coalition, is an attempt to turn allied critical-minerals policy into a functioning market by linking trade tools, financing, offtake and stockpiles. The building blocks are increasingly in place, but significant obstacles remain. Its hardest task is not identifying strategic projects, but making them commercially rational for private actors still operating in global commodity markets.
Businesses do not need convincing that critical minerals are strategic. These materials sit at the base of defense systems, power infrastructure, semiconductors, batteries, advanced manufacturing, and telecommunications. The risk is well documented and understood. What is not yet resolved is whether secure, non-Chinese supply chains can be coordinated, financed, and scaled before the next disruption causes lasting national security and economic damage.
The bottleneck is not geology. Mines outside China exist across a range of strategic materials. The harder problem is what comes after extraction: refining, separation, precursor production, and the intermediate manufacturing steps that turn raw output into usable industrial inputs.
China’s advantage is not simply control of deposits, but much of the processing infrastructure and pricing environment, and, by extension, the offtake of upstream ore and mineral concentrate. In practice, state-backed processors can run at a loss long enough to push prices below what new entrants can survive, then set the benchmark prices everyone else must finance against. A refinery in an allied country is therefore competing not against a market price, but against a price Beijing is willing to hold down for as long as it takes.
In response, national industrial policy tools have multiplied across the allied world. Yet they have not produced a functioning allied market, as these market shifts take years to develop even with the best coordination.
The most ambitious multilateral attempt to date to change that market dynamic is FORGE: the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement. Announced at the inaugural U.S. Critical Minerals Ministerial in February 2026, FORGE is the Trump administration’s successor to the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP). Rather than a traditional coordination forum, FORGE is designed as a plurilateral coalition: a preferential trade-and-investment zone for critical minerals, with coordinated price floors intended to counter adversarial market manipulation. In a sense, it is designed to define what the Western-aligned supply chain is and how it will operate.
FORGE’s 17 members span very different positions in the minerals value chain, from resource-rich Australia and Canada to major processing and downstream manufacturing economies such as Japan, South Korea and India, alongside key European partners. Aligning those different interests across trade policy, investment screening, and financing is central to the initiative’s ambition. The open question is whether FORGE can assemble the right building blocks to create an allied supply chain resilient to that manipulation – and do so fast enough to matter.
What FORGE is trying to fix
FORGE matters only if it connects what is currently fragmented: project pipelines, financing, offtake commitments, trade tools, and strategic reserves. It is not a replacement for the 27 bilateral critical minerals frameworks the United States now has in place, but it is envisioned to be the architecture that sits around them and gives them cumulative force.
The trade dimension is the most important near-term signal. On February 26, 2026, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) published a Federal Register notice requesting public comment on the design of a plurilateral Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals, raising price floors, tariffs, and other border mechanisms as tools for building a “resilient and non-distorted marketplace among aligned trading partners.” That followed the January Section 232 action directing Commerce and USTR to pursue such arrangements.
The logic is straightforward. Price floors and tariff preferences, applied consistently among allied partners, could change the investment calculus for midstream capacity. A refinery or separation plant that cannot be financed against opaque commodity benchmarks becomes more financeable if offtake is guaranteed at a known floor and its output is protected. That link between trade architecture and project bankability is what earlier initiatives, including the MSP, never fully achieved.
Project Vault adds a demand anchor. Announced on 2 February 2026, it is a public-private stockpile covering all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) critical minerals list. The initiative is backed by a proposed US$10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) – the largest in the bank’s 92-year history – alongside nearly $2 billion in private capital pledges from Hartree Partners, Mercuria, and Traxys. Companies make long-term financial commitments to secure materials at fixed prices; the government provides physical storage, making feedstock available as needed. Done right, it can provide both a price signal and demand commitment for new allied production. To take this from an announcement to physical stockpiles, however, will require significant market buy-in and coordination, with first movers willing to take on the risk.
The central tension FORGE is unlikely to resolve is that Washington is asking partners to build long-term supply chains around a U.S.-led trade architecture while imposing broad tariffs on many of those same partners and treating multilateral commitments as contingent on bilateral leverage. The same tariff tools envisioned to enforce FORGE price floors have been used unilaterally against the very economies being asked to co-invest.
A price floor is credible only if partners believe it will serve their collective interest rather than become leverage in unrelated disputes. That confidence does not currently exist, and until it does, FORGE risks becoming an architecture allied capitals support in principle but hesitate to build around.
What FORGE actually is, institutionally
So, what is FORGE, really? In our view, the initiative sits somewhere between a convening forum and the early stages of a managed allied market for critical minerals. Which one it becomes depends on whether governments follow through with the process discipline and mutual trust that turning intentions into investment requires.
At (re)launch, FORGE was described as a forum that would "collaborate at the policy and project levels," inheriting the MSP Finance Network as its primary private-sector engagement channel while remaining government-led. In July 2026, the U.S. took over the rotating chair from South Korea and released non-binding Guiding Principles pointing toward working groups and coordination among development finance institutions. The next step is specifying how both will work in practice and beginning that work in earnest.
FORGE's ambition is larger than the MSP's, which was broadly criticized for identifying projects without moving capital. FORGE is designed to do more: align trade tools, price signals, and financing across member governments and connect them to private-sector offtake and investment decisions. The inherited Finance Network already brings together DFIs, export credit agencies, and multilateral development banks. What is missing is clarity on how private sponsors access that coordination, and who decides which projects receive support.
How FORGE organizes its working groups will determine whether companies can engage purposefully and without confusion. A plurilateral selection method, clear institutional ownership, and a defined path from identification to financing are what separate real architecture from a well-attended meeting. The building blocks are present; FORGE now has to connect them.
Where implementation gets difficult
Previous allied minerals initiatives have often stalled between announcement and implementation, and FORGE faces the same sequencing problem. Four things need to happen:
A priority map identifying which minerals and geographies come first
A shared project pipeline that member governments and private sponsors can build around
A bankability framework specifying what combination of offtake commitments, guarantees, and tax credits makes a given project financeable
A functioning private-sector interface that gives companies a clear way in.
Many of the building blocks are there, but they will require continued strong coordination among a historically disjointed group of aligned trading partners.
The U.S.-Mexico Action Plan on Critical Minerals offers a useful working model. It identifies priority minerals, outlines the architecture for border-adjusted price floors, and brings regulatory cooperation, investment screening, crisis response, and stockpiling into a single framework. That is the level of specificity FORGE needs to replicate at the plurilateral level.
However, the broader context of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) illustrates the trade tensions to which FORGE is exposed: the U.S. has declined to renew the agreement in its current form, pushing it into annual reviews following the July 2026 joint review trigger and a more uncertain negotiation phase. Canada presents an even sharper illustration of the problem. Escalating U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods, including outright import bans and looming tariff increases on steel, aluminum, and autos, have pushed bilateral relations to a breaking point, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatening to cut off critical mineral and electricity exports to the U.S. in retaliation. Canada is one of the most important U.S.-allied sources of nickel, cobalt, and uranium, and a partner whose cooperation is essential to any functioning FORGE architecture. Recent announcements by the Trump administration of plans to purchase potash from Belarus (instead of Canada) further complicate the situation.
The risk is not abstract: a FORGE designed to build resilient allied supply chains cannot function if its closest geographic partner is simultaneously threatening mineral export bans in response to U.S. trade policy. The question is whether critical-minerals coordination can advance through bilateral and plurilateral tools while the wider trade architecture is being reopened. The U.S.-Mexico Action Plan suggests a path forward, but only if governments specify mechanisms rather than simply endorsing principles.
What an allied market could actually look like
Full harmonization across FORGE members is unlikely in the near term, and defining success that way sets the initiative up to fail.
A more realistic, still consequential outcome is modular alignment: common definitions of eligible allied supply; mutual recognition of quality and traceability standards to avoid duplicative compliance; coordinated tariff treatment and rules of origin for key minerals and materials; shared stockpiling principles that connect national reserves to a common demand signal; and joint offtake frameworks that give private sponsors enough certainty to commit capital.
The likely first step is not a comprehensive allied minerals market, but pilot arrangements around a narrow group of minerals where import dependence is acute and downstream demand is concentrated enough to structure. Specific rare earth supply chains, alongside cobalt and graphite, are the obvious candidates, although the appropriate mechanisms will differ across materials. Getting those pilots right matters more than announcing a broader architecture that cannot yet be operationalized.
What businesses should watch
For businesses across the minerals value chain, the immediate question is not whether FORGE ultimately delivers on its full ambition, but whether the direction of travel is clear enough to inform positioning today. Increasingly, it is.
Miners stand to benefit most directly if price-support mechanisms and aggregation tools materialize, particularly for projects in allied jurisdictions that have struggled to compete against Chinese benchmark pricing and need financing support. The signal from FORGE, Project Vault, and the bilateral action plans is consistent: governments are willing to put a floor under allied production. The timing and mechanics remain uncertain; the intent does not.
Processors and refiners may ultimately be the biggest beneficiaries, albeit selectively. If FORGE succeeds in reframing the midstream as the real chokepoint, coordinated support for refining and separation capacity becomes the logical next step. Companies operating or developing midstream assets in member countries should engage now with the financing and offtake frameworks taking shape.
OEMs and industrial buyers face a different calculation. Pressure to demonstrate resilient, non-Chinese sourcing is growing amongst customers, regulators, and investors. Joining allied supply arrangements at a modestly higher cost is increasingly the lower-risk option compared with supply disruption or reputational exposure.
Investors should watch whether FORGE generates contractable support: guarantees, offtake commitments, stockpile purchases, tariff protection, and tax credits that materially change project economics. That will determine whether the architecture produces bankable deals or remains a policy statement.
Traders could also see their role expand if stockpiling and strategic reserves create structured demand signals rather than spot-market noise. As the initiative develops, their role across commercial markets and government-backed strategic reserves may attract greater scrutiny, particularly around pricing and arbitrage, as they may be forced to pick sides.
The bottom line is the same for all of them. Do not treat FORGE as a market creator yet. Treat it as a signal of where allied governments intend to build a managed market, and position accordingly. The window to shape that market, rather than simply respond to it, is open now.
About the authors
Will Thompson is a Managing Director at FGS Global.
Peter Huette is an Associate Director at Veracity Worldwide, a strategic intelligence and advisory firm, specializing in critical minerals, technology, and geopolitical risk.