Interest in critical mineral reserves has accelerated across the U.S. and allied governments, driven by concerns about concentrated supply chains, rising demand, and, most prominently, China’s weaponization of supply bottlenecks and other non-market practices. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced Project Vault, a public-private stockpile intended to support demand for non-CCP critical minerals and ensure access during supply shocks. In the 119th Congress, legislation was introduced to establish a strategic critical minerals reserve to strengthen domestic and allied supply chains and market resilience. Internationally, the G7 committed in June 2026 to expanding domestic stockpiling capacity and cooperating on its use. Stockpiles now span the globe, with more in development.
Greater coordination of reserves through a common framework could reduce competition for scarce materials and strengthen collective resilience.
International Reserve Coordination as Part of the Solution:
A well-designed reserve[1] is one tool to mitigate supply chain risks. It acts as a backstop against CCP export controls, ensuring U.S. firms maintain access to critical mineral inputs during supply disruptions. If scaled appropriately, it can also counter market manipulation—through market transactions or contracting mechanisms that support non-CCP producers when prices are distorted—and catalyze demand for alternative supply chains.
National reserves can mitigate localized supply disruptions, but for many mineral markets they lack the scale to meaningfully counter the CCP’s market power. Weathering larger shocks and market manipulation—such as predatory pricing or engineered scarcity—requires reserves large enough to move global supply and prices. International coordination can provide that scale collectively, sharing the administrative burden and cost of maintaining a large reserve across all members.
International cooperation helps in six ways:
- Expand available resources: Critical mineral resources and value chains are geographically fragmented. Structuring the reserve around each member’s comparative advantages allows the coalition to pool resources and capacities, creating a larger and more resilient supply base than any single country could assemble on its own.
- Safeguard trading partners: Market disruptions targeting even a few trading partners can threaten all participants in global mineral markets. Coordinating across members helps secure supply across the bloc and leverage shared resources.
- Deter market manipulation: Combined reserve depth changes the calculus for a dominant adversary. When reserves span multiple allied economies, no single act of coercion can exhaust the coalition’s capacity to respond, giving the reserve real deterrent value.
- Drive demand for alternative supply chains: Coordinated reserve purchasing, contracting, and shared replenishment requirements aggregate demand across member markets, giving non-CCP producers predictable demand.
- Reduce cost and duplication: Pooling reserves spreads the capital burden across members and avoids unnecessarily duplicating storage, processing, or market infrastructure a partner already has.
- Avoid uncoordinated stockpiling risks: The U.S., EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India have each announced or implemented critical mineral reserve programs. Uncoordinated, these efforts can work against each other, straining supply, amplifying volatility, and intensifying competition among partners and industries.
A Framework for Action
Congress and the administration should develop a framework for an enduring international reserve coordination framework.
For example, Congress could direct the Secretary of State, in coordination with relevant departments and agencies, to coordinate U.S. critical mineral reserve and stockpiling efforts with international partners, including through existing and emerging plurilateral initiatives.
More prescriptively, the Secretary could be directed to establish an international board to coordinate member countries’ reserve and stockpiling activities. It could also establish a U.S. industry advisory panel to inform U.S. representatives to the board and ensure that coordination reflects market needs.
A board could seek to coordinate across three dimensions:
- Board governance: Establishes the structure and rules of coordination, including participation requirements, reserve targets, transparency & traceability measures, communication protocols, and the mix of eligible reserve instruments, such as physical reserves and contractual instruments.
- Crisis prevention/response: Establishes early-warning data sharing and a rapid-response protocol for member countries to jointly act when a geopolitical crisis or acute supply shock threatens members’ mineral supplies.
- Market and supply response: Coordinates joint efforts to counter dumping, export restrictions, and other market distortions, using tools such as collective purchasing, coordinated releases, offtake agreements, and advance market commitments.
Such a mechanism would help institutionalize coordination with partners and complement existing administration efforts, such as FORGE, Pax Silica, and the ATCM.
[1] “Reserve” is used in this post to encompass both stockpiling and reserve efforts