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President Trump’s intense interest in Ukraine’s minerals seemed to come from out of the blue. He dispatched his Treasury secretary to Kyiv 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 Mr. 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 Joseph R. Biden Jr.
And Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 the Democratic Republic of Congo — and are integral to common technologies (electric car batteries) and specialized ones (missile systems).
Because of competition with China, the search for critical minerals has been important to the United States for nearly a decade.
Mr. Biden, on the final overseas trip of his presidency, visited a U.S.-supported railway in Angola that would help transport critical minerals 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 of China and established a forum so that mineral-rich countries could speak to potential client nations and foreign companies about developing mines and processing plants.
Some foreign leaders tried to work this angle. Ashraf Ghani, then the president of Afghanistan, promoted his country’s mineral wealth to Mr. Trump so that the American president would keep U.S. troops in the nation, as the government battled a Taliban insurgency.
But minerals stayed on Mr. Trump’s mind.
In September 2020, he signed an executive order pushing agencies to address the country’s “undue reliance” on “foreign adversaries” for critical minerals, namely China.
The disruptions in global supply chains during the coronavirus pandemic heightened anxieties within the U.S. government. Mr. 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.
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 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.
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