Trumpian State Capitalism

From acquiring government equity stakes in private industries and threatening to seize defense contractors, to signing revenue-sharing agreements with chipmakers and announcing a slew of tariffs and protectionist measures, the Trump administration has stunned with its ostensible embrace of state ownership and overt politicization of the economy. At any rate, these policies are now signature forms of Trumpism. “We should take stakes in companies when people need something,” he recently declared. “I think we should take stakes in companies. Now, some people would say that doesn’t sound very American. Actually, I think it is very American.”

The distinctive features of Trumpian state capitalism, but also its fundamental limits, contradictions, and fault lines, are particularly manifest in the US’s quest to secure “critical minerals,” a growing catalogue of raw materials that the government deems essential to national security and economic functioning, and at risk of supply disruption. Since July 2025, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the US International Development Finance Corporation, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and the Department of War have committed approximately $25 billion in financing to critical mining firms and projects in the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Jamaica. In February 2026, Trump unveiled Project Vault, a $12 billion critical mineral stockpile, and JD Vance announced that the US is seeking to create a new critical minerals trading bloc “among allies and partners, one that guarantees American access to American industrial might while also expanding production across the entire zone.”

As the US aggressively promotes a global race to secure core resources, reconfigure domestic and cross-border supply chains, and construct alliances to challenge Chinese dominance in these sectors, defining in practice the features of Trumpian state capitalism, it will also confront its fundamental limits, contradictions, and faultlines. The interventionist strategy for critical minerals security comes amid a global resurgence in state capitalist policy making, and immediately following the advent of green industrial strategy in Washington. The Trumpian deployment of these economic tactics will reshape the struggle for sovereign green development in the global South and the terrain of progressive politics in the US itself.

Putting Trumpian state capitalism in its place

For all his state capitalist showmanship, Trump is in reality a late adopter. For at least the last two decades, governments across the world have re-embraced state ownership, often in combination with various forms of industrial policy, and often to geostrategic ends. This marks a reinvention of state capitalism in the twenty-first century. State-owned corporate entities such as state-owned policy banks, sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises and state-backed venture capital funds have proliferated, and the amount of capital and assets they control has vastly increased. As of early 2026, sovereign wealth funds globally manage a record high of approximately $15 trillion in assets, up from less than $1 trillion in 2000. State-owned enterprises control even more: $54 trillion in assets, the equivalent of almost half of global GDP, which is up from about $13 trillion in 2000.1While there is no doubt that China weighs heavily in these statistics, a vast body of academic and policy-oriented scholarship (not least reports by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other global governance institutions) shows that this expansion is neither reducible to the rise of China, nor to the ‘rise’ of the BRICS and other emerging economies. These various state-owned corporate entities originate from countries across the income spectrum and from diverse types of political regimes, and their presence is highly significant in OECD countries as well. Between 2017 and 2023, the rate of adoption of industrial policies increased ninefold. Trade restrictions are also a key component of the state capitalist agenda. Tariffs on imports as well as bans, quotas, or other conditions on exports have sharply risen over the past decade.

This quantitative shift represents a transformation of economic organization. The political significance of state intervention has become unmoored from twentieth century ideological associations—with socialism, anticolonial governments, social democracy, fascism, and so on—and is instead adopted by regimes of all stripes. In a partial reversal of the tremendous waves of privatization and market liberalization that characterized peak neoliberalism from the 1980s to the early 2000s, governments have re-embraced state ownership to secure industrial and development objectives in the face of global turbulence and in response to intensifying geoeconomic competition, resulting in an unprecedented concentration of capital and assets in the hands of state-owned entities.

Responsive to and embedded in global trends, what makes Trumpian state capitalism unique? Prior US governments have consolidated and weaponized US financial and technological networks, and the Biden administration in particular advanced a market-friendly industrial policy, relying on tax credits for private sector investments in green technologies and critical minerals, paired with rebates for consumers. Trump’s variant infuses the immense capacities of the US state with personalistic ties while also openly advancing outright government ownership beyond what Biden ever attempted.

The latter marks a watershed in the trajectory of American statecraft. It is not without precedent. US government ventures have famously produced technological breakthroughs with broad commercial application: New Deal institutions engaged in some cases in direct ownership and control when advancing the mixed economy, World War II saw the expansion of planning and coordinating roles of the federal government through institutions such as the War Production Board, the 1950 Defense Production Act provided the means for state direction of private production, and so on. Since the 1950s, in peacetime, the federal government has repeatedly acquired equity stakes in the financial sector and large corporations. These interventions, which provide the legal basis for Trump’s own ownership moves, were linked to temporary bailout programs. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), established in 1975 as a government stockpile to aid in price stabilization and supply security, perhaps provides the closest precedent for a state-owned and -administered asset created for geostrategic and developmentalist ends.

The critical minerals laboratory

Extractive sectors are uniquely synonymous with muscular state intervention—even within avowedly free market economies. Historically and in the present, these interventions take a number of forms: nationalization and asset expropriation; state-owned enterprises; joint ventures between state-owned enterprises and private sector firms; contract negotiations between corporations and state agencies for leases or concessions; required permits and licenses to explore and develop mines, as well as to close and remediate them; and a growing set of social, environmental, and labor regulations including, in some jurisdictions, the requirement of Indigenous consultation or consent. From accessing the mineral asset itself, to establishing the basic parameters of investment, to managing the socio-environmental impacts of extraction, state agencies are involved in almost every aspect of the process. Today, entirely new state capacities are being fashioned to address—and, in so doing, exacerbate—the geopolitical salience of the supply chains for new technologies, all of which begin with mineral extraction.

What explains the current policy obsession with critical minerals? The contemporary critical minerals consensus can be traced back to multiple recent events and processes: the commodity boom that began at the beginning of this millennium and lasted until 2014, the economic ascent of China and the threat posed to global North technological primacy, the rapid growth and diffusion of computing and green technologies, and the Covid-19 pandemic, which illuminated the fragility of global supply chains when confronted with major shocks—a fragility only underscored by subsequent geopolitical conflagrations.

The concern about both the supply and the price movements of a wide range of mineral inputs first surfaced during the commodity boom, itself driven by fast-paced industrialization and urbanization in China—but the worry remained confined to corners of the US and EU administrative states. That changed as elite anxiety in those regions intensified with China’s ascent up the ladder from low-wage assembly and manufacturing into the most important frontiers of technological innovation.

The US government first began cataloging an official list of what it called “critical minerals,” and stockpiling them, in the leadup to World War II. Over the past decade, executive actions have expanded the list to include new mineral inputs for advanced technologies, defense and military equipment, and the green transition. On the other side of the Atlantic, the EU first began cataloguing such minerals in 2010, with the UK developing its own list in 2021. As global North policy experts belatedly came to understand the scale of China’s world-historical industrial transformation, they endeavored to domesticate and securitize supply chains from end to end. The goal was to either “onshore” (or in some cases reshore) or, as a second best, “friendshore” these nodes of economic production from mine to factory. It’s worth emphasizing the breadth of this consensus: spanning the ideological spectrum in otherwise highly polarized political contexts, alignment on this goal crossed the public and private sectors, uniting national security hawks with climate activists, energy wonks, domestic manufacturers, Big Tech executives, and investors, across the US, UK, and EU.

The critical mineral China shock was a response to the country’s clear dominance in minerals supply chains, from mining to processing and refining, manufacturing, and end-of-life recycling. Take the example of rare earths, used both in EV motors and the wind turbine nacelles, along with many other applications in consumer electronics and military hardware. Starting from the early 1990s, China painstakingly built dominance and vertical integration in the rare earths sector, at enormous environmental cost. Meanwhile, most mines located in the rich world closed down because of environmental regulation or an inability to compete with new mines. Similar patterns recur in other critical minerals sectors, and is especially dramatic at the processing and refining nodes.

According to Mining Technology, China now produces 99 percent of battery-grade graphite, over 60 percent of lithium chemicals, 40 percent of refined copper, more than 80 percent of refined magnet rare earths, and 70 percent of refined cobalt, “while also dominating the entire graphite anode supply chain end-to-end.” Chinese foreign policy makers have made use of this dominance. In 2010, following tensions over the East China Sea, China briefly halted its exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which reinforced the sense of alarm among Western state managers and security bureaucrats. In July 2023, in retaliation against Biden-era US tech restrictions on semiconductors, China imposed export controls on gallium and germanium, crucial materials for electronics manufacturing. In October 2025, in the midst of Trump’s trade wars, China expanded its export control regime to include a wider range of critical minerals—specifically rare earths, lithium battery materials, and graphite.

Countries around the world are now responding to this acute geopoliticization of critical minerals with a panoply of policy initiatives, as demand for these minerals is expected to surge in the next decades. Consider, for instance, the European Critical Raw Materials Act, Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy, and the UK’s Vision 2025, all of which aim to reconfigure and diversify the supply of critical raw materials essential for green and digital transitions. Many of these initiatives and others include the use of state-owned investment funds, state enterprises, and development banks to extend financing to both overseas and domestic resource development firms and mining projects. Other plans involve setting up government-owned strategic stockpiles of industrial metals in anticipation of future supply chain disruptions.

Trade policy has become another arena in which to secure mineral supplies, with the US advancing a proliferation of bilateral and multilateral agreements aimed at “mineral security.” Also on the trade front, we observe a dramatic rise in export bans and quotas to restrict outbound flows of critical minerals, whether to support domestic industry, weaponize interdependence, or increase income from commodity sectors. Lastly, additional initiatives involve proposals for transnational coordination to stabilize prices and, potentially, standardize governance—efforts in turn linked to competing geopolitical projects, emanating from the US, the EU, the DRC, and Latin America.

Mapping US state capitalist interventions

The Trump administration is currently involved in an expansive project to reposition the US national economy and the US state within global critical minerals networks. As of February 2026, at least eighteen major critical minerals firms have received or been offered direct financing, guaranteed loans, or equity stakes from the US federal government, the export credit agency (EXIM Bank), and the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

Mining projects in the US are unprofitable for investors without tremendous government support. The major obstacle is the hurdle rate of private finance: the acceptable rate of return, net of risks and costs. Mines are characterized by high, upfront fixed costs, almost all of which are classified as “sunk,” and long timeframes for returns on initial investments. From early-stage permitting and exploration to construction and decades-long operational phases, projects are exposed to all manner of risks. Market gluts can crash prices and therefore the value of the mineral asset as well as the shares of the corporate owner, geopolitical tensions can disrupt supply chains or strain relationships between producers and their customers, community protests can shut down mines for days or weeks, technological uncertainty and the threat of material substitution haunt extractive projects linked to fast moving frontiers of innovation, and the growing toolkit of state interventions can themselves produce uncertainty, with regulations, tax codes, and ownership structures in flux.

All of these features are anathema to the private financial sector. Over a decade after the commodity supercycle, exploration budgets for greenfield projects have yet to fully recover. In this context, public finance is not a replacement for private investment, but rather the sine qua non of attracting otherwise impatient capital to a sector characterized by high costs and high risk, and a long time horizon. In the US or EU, where operational costs of land and labor are elevated relative to the global South, this holds even more true. As a result, mining projects have grown increasingly dependent on attracting policymaker interest.

Take Thacker Pass, a lithium mine now under construction in Nevada. Despite years of uncertainty linked to multiple lawsuits and active protest encampments, the project was ultimately ushered through—but only by leveraging the entire toolkit of state capitalism. The mine benefitted from fast-tracking under the first Trump administration, receiving final approvals in January 2021 during the last week of his first term. It then garnered an enormous loan from the Department of Energy (DOE) under Biden’s administration, covering 75 percent of the capital costs of construction. Next, under the second Trump government, the DOE took equity positions in the project and the company. Simultaneously, during the Biden years, General Motors bought a major stake in the project to guarantee privileged access to offtake. In Europe there are parallel developments. Vulcan Energy’s Lionheart, a lithium project in Germany’s Upper Rhine Valley, exemplifies state capitalist largesse. According to the Financial Times, in December 2025, the company clinched $2.56 billion in a blended stack of public and private money: “backed by European and German government agencies, the European Investment Bank, five export credit agencies and seven commercial banks—combined debt, government grants, equity investments and equity raising.”

By directly addressing these high hurdle rates, US state capitalist interventions first and foremost aim to expand mining and processing operations of critical raw materials (including titanium, nickel, copper, gold, zinc, lithium, cobalt, graphite, potash, manganese, gallium) within US territory in a variety of ways: by opening new mines, such as Thacker Pass (lithium); re-opening shuttered mines, such as Mountain Pass (rare earths); or incentivizing projects that had been stuck in the early permitting stages due to lack of investor interest or local opposition (Resolution Copper, in Arizona). Coupled with market-wide price floors on certain minerals, the financing extended by the state is meant to support private businesses and to crowd in further domestic and international private investment in the sector. This expansion of extractive and mining capacities would strengthen the position and centrality of the US national economy within global critical minerals networks. This fortified position would in theory enhance protection from supply risks and potentially enable the US to weaponize the dependency of importing states, as it has in the example of advanced semiconductors.

The second goal of state capitalism in critical minerals is to exercise control over important nodes in global supply chains and production networks. The DFC has been repurposed precisely to serve that objective. It describes itself as “investing in projects that counter China’s presence in strategic locations and bolster supply chains of critical minerals needed for the industries of the future.” In mid-December, the US Congress renewed its mandate through the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, raising its investment cap from $60 billion to $205 billion—more than three times its previous limit. The DFC is now able to make riskier investments in a range of foreign firms and entities in low-, middle- and high-income countries. Notable recent DFC investments include a $565 million loan to Brazilian mining firm Serra Verde, “the first large-scale producer of all four magnetic rare earths outside Asia,” and a $75 million equity investment in the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund for critical minerals development.

Despite the DFC’s original focus on fostering private market activity, it is now also able to invest in state-owned firms, which continue to play a fundamental role in mining and infrastructure sectors around the world. In this sense, the US government is fostering state capitalism both at home and abroad—a significant departure from the era of the Washington Consensus, in which US policymakers and US-led financial and development institutions strongly opposed state ownership and industrial policy in the global South.

For example, the DFC is particularly active in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Chinese firms hold a dominant position in the mining sector. In December 2025, the DFC announced an equity investment in a joint venture between the DRC’s state-owned mining company Gécamines and the global commodities trader Mercuria Energy Trading. The joint venture announced $2 billion in fresh funding for minerals projects, paving the way for greater US access to the DRC’s wealth of minerals—particularly copper and cobalt. It also grants American companies a first bidder advantage to purchase its metals. In late 2025, the DFC partnered with the hedge fund Orion Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund ADQ to set up a US government-backed mining investment fund, Orion Critical Mineral Consortium (CMC), to invest in mining projects around the world. In February 2026 the latter announced a 40 percent stake in the mining giant Glencore’s copper and cobalt projects in DRC. The same month, Orion CMC joined forces with Virtus, a group founded by US security and intelligence service veterans, to buy Chemaf, a Congolese mining firm which ran into financial difficulty during the construction of what is set to become one of the largest cobalt mines in the world. Only time will tell if these financing initiatives will work, but it is clear that the DRC is ground zero for the US’s attempt at using state property to acquire control over significant nodes in transnational critical minerals supply chains.

The third and final objective of US state capitalist interventions is to exclude Chinese actors from said networks. From January 1, 2027, new US defense procurement regulations will prohibit the use of rare earths and magnets sourced from China across the entire US defense supply chain, from extraction and processing to incorporation into final defense products and weapons systems. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pursuing a form of bloc politics designed to create alliances and country groupings that isolate Chinese firms. The US recently signed a dozen bilateral agreements and Memoranda of Understanding with minerals-rich partners to build new sources of supply that bypass Chinese actors, including with Canada, Australia, Morocco, the DRC, Argentina, Malaysia, the Cook Islands, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the UAE and Uzbekistan. Other partnerships are currently being negotiated with large trade partners such as the EU, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico, with the objective of developing joint mines, infrastructure projects, and coordinated trade policies.

Some of these bilateral partnerships are directly backed by loans from the DFC and international offtake contracts guaranteed by EXIM Bank. For instance, in the context of its Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative, EXIM can financially support overseas mining projects that have secured long-term offtake agreements with US firms, helping ensure those companies obtain reliable access to critical minerals from partner nations. In short, the US government mobilizes state capitalist instruments to shape the integration of resource-rich regions and relations between firms in US-centered minerals networks.

On February 6, 2026, in addition to the multiplication of bilateral agreements, the US also launched the new plurilateral Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE). This initiative includes seventeen members and deepens the Minerals Security Partnership, which was launched in 2022 under Biden. The goal is to foster collaboration at both national and project levels around issues such as regulatory standards, export controls, investment screening, financing mechanisms, and environmental and labor requirements, in order to reconfigure cross-border minerals networks across different jurisdictions. FORGE also features a proposal for a preferential trade zone for critical minerals, with benchmark prices that function as effective price floors for select minerals, supported by adjustable tariffs. This is not only to ensure price stability in an industry mired in market volatility, but also specifically to counter China’s alleged “dumping” pricing practice of selling minerals below market value to maintain dominance in critical minerals networks. The strategic US stockpile, Project Vault, is also expected to have an international component, in which it would back allied producers by serving as a reliable purchaser of key critical minerals. Other US-led plurilateral initiatives such as Pax Silica (which targets AI tech and supply chains) also aim to consolidate downstream demand for critical minerals across allied jurisdictions.

Overall, Trumpian state capitalism simultaneously reconfigures power domestically and projects power extraterritorially, in a bid to restructure and achieve centrality in transnational critical minerals networks. Expand supply, deepen control, and exclude adversaries: these goals are compatible in theory. But in reality, they are riven by multiple contradictions.

Limits and contradictions of Trumpian state capitalism

From a financing perspective, mining projects in the global North are dead in the water without tremendous government support. But tapping into the fiscal firepower of the US federal state exposes firms to granular intervention in investment and production decisions. They also further expose these firms to market fluctuations related to volatile government policy decisions. For instance, the shares of MP Materials, USA Rare Earths, Lithium Americas and other US-listed rare earths stocks tumbled in late January 2026 in the face of the Trump’s administration hesitations to publicly guarantee price floors. They tumbled yet again in February 2026 after Vice President JD Vance announced a trading bloc with allied countries, reflecting wariness over continued intervention in the sector. These developments show how policy interventions designed to be broadly compatible (such as equity stakes, price floors, multilateral trading blocs) and aligned around the same set of goals (strengthening US-centered supply chains) may end up triggering contradictory or adverse market reactions.

This is compounded by the “move fast and break things” approach so far taken, which, while consistent with the Trump administration’s taste for sensationalism and heavy-handed, blockbuster-style state capitalism, isn’t exactly suitable for the kind of long-term planning and broad-based economic coordination that is necessary to repurpose multiple complex supply chains. Nor is the “private equity mindset” which seems to animate state capitalist interventions, notably the focus on low-hanging fruit and easy “wins.” As a team of resource analysts recently put it: “It is one thing for the federal government to mobilize public capital and attract Wall Street investors, but another thing completely to shift the underlying economics of a domestic industry that has been in secular decline.” That includes questions about long-run durability, competitiveness, and cost-effectiveness, particularly in relation to Chinese firms which have concentrated market power and a technological lead in an incredibly capital-intensive sector on a global scale.

From an industrial policy perspective, the analysts’ concerns reflect a sequencing dilemma. If a network is already dominated by your competitor, you are not in a position to exclude them until you have secured your own nodes—yet this may be impossible to do without piggybacking on your adversaries’ production matrix. US state capitalist interventions in the graphite sector illustrate this tension.

Under the Biden government, Australia-based Syrah Resources received major loans from the DOE in 2022 and the DFC in 2024 to finance its graphite processing plant in Louisiana and its Balama graphite mine in Mozambique, respectively. The support was critical. Yet even with it, the company defaulted multiple times and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. It shuttered in December 2024, declaring force majeure due to escalating protests led by local farmers over the terms of their resettlement when the mine was initially built. Operations resumed in June 2025, but the saga was far from over. In February 2026, the firm’s US subsidiary, which operates the Louisiana refinery, joined others in an industry coalition petitioning the Commerce Department to impose “anti-dumping” tariffs on Chinese graphite imports, resulting in a 93.5 percent levy.

However, in terms of excluding China from graphite supply chains, this was a pyrrhic victory. As Henry Sanderson reports, the practical effect was to reroute Balama’s output to a processing plant in Indonesia. The plant is majority owned by BTR, based in Shenzhen; the minority owner is a subsidiary of China’s Tsingshan, a top nickel producer. Why didn’t Syrah Resources simply send the graphite to its plant in the US? The process of “qualifying” a material as battery-grade is lengthy and complex, and that plant has not yet met industry standards. BTR’s plant did. Biden and Trump may have expanded graphite supply, but, until the Louisiana refinery can prove the quality of its product, all the loans and tariffs will fail to strengthen the US position in battery supply chains, or to exclude a declared adversary.

These limits and challenges of industrial policy are made worse by the predatory dimension of state capitalism à la Trump. Indeed, there are serious concerns about the conditions in which some of the deals are struck—which appear shady at best—as well as doubts about the firms championed by the White House. Many of the targeted companies lack a proven track record. The case of USA Rare Earths is instructive. The group is one of the “winners” poised to receive $1.6 billion in government equity, handpicked to develop a “mine-to-magnet value chain” decoupled from China. Yet the group has not demonstrated that it can do so on a commercial basis. Beyond this case, there are doubts that many of the chosen mining companies can deliver on their promises.

If successful business models are seemingly not a criterion for financial support, nepotism might be. USA Rare Earths was supported in its fundraising efforts by Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by his sons. Two little known start-ups, Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies, secured a $1.4 billion deal (combining loan and equity) in December 2025, three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital invested in Vulcan. According to Bloomberg, while the firm was valued at $200 million when 1789 Capital invested, by January 2026, some investors were considering a potential valuation close to $2 billion in an upcoming funding round. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump also have a stake (the size of which is undisclosed) in Cove Kaz Capital, a US investment group that in November secured access to a major tungsten mine in Kazakhstan, with $1.6 billion of pledged financial support from EXIM Bank and DFC. It practically goes without saying that such profiteering, cronyism, and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a tiny clique run counter to the fundamentals of effective and durable industrial policy.

Finally, from a geopolitical perspective, there is a major contradiction in the Trump administration’s state capitalist strategy. On the one hand, it recognizes that reconfiguring sophisticated cross-border minerals networks requires building solid partnerships around the world. On the other hand, the Trump administration keeps threatening countries with trade tariffs, sanctions, territorial annexation, and imperialist aggression. Weaponizing network nodes and chokepoints may function as a display of coercive power, but it also undermines attempts to create new and parallel blocs to rapidly reshape existing supply chain networks. The ongoing development of Trumpian state capitalism in critical minerals reflects this fundamental contradiction of US imperial power in an age of enhanced competition over strategic economic networks.

Despite such tensions, US state capitalist interventions in critical minerals are on a self-reinforcing path. That is in large part because actions framed as responses to perceived security risks, such as the concentration of critical mineral supply chains by a declared foreign adversary, in turn up the ante of geopolitical conflict. The bonhomie on display during May’s Trump-Xi Summit notwithstanding, there is no visible endgame for the weaponization of interdependence.

Southern implications

Rather than “deglobalization,” whatever that would mean, this new era of state capitalism is defined by the reconfiguration of the border-spanning movement of capital and minerals, the sprawling geographies of supply chains and industrial clusters, and the multi-actor alliances of trade and diplomacy. These developments are especially relevant to the governments and societies of the global South, as they attempt to navigate an increasingly fractured world order to achieve longstanding goals of development, regional integration, and sovereignty. The new US state capitalism carries three significant global implications: neocolonialism, subordinate integration, and asymmetric competition.

Generically, neocolonialism refers to the reproduction of unequal power relations in a “postcolonial” context. Here we mean something more specific and perhaps more literal: foreign policy interventions that threaten territorial integrity and economic and political sovereignty in the global South. This recalls a more classical mode of imperialism, which deployed direct and indirect rule to conquer and annex colonies, subjugate populations, manipulate local politics, secure access to land and resources, and buttress the geostrategic position of the metropole.

The clearest parallel today is the US invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Maduro, carried out with the explicit aim of controlling Venezuela’s oil industry to the benefit of US fossil fuel corporations. Venezuela also has significant mineral deposits, primarily of gold, bauxite, and coltan. Given the dismal state of basic infrastructure in the country’s mining regions combined with tremendous political uncertainty, a mining boom in the near term is unlikely. But in the meantime, the US government has sold nearly $2 billion worth of Venezuelan crude and is currently attempting to take ownership of an oil tanker, the Skipper, containing two million barrels, which US Marines seized in December. Trump sees US interventions in Venezuela as a “colossal victory.” With recent threats against Greenland,2In late May, the Pentagon-backed firm (<)a href='https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/u-scores-major-rare-earth-000100726.html' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'(>)REAlloys announced a major offtake agreement(<)/a(>) with a Greenland mine, making the reescalation of threats unlikely in the near future. a fuel blockade in Cuba, the US-Israel war on Iran and Lebanon and ongoing counter-blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and explicit glorifications of the sordid history of Western colonialism by high-ranking Trump officials, there can be no doubt about the imperial ambitions of this administration, and their tenuous compatibility with state capitalist policy initiatives.

These instances of military intervention and resource capture are an extreme form of a more quotidian threat: subordinate integration into US-centered critical minerals networks. The risk is that governments and firms become locked in such networks, exposed to the whims of American imperial power, and prevented from engaging with other major partners, such as China. Already problematic for countries such as Mexico which have highly integrated manufacturing sectors subject to various US national security restrictions, the further restructuring of trading blocs and supply chains according to US priorities and the injection of US state-owned property in key network nodes (whether firms, mines, or infrastructure projects) would increase the ability of the US state to weaponize critical minerals networks.

This power is particularly problematic for global South countries pursuing a strategy of polyalignment—cultivating trade, investment, and security partnerships with multiple competing powers while refusing to align with any single country or geopolitical bloc. As Hakainde Hichilema, President of Zambia, quipped recently in regard to attracting foreign mining investment: “When I’m in Beijing, I’m not against Washington. When I’m in Washington, we’re not against Beijing.” (It’s worth noting Zambia’s crucial role in the 1960s–70s era “nonaligned” movement.) The goal of these multiple alignments is to secure a surge of green foreign investment from richer economies as the latter compete to restructure strategic supply chains. Given that the Trump administration has already at times deliberately tried to curtail such strategies, it is likely that it would not hesitate to leverage its greater control of critical minerals networks to further coerce developing countries into decoupling from China and other competitors.

A third risk is that of asymmetric competition. While less existential than neocolonialism, it is also distinct from subordinate integration. Asymmetric competition names the prospect of global South states competing with global North states for investment in mining as well as downstream sectors. This challenge reveals an understudied implication of the US onshoring of critical minerals supply chains. Global South policymakers in countries with existing or aspiring critical minerals sectors cannot compete with the financing packages lavished on mining companies by the US government. They thus face the risk of not only losing an export market, if the US were to substitute imports with domestic extraction, but also directly competing for Foreign Direct Investment in mining sectors, if the US is successful at attracting investment. Here too the potential for mineral resource-based industrialization and developmentalist projects in developing countries could be constrained. In a world where more and more governments are competing for mining investment, global South governments will face increasing pressure to make mining projects more attractive to financiers—through deregulation, derisking, and repression of protest—to merely maintain their existing position in the most extractive and least-value added nodes of green technology supply chains.

In all these ways, Trumpian state capitalism exploits and reinforces global inequalities. At the same time, his government’s blockbuster tactics may expand strategic opportunities for progressive forces, within the US and elsewhere. The Trump 2.0 experiment and the wider pattern of contemporary state capitalism raise profound questions about how political power and public authority can be exercised in the form of economic ownership for private accumulation, militarized extraction, and imperial ends. Leftist projects the world over must engage in their own experiments, including reclaiming public institutional capacity, to exercise collective control in a rational and conscious manner over the infrastructure underpinning social, economic, and ecological life. In short, Trumpian power plays open up new terrain for progressive forces North and South to reexplore and make the case for alternative forms of planning and ownership of economic activity, beyond both private finance and state capitalism, to ensure development for the many that is driven by objectives of social justice and planetary sustainability.