By Jeremy Kusmarov
In February, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an inside-the-beltway think tank, published a book-length study entitled Critical Minerals and the Future of the U.S. Economy, edited by Gracelin Baskaran and Duncan Wood.
The study laid bare what CovertAction Magazine co-founder Philip Agee detailed throughout his career: how U.S. military and covert interventions were driven largely by multi-national corporations and a yearning to secure access to the mineral wealth of developing world countries.
The CSIS report makes clear that this yearning has become more acute in the 21st century, when strategic minerals are necessary to power high tech computer and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and to advance the so-called clean energy revolution.
Donald Trump has been candid about the importance of rare-earth minerals to the 21st century U.S. economy, seeking to broker a deal with Ukraine to secure access to its rare-earth minerals in exchange for continued U.S. military aid. Trump has also talked about directly colonizing Greenland—heavily valued because of its untapped mineral wealth—and incorporating mineral rich Canada as the 51st U.S. state.
The book launch for the CSIS’s critical minerals study was hosted by U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-IN), who sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot specializing in political propaganda and helping to coordinate regime-change operations.
The report starts out by noting that “mining is an inextricable part of the American story. What starts as rock in the ground goes on to become the inputs that build America’s homes and buildings, transportation systems, energy generation and transmission, defense systems, and technological capabilities. Mining is the foundation that allowed the United States to be a military leader, providing the minerals needed to manufacture tanks, missiles, fighter jets and warships. It is the reason computers, phones, and iPads exist. Mining is the reason we have energy and can turn on lights every morning.”
A pivotal concern is that China is the major producer of 29 of the 50 minerals identified as critical by the U.S. Geological Survey.
China’s willingness to weaponize these minerals was epitomized by its initiating export restrictions, including complete bans, on antimony, gallium and germanium. The report warned that China has developed a “stranglehold on minerals processing, refining between 40 and 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth elements, graphite, lithium, cobalt, and copper.”
The authors wrote that “reducing reliance on China and creating resilient mineral supply chains is one of the most bipartisan priorities in Washington, D.C.”
Making the World Safe for Silicon Valley to Flourish
At the start of World War II, the Roosevelt administration signed into law the Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpiling Act of 1939 establishing strategic material supply reserves. In a letter to Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted that commercial stocks of vital raw resources in the U.S. were low and that, “in the event of unlimited warfare on sea and in the air, possession of a reserve of these essential supplies might prove of vital importance.”
According to historian Jonathan Marshall, control of Southeast Asia’s rich mineral resources was the key determinant underlying U.S. war provocations directed against Japan that led to the Pacific War. Japan had established a regional empire coming on the heels of the decline of European colonial empires that threatened U.S. control over Southeast Asia’s mineral wealth.[1]
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. raised the specter of the Soviet threat to justify continued imperialistic intervention designed to heighten access to mineral resources needed to power the U.S. economy and military.
Well-known examples include the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to secure access to oil and the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile after President Salvador Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry (which was dominated previously by two U.S. firms, Anaconda, and Kennecott).
Another was the 1965 CIA-backed Indonesia coup and genocide, which paved the way for the exploitation of Indonesia’s rich mineral wealth by Western-based multi-national corporations and clear-cutting of Indonesian forests.
In the post-Cold War period, the U.S. government became more open about intervening in countries to access their mineral resources. Donald Trump, as an example, admitted that the U.S. was in Syria to steal its oil. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote some years before Trump took office that “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Sights on Zambia
One country that the U.S. ruling elite has set its sights on now is Zambia because it is a leading producer of copper, which the CSIS report specifies as a “necessary material for many of the advanced technologies that are essential to the modern global economy, including in infrastructure, clean energy, electronics and automotives; copper wires connect electrical grids, integrated circuits, and telecommunication systems.”
CovertAction Magazine has previously reported on the expansion of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Zambia, the Biden administration’s gifting of four Bell helicopters, and U.S. support for the right-wing government of Hakainde Hichilema, which has loosened regulations and lowered taxes on foreign mining companies operating in Zambia to enable a $2 billion expansion of copper production.[2]
In January 2025, Citizens First Party Chairperson for Mines and Minerals Committee Felistus Mumba, criticized the Hichilema administration for suspending a 15% export duty on precious stones and metals and for secrecy surrounding mining agreements, citing KoBold Metals, a Silicon Valley-based company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, planning a $2.3 billion investment in the Mingomba copper mine project.[3]
While the U.S. provided Zambia with $250 million in foreign aid in 2024, Hichilema’s pro-corporate policies[4] have made him extremely unpopular in the capital Lusaka and the copperbelt area due to the economic hardship experienced by Zambians living there, according to The Lusaka Times. Mumba said that “it is unconscionable that Zambians go to bed hungry while the country sits on vast mineral wealth.”
Harsh neoliberal policies have coincided with a mounting campaign of repression targeting Zambia’s socialist party, which developed a progressive manifesto pledging to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatization and de-industrialization and calling for re-assertion of national control over the copper industry.[5]
The situation in Zambia no doubt will provide a blueprint for other countries possessing vital minerals, whose socialist parties will face the same kind of repression.
Semi-Conductors, Military Advantage and a Clean Energy Revolution?
The CSIS report emphasizes that semi-conductors, foundational to modern life because of their use in smart phones, computers, medical devices, automotives and military applications, are mineral intensive, requiring essential quantities of gallium, germanium, palladium, silicon, arsenic and titanium.
The authors write that “the production of these resources is largely concentrated in foreign adversaries, exposing a severe national security risk.”
This risk necessitates building up the defense industry and military, which are reliant on strategic minerals, hence creating an ever-greater demand for them.
According to the report, China, unfortunately, is acquiring new weapons systems roughly five to six times more quickly than the U.S. based on its control over world mineral supplies, which the U.S. needs to try to offset.
Electric vehicles and renewable energy, like wind farms and solar energy plants, also require large mineral inputs whose supply chains are increasingly dominated by China. Wind farms and solar energy facilities require more mineral inputs than conventional power plants, enhancing yet greater demand for the minerals.
The Biden administration’s climate initiative, providing tax credits, loans and grants for renewable energy, does not seem all that environmentally friendly in the latter context, particularly if one considers the environmental effects of mining operations that pollute rivers, poison the air, despoil the land, and displace indigenous people.
Biden and the Democratic Party’s hawkish foreign policy, packaged under the false veneer of democracy promotion, makes best sense in light of the need to extract more and more minerals to fuel the “clean energy” revolution.
How clean this revolution is should be more openly questioned, including by environmentalists and progressives who support the Democratic Party.
Domestic Mining
The CSIS report laments that it takes on average 29 years to build a mine in the U.S. because of a “Byzantine” permit system and “burdensome” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations along with bureaucratic inefficiency.
The U.S. economy was in the late 19th century rooted in mining industries, which gave rise to radical labor groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of the exploitative working conditions that are prevalent today in many countries.
One of the chapters in the CSIS report advocates for streamlining the permit system for mining projects in the U.S., considered to be socially and environmentally responsible to allow for revitalization of domestic mining.
Sugarcoating Modern-Day Colonialism
The report is generally written from a nationalist perspective that places primacy on the U.S. wresting control over mineral supply chains from China and securing access to mineral deposits around the world. This is to be achieved in part by better developing the “defense-industrial base” and placing the U.S. more on a war footing than it already is.
The pitfalls of the approach are never explored nor the likelihood of heightened military and covert military operations that have a disastrous track record, especially for the subject countries.
Further, there is the danger of outright war with China, which the CSIS report makes clear the U.S. could never win.
Lead author Gracelin Baskaran, a South African economist with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University who worked for the World Bank, claims that “Western companies are generally more responsible, environmentally conscious, and attentive to human rights and labor conditions [than non-Western ones],”[6] which history does not bear out.
Baskaran believes that a framework can be worked out where resource-rich countries would benefit from an expansion of mining operations by Western companies. Zambia, however, is indicative of the historical pattern by which the U.S. government helps to secure a privileged operating environment for Western corporations whereby they pay limited royalty taxes and can get away with exploiting the local labor force and plundering the local environment.
Furthermore, the U.S. government frequently orchestrates covert and military operations to help secure a favorable business climate for these companies that often result in the deliberate enflaming of ethnic divisions and spread of endemic violence.[7]
Baskaran praises the Biden administration’s $600 million Lobito Corridor project—an infrastructure project linking the ports of Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic Coast to Zambia through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which contains some of the world’s largest deposits of critical minerals like cobalt and copper.
Baskaran’s viewpoint is challenged by Dady Saleh, a Congolese economic analyst in tune with local opinion, who told Al Jazeera that the Lobito Corridor was “neo-colonialist—an organized sell off of the region’s natural resources in a capitalist system” by which locals would only benefit “with crumbs.”
Saleh further said that the Lobido Corridor agreement was returning Africa “to the old days, where railroads were made to facilitate the transport of our raw materials by the colonialists,” adding that through the project “we’ve opened up our economy to modern plunderers.”
Baskaran would do well to consider Saleh’s perspective, take a history class, and study the writings of Philip Agee, Walter Rodney (author of the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) and others with a similar viewpoint.
Of course, if she did that, she would be out of a job. The think tank she works for provides guiding principles for the U.S. plutocracy that is intent on continuing the pattern of destructive policies from which they reap enormous profits.
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