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The Democratic Republic of Congo—home to some of the planet’s largest cobalt and copper reserves, as well as a brutal war—was the centerpiece of Biden’s only trip to Africa. In late 2024, he travelled there to promote the so-called Lobito Corridor, where the U.S., European Union, G7, and private firms (including Critical Metals) are spending billions on mining and infrastructure development as part of a series of partnerships with the governments of the DRC, Zambia, Tanzania and Angola. The initiative is a bid to compete with China, whose firms control more than two-thirds of the country’s copper and cobalt mining operations as a result of longstanding investments and infrastructure spending. Trump has taken a less multilateral approach in looking to negotiate a security-for-minerals deal, championed by Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi. And rather than embarking as Biden did on a partnership for minerals with Canada—home to some of the world’s largest mining conglomerates—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state.

Charitably speaking, the Trump administration is focusing more on what are known as the upstream parts of the minerals supply chain (i.e. mining and refining) than Biden, whose White House emphasized investments further downstream in areas like battery manufacturing and recycling. The Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—which Trump and fellow Republicans have vowed to scrap—subsidized exploration, extraction and processing along with the production of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other technologies that require critical minerals, plus infrastructure to support that manufacturing and increase the adoption of electric vehicles. Though Biden often spoke about the importance of those technologies for fighting climate change, his administration was just as explicit about supporting such investment as a means of eroding China’s global dominance in these sectors. Last September, the White House boasted in a fact-sheet that companies had announced more than $120 billion worth of investments in battery and critical minerals supply chains since Biden took office, and claimed that the U.S. was on track to supply more than one-fifth of global demand outside of China by 2030. “After years of ceding ground to China,” the fact-sheet argues, “we are now winning the competition for the 21st Century, protecting our industrial base and creating good jobs, and strengthening our energy and national security.”

Trump’s more guns-blazing approach to securing minerals means that the administration could find itself caught in a web of contradictions. The trade war he’s stoking with China, and longtime allies like Mexico, Canada and the European Union, threatens to drive up already inflated production costs for upstart domestic mining companies struggling to court investors. That hostility is also encouraging foreign governments to safeguard their own access to those resources, providing the small handful of firms that dominate mineral supply chains with other, potentially more reliable investment options abroad.