The National Interest - The Critical Mineral Up and Downstream: Drivers and Stabilizers of US Foreign Policy - June 25, 2025 By: Caleb Slayton

 The National Interest 

The Critical Mineral Up and Downstream: Drivers and Stabilizers of US Foreign Policy

June 25, 2025

By: Caleb Slayton

Critical minerals will continue to be drivers and stabilizers of US foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

Despite the Middle East acting again as a foreign policy distraction, critical mineral supply chains and China, will still dominate US foreign policy agendas in the long term. In Africa, the Lobito Corridor project is cited as a template for partnership investment and as a transactional and transformational investment design for the advanced technology supply chain upstream. China, viewed as the only other real rival in artificial intelligence (AI) research, represents the downstream competition arena in advanced technology applications.

Angola is a south-central African lynchpin that represents the transformational development and critical mineral investment trajectory of the future that includes the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia directly and Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania tangentially. Japan, the world’s fifth-largest economy, is an indispensable US ally. It is also technologically advanced and has shared concerns regarding China’s East Asian hegemonic aspirations. But from Africa to Asia, partnership formulas are reformulating.

US foreign policy and therefore the global order, is in flux. But recent history suggests that as much as strategies change, the solid principles of good foreign policy remain the same. A look at two different regions and countries with unique competitive advantages reiterates the notion that a successful comprehensive foreign policy is nuanced and considers to what extent shared values and interests can support strategic cooperation beyond finite business deals. That same foreign policy requires listening to partners and taking care that threat priorities do not receive attention at the expense of indispensable allies.

Regardless of the trial-and-error US foreign policy approach in the first half of 2025, access to the critical mineral supply chain and deterring China will result in not only a partial reversion to traditional foreign policy approaches but also a recognition of how even transformational investments still require a decisive military element.

What Shifts in Angola Look Like

After Angola’s independence in 1975, the United States supported the opposition to the communist-aligned ruling MPLA (People’s Liberation Movement of Angola) before later opting for a more nuanced approach in the 1990s, brokering a peace that touched all of southern Africa.

At the end of the second phase of Angola’s civil war in 2002, Angola, and much of Africa, was not a United States foreign policy priority, as the War on Terror captured US defense and security attention. When Angola’s reconstruction partner of choice, the United States, was largely unavailable, Angola turned to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Angola’s oil money, since 2003, has funded Sub-Saharan Africa’s most expensive and debt-inducing development task list with the PRC —over $40 billion USD worth. In 2024, Angola continued its PRC partnership, signing billions of dollars more in infrastructure projects focused on telecommunications, transportation, and port facilities. But a decade-long political rebalance inside Angola had long begun to take place.

Russia and Cuba had been the Angolan Armed Forces’ major arms suppliers and troop trainers for a half-century. Russia continues to be an Angolan Air Force trainer and parts supplier, with active and retired military advisors in its defense headquarters, instructors in the military schools and liaisons across the country in various military units. Either Russia became complacent or Angola became wise to its own professional stagnation, or both. But Angola began to loosen its past political attachments and seek a more self-sustaining, multilateral modernization model.

Angola experienced a series of internal reforms, investigations, and political and security upheavals between 2017 and 2021. It also began to shift away from Russian space technology support, while avoiding space projects with China, and opting for Airbus and NASA partnerships instead. The rebalance led to an Angola-US head-of-state encounter in 2023 and Angola signing on to the US-led Artemis Accords.

The multi-billion USD Lobito corridor project announced in 2024 was not a sudden shift in US strategy but a reflection of earnest diplomacy, Angola’s patient persistence, and a little of catching up to regional realities. The project is meant to not only secure access to critical minerals in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but also increase cyber, transport, and market access for millions along its route. President Trump’s team appears poised to support the project and others like it.

A View From Japan

Since 2006, when Japan’s Defense Agency was promoted to a full-fledged Ministry of Defense, Japan has continued to carefully increase its participation in global security affairs. Japan’s slowing economy and political party scandals are two 2020s-era factors pushing out from the center while, China’s military rise, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and North Korea’s rapidly advancing ballistic missile projects and its partnership with Russia are outside security factors pushing in.

Furthermore, Japan is acting on new laws allowing the export of defense equipment. It is an effort that will bolster the Japan-UK-Italy sixth-generation fighter development project and allow transfers of other defense-related equipment to regional partners. Japan is also pitching more defense cooperation programs to Australia, Vietnam, Mongolia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and others — cooperation that demonstrates a concern for China’s regional aspirations and requires a mix of cautious diplomacy and research and development of advanced technologies.

Japan and the United States have put immense efforts into maintaining their alliance, creating deep and lasting people-to-people connections and coordinating their defense policies. The alliance is one built on like-minded values and shared regional security concerns. Japan is loath to let the US-led rules-based order dissolve. Sold on the importance of defense partnerships and alliance networks, Japan even pitched a shared deterrent posture based on “cooperative strategic autonomy” during the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogues.  

Overall, Japan’s partner country base is widening, its defense policies are diversifying, its export controls are slowly loosening, and its defense equipment, advanced technical research, and production capacity are seeking deeper self-sufficiency. The goal is not conflict with China but deterrence.

The Up and Downstream of the Critical Mineral Supply Chain

Angola and Japan are important for more than simply a policy study of critical mineral global supply chains and China competition. The two regions are also important comparisons in development strategies and country approaches to balancing American and Chinese investment overtures. China’s political strategy in East Asia (Japan) and in the developing world (Angola) differ. Only a nuanced, informed and partner-centric US foreign policy can have long-term success in this environment.

The US senior government advisor positions for the East Asia region were the first to be announced in early 2025 — an indicator of East Asia’s importance to US foreign policy. The new US administration did voice a new Africa policy based on investments and transactions instead of development aid and security. But by June 2025, the Africa policy team continued to shrink and the region lapsed into deeper strategic austerity.

The “3D” model of diplomacy, defense and development might be out of vogue, but the new strategy of investment will still require a diplomatic and security base. As soon-to-retire State Department lead in Africa policy, Ambassador Troy Fitrell, rightly notes, no amount of critical mineral-related investments will serve the vast majority of Angola, Congo, or Zambia’s development needs where over sixty percent of the population depends on the agricultural sector. A lack of focus on rural populations is exactly what scholars who compare Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa say stunted Africa’s growth. The best long-term investment win for the United States in Africa must also meet its partner’s development interests.

In places like Angola and the Congo, the United States is not seeking to replace China’s Belt and Road (BRI) development initiatives, nor should it. But the United States should learn from what China does well and where it goes wrong. Chinese scholars and Japanese partners have both noted how Trump’s initial foreign policy approach was similar to China’s transactional investment model, which focused on access to resources and rapid infrastructure deals — and had few political strings attached. While there may be something to glean from China’s model, US foreign policy, especially in Africa, is quickly learning that lucrative long-term investments are most successful when built on a secure environment and sustained via deep relationship connections on a scaffold of shared values.

The United States is serious about deterring China’s expansionist projects in East Asia but, on a much smaller scale, cannot ignore the security requirements that make African investments more likely to succeed. Unlike China, the United States has not shied away from spending political capital for the sake of peace in some of the riskiest conflict neighborhoods. Judging from the fact that Africa has become the locus of Islamist terrorism and reached an overall conflict record high in 2024, the security need is not going away.

Decades of alliance management have taught the United States and Japan how to listen well via robust civilian, commercial, and government interactions, especially through tough political transitions. In Africa, over the past two decades, the United States was so focused on stability operations that it often neglected broader social and cultural shifts.

Angola’s president not only led his country through a productive great power rebalancing, but as the current chairman of the African Union, he is channeling new forms of Pan-Africanism intent on eradicating vestiges of neo-colonialism and so-called cycles of imperialism on the continent. Even if development and defense models are changing, with significant undercurrents of bitterness against Western security partnerships, a defense element based on partner interests will be necessary to stabilize any investment.

Conclusion

Much of Sub-Saharan Africa is in search of development sustainability after decades of trial, error, and conflict. East Asia is an example of economic tiger growth, but it is now witnessing an increasingly tense geopolitical security balance. Growth in Africa and stability in East Asia are crucial to America’s prosperity and that of the world.

Japan sits adjacent to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its regional expansionist projects. Angola sits in the middle of the globe’s coveted and indispensable natural resource and critical mineral deposit hubs. Angola and Japan are leading political, economic, and military forces in their respective regions. Finally, both countries provide examples of how to understand the CCP’s varied country approaches and its own vision of global affairs.

The United States’ foreign policy will look different on the level of specific projects and deals. But people are still people. So, while a working grand strategy of investment and deterrence may seem different in press briefs and media soundbites, the country will eventually fall back on the necessary diplomatic and defense networks that make investments and development successful.

About the Author: Caleb Slayton

Caleb Slayton is a US Air Force active-duty officer with experience in Africa and East Asia. He served as the Director of the Special Forces School Africa Course for four years and completed back-to-back tours as a military attaché in Angola and Japan. He has a master’s in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School and  also studied at Indonesia’s Command and Staff College, winning “best thesis” on South-South Cooperation.