Editor’s Note: Over the past year, members of the inaugural cohort of the Foreign Policy Futures mentorship program each developed an independent research project with support from the Strategy Program. They refined their ideas through mentorship and peer feedback, conducted original research, and presented their findings at an in-person summit at the Stimson Center. The following commentaries offer condensed versions of their work and reflect the range of questions this cohort explored about how the United States should navigate a changing international order.

A.J. Manuzzi, a program associate at the John Quincy Adams Society, argues that the United States can adapt to multipolarity by embracing a more restrained and pragmatic foreign policy. Daniela Canales, a graduate student at Tufts’ Fletcher School, explores why China’s dominance over rare earth processing poses a deeper challenge than access to the minerals themselves. Chijioke Onuchukwu, a graduate student at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, calls for a U.S. Africa strategy centered on trade, investment, and African agency.

And Carl Parkin, a summer research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Existential Risk Lab, draws lessons from the first U.S. ICBM program for today’s defense acquisition debates.

By Christopher Preble, Senior Fellow and Director, Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program

Why Access Is Not Power in the Global Race for Rare Earths

Daniela Canales

In Washington, there is little doubt that critical minerals are foundational to national power. Rare earth elements—a subset of critical minerals essential to the production of semiconductors, electric vehicles, wind turbines, advanced electronics, and modern weapons systems—are treated as vital strategic assets and material indicators of national security, competitiveness, and technological leadership.

This signals a quiet but consequential shift in American grand strategy: a return to resource geopolitics more familiar to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first, in which states seek security by controlling the material sources of industrial inputs. However, this line of reasoning misdiagnoses the vulnerabilities the United States actually faces and, to our detriment, the nature of China’s dominance in the sector.

China’s Institutional Power

Sustained investment in downstream processing has allowed Beijing to construct a vertically integrated system that captures value at every stage of the supply chain. State-owned enterprises absorb risk, operate in weak governance environments, and prioritize strategic objectives over profitability. Even rare earths mined outside China routinely pass through Chinese-controlled refiners, traders, or manufacturers before becoming usable components.

This system also allows China to externalize costs while internalizing control. Environmental damage and political instability are pushed outward into extraction-only regions while the industrial and technological benefits flow inward to China’s manufacturing base. The result is a form of resource power that is less visible than territorial control but far more durable. China currently controls roughly 70% of rare earth mining and more than 90% of global processing and refining capacity. When Beijing restricted exports of seven heavy rare earth elements in April 2025, triggering production shutdowns at automotive manufacturers around the world, the message was unambiguous: Washington lacked leverage precisely where it mattered most.

On Project Vault

The Trump administration’s February 2026 response in Project Vault—a $12 billion public-private reserve including all 60 minerals in the U.S. Geological Survey’s critical minerals list—addresses some of these supply-chain issues. Under a structure similar to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, participating manufacturers commit to purchasing materials at set prices, pay upfront fees, and can draw from the stockpile during supply disruptions while replenishing the materials.

The problem is not the stockpile itself—it is what a stockpile simply cannot do.

Project Vault’s design embeds several structural vulnerabilities. First, the stockpile’s commodity mix risks obsolescence if end-use technologies shift. Unlike oil, whose uses have historically been relatively stable, rare earth elements are tied to specific manufacturing processes that evolve quickly—for example, a reserve optimized for today’s offshore wind turbine requirements may be misaligned with the industrial needs of the next decade as more companies like Vestas seek to reduce their environmental footprint.

Second, the 17 rare earth elements have sharply divergent supply-demand profiles. A uniform stockpiling approach cannot account for the commodity-specific strategies that meaningful supply-chain resilience requires. For example, neodymium, which is used in permanent magnets for EVs and wind turbines, faces very different pressures than samarium, a critical component for missile guidance systems. Treating all REEs as interchangeable strategic assets is not a supply-chain strategy.

Project Vault becomes genuinely strategically beneficial only if the demand-side architecture around it—price floors, allied procurement commitments, and enforceable trading frameworks—is built out with the institutional depth it requires.

On the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement

In what has historically been a boom-and-bust industry, structural guarantees are needed in order for actors to accept the risk. FORGE addresses this by establishing a preferential, rules-based trading bloc for critical minerals with over 50 participating countries. This acknowledges what several signatory states needed in order to form a coalition against China: pricing controls to mitigate risk for the public and private sector.

While this coalition builds a promising framework, it still has a major blind spot. A multilateral critical minerals agreement will deliver lasting resilience only if it addresses who owns the assets producing them—not just who is buying and selling. Chinese state-linked capital has flowed extensively into critical mineral projects across FORGE’s member countries. From mining concessions in South America to processing facilities in Southeast Asia, these projects continue to benefit from Chinese nonmarket advantages, respond to government demand, and frequently route raw materials back to China for processing. Ignoring the lasting Chinese influence on the market sets a lackluster foundation for a plan intended to establish lasting security in vital economic sectors.

Toward a Better Balancing Strategy

Dependency on China for rare earth elements is a significant problem. To counter it, the United States needs to practice better balancing by forming trade agreements with allies that create objective constraints on Chinese power while expanding American capabilities technologically, economically, and militarily.

In order for this to be feasible, price stabilization mechanisms, investment screening coordination, and collective response architecture are necessary to foster a resilient coalition.

Multipolarity is What the United States Makes of It

A.J. Manuzzi

For the past three decades, U.S. policymakers have sought to transform the world order and remake it in the mold of the United States. Afforded the “special providence” that Otto von Bismarck once proclaimed it shared only with fools and drunkards, the United States embarked on grand ideological crusades and pledged security guarantees to dozens of nations around the world.

However, owing to the rise of near-peer powers like China and increasingly autonomous “middle powers” like Brazil and India and America’s own costly Forever Wars, the unipolar moment is over. Many fear that a more multipolar world is inherently a more dangerous one for the United States—after all, World War I was the byproduct of a multipolar world. Yet the United States is not doomed by prophecy to succumb to a major war. What Washington gets from a multipolar world depends on the strategy it pursues—whether one of management or one of rejection.

Debating Polarity

A critical mass of scholars agree that the international landscape is transitioning from a more unipolar period of unrivaled U.S. preeminence to a more multipolar one (in which power is distributed more evenly among a greater concentration of states).

While the United States maintains a sizable advantage over potential peer competitors in terms of GDP per capita, other statistics (such as GNI, total national wealth, and more) depict growing U.S.-China economic parity. Furthermore, while operationalizing and measuring power is famously difficult and subjective, indices that take a more expansive understanding of the term, including the Lowy Institute’s 2025 Asia Power Index (which evaluates 131 indicators across eight thematic measures of diplomatic, economic, cultural, and military power), rank a declining United States and a rising China similarly as the sole “major powers” but note the rise of middle powers like South Korea, Indonesia, and India.

Given the preeminence of the top two powers and the fact that these middle powers are able to exercise their power globally to a greater extent than during the Cold War (when they were mere proxies of the great powers as a result of the destruction they suffered in World War II), the world is in a period of “unbalanced multipolarity.” Unbalanced multipolarity is characterized by the presence of two major powers and a collection of second-tier powers that also exercise considerable influence. This is distinct from the bipolar Cold War environment—during that period, the United States, American allies, the Soviet Union, China, and the communist bloc’s allies combined for 88 percent of global GDP compared to just 57 percent today. Some conditions observers could expect to see under this order are states bandwagoning less often with the United States, defying U.S. preferences more often, and increasingly acting in ways that Washington will struggle to inhibit. But is such an order inherently more hostile to U.S. interests than a U.S.-led unipolar order?

The Myth of Hegemonic Stability

Conventional wisdom assumes that a multipolar world is by nature a more dangerous one for the United States. Yet because this view overwhelmingly relies on a historical anomaly, the overwhelming post-World War II dominance of the United States, this school of thought is needlessly pessimistic about multipolar order.

Multipolarity is not without risks—more bona fide regional powers may well lead to regional rivalries prone to conflict, or the lack of a dominant power to exert leverage on its clients may portend more low-level conflicts between small states. But multipolarity may offer opportunities as well as challenges, while the benefits of unipolarity are exaggerated.

For example, while it is often claimed that a more multipolar world will lead to more civil wars and low-level interstate wars, the number of civil wars grew markedly under the last three decades of unipolarity. And as Barry Posen argued in 2017, because great powers under multipolarity concern themselves largely with the behavior of other great power competitors, they will be less likely to intervene in civil wars and thus escalate them into proxy wars.

Similarly, while multipolarity may encourage allies to pursue nuclear weapons to hedge against a less activist United States, the unipolar era’s lack of external constraints conditioned the United States to pursue regime change policies that incentivized countries like Iran and North Korea to accelerate their pursuit of nuclear weapons as an instrument of regime security. And the same nuclear multipolarity that may present a greater risk of accidental nuclear war and turns nuclear deterrence into a three-body problem tempers the risk of intentional great power war by necessitating potentially existential costs.

A multipolar order is thus neither inherently more nor less threatening to U.S. interests. This offers U.S. policymakers a new framework: multipolarity as not only a challenge to confront, but an opportunity to seize.

Adapting to a Multipolar World

A strategy that tries to reverse the course of multipolarity by doubling down on U.S. primacy is doomed to fail. The Biden administration’s restorationist approach of organizing a new Western coalition against the “axis of authoritarians” of China, Russia, Iran, and others failed, as many of the world’s nations refused to pick sides, understandably prioritizing their own interests ahead of Washington’s. The Trump administration has only fared worse, substituting Cold War liberalism for a “radical American imperialism” that “does not so much break with tradition as bring forward some of its most retrograde but persistent elements,” like hot regime change conflicts in the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East. A new era beckons a new strategy—one that leverages multipolarity’s cooperative elements to act on transnational issues like the climate crisis and global health and promotes great power peace.

Such a strategy would take a narrower view of America’s global security interests, drawing down U.S. security commitments and interventions in the Middle East and Europe in particular. It would regard diplomacy with countries like China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea not as appeasement, or a reward for good behavior, but as a chance to reduce the unacceptable risk of major war. It would replace rigid, vestigial Cold War-era alliances with flexible, issue-specific ones to permit greater freedom of choice and hedge against rising competitors. Finally, Washington must resist the overuse of coercive economic statecraft, as the indiscriminate use of sanctions and tariffs can only manifest the coalitions Washington seeks to avoid and encourage other states to employ countermeasures.

A multipolar world is now unavoidable. But if the United States adopts a more pragmatic, restrained model of global engagement, it can avoid overstretch, reduce the risk of conflict, and facilitate a global order apt to respond to the challenges of the future.

Reimagining U.S. Strategy in Africa

Chijioke Onuchukwu

For over sixty years, U.S.-Africa relations have largely followed a donor-recipient model centered on humanitarian assistance and security cooperation. While programs such as PEPFAR have delivered measurable gains, this aid-centric framework has failed to catalyze sustained economic development for African countries. Despite $14.9 billion in assistance to Africa in 2023 and hundreds of billions more over decades, structural constraints like limited capital access, weak industrial capacity, and low value-added manufacturing remain unsolved. This results in a model that manages symptoms rather than builds competitive economies that stimulate development.

In a multipolar world defined by strategic competition, influence is measured by economic integration rather than aid volume. As African governments diversify partnerships in pursuit of industrial growth and development, the United States must shift toward a partnership built on trade, investment, technology transfer, and shared policymaking. African countries navigating a multipolar world seek to balance among major powers rather than align exclusively with any single actor. Competing through value creation and institutional integration is now a strategic necessity for the United States in Africa.

A partnership model moves beyond unilateral aid toward collaborative economic engagement grounded in African agency. It prioritizes joint policy design, targeted technical assistance, and investment in value-added industries that integrate African economies into high-value segments of global markets while advancing U.S. interests in supply chain resilience and market access.

Lessons From South Korea and Vietnam

South Korea’s transformation from an aid recipient with a GDP lower than many African countries in 1960 to a major U.S. trading partner illustrates how export-led industrialization and institutionalized trade agreements drive structural change. A long-term partnership, not aid dependency, has produced durable growth.

Vietnam’s integration into semiconductor and emerging technology supply chains through its Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States demonstrates how targeted public support can catalyze private investment and strengthen domestic manufacturing. Vietnam’s initial hesitation in deepening ties with the United States due to concerns about provoking China shows that partners will balance major powers rather than choose sides. Effective engagement must therefore offer tangible economic value rather than geopolitical ultimatums.

African Agency and Innovation as Strategic Assets

Successful partnerships prioritize technology transfer and workforce development over commodities trade. A credible model requires African policymakers and firms to participate directly in economic strategy, recognizing the continent’s capacity for innovation.

Kenya’s digital finance ecosystem and Morocco’s renewable investments illustrate Africa’s ability to deliver scalable solutions. A partnership framework should therefore focus on joint research, technology development, and market integration that generate mutual benefit rather than dependency.

This partnership model contrasts with China’s project-based engagement, which often finances infrastructure tied to resource extraction and unsustainable debt levels for African countries without sustained industrial integration.

The United States can instead offer regulatory standards, private-sector integration, and access to a global innovation ecosystem. Trade frameworks aligned with U.S. standards incentivize market-oriented reforms, stronger governance institutions, and long-term integration into high-value supply chains. By focusing on processing of Africa’s significant mineral reserves and midstream integration rather than raw exports, U.S. engagement can reduce supply chain vulnerabilities while enabling African economies to move up the value chain.

Operationalizing this shift requires replacing unilateral trade preferences with reciprocal Strategic Investment and Trade Frameworks modeled on the U.S.-Korea agreement, with tiered pathways aligned to the African Continental Free Trade Area, where capacity is limited.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation should deploy first-loss guarantees to de-risk private investment in mineral processing and infrastructure. Support for Special Economic Zones anchored in U.S. technical and environmental standards, alongside Joint Innovation Hubs in regional centers, would institutionalize collaboration in green technology and digital infrastructure.

Domestic Constraints and Measuring Success

This shift may face domestic skepticism, yet a partnership model centered on reciprocal trade, private investment, and supply chain resilience aligns more closely with U.S. economic and national security priorities than aid programs reliant on annual appropriations. By emphasizing job creation and secure supply chains, U.S. Africa policy becomes an extension of industrial strategy rather than foreign assistance.

Success should be measured by growth in U.S.-Africa value-added trade and reduced debt vulnerability. Embedding governance standards within trade and investment frameworks strengthens institutions more credibly than democratic promotion programs.

An Africa that evolves from aid recipient to economic and political partner will be more resilient and better positioned to contribute to global stability in a world where one in four people will be African by 2050.

These recommendations offer no silver bullets, nor will they solve Africa’s development challenges overnight. But they represent a gradual and strategic shift that can move Africa further and faster toward sustainable growth and development, offering better returns than aid could ever could.

Lessons from the Missile Warriors

Carl Parkin

A rising threat on the other side of the world has sparked a headlong race to harness emerging technologies. A fervor for new tech has gripped the Pentagon, prompting the replacement of the traditional acquisitions process with one based on the central metric of speed. Meanwhile, a business-minded executive has opened new avenues of influence for prominent defense contractors among accusations of grift and self-interested behavior.

This may sound like a description of our current defense acquisitions environment, but it applies just as well to the environment that birthed the first U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. The details have changed: the rising threat is China, not the Soviet Union; the acquisitions reforms are occurring in a dramatically different defense bureaucracy; and Trump is certainly no Eisenhower. Nevertheless, the core similarities remain and make the lessons of the ICBM’s development valuable for those attempting to control the current tumult rippling through defense acquisitions. A few of these lessons are laid out here.

First, the ICBM was a technology of apocalyptic importance to the men who drove its creation. Trevor Gardner, the bureaucrat most responsible for it, publicly wrote that the fate of the world depended on the U.S. winning the race for long-range missiles. This belief drove Gardner to dramatic action: even after he’d set the ICBM on track for an accelerated completion, he resigned in protest because the process had not moved fast enough. After his resignation, he spoke constantly to Congress and the press about the existential importance of the ICBM race, and his fear that America was losing it. Even the personal testimony from his compatriot in ICBM development, Brig. General Bernard Schriever, that the ICBM program was indeed proceeding well, did not stop Gardner’s public comments.

Gardner’s crusade had real consequences: his Congressional statements were the early seeds of the “missile gap,” a doomsday defense scenario that never truly existed, and was arguably responsible for the overwhelming great power tension that defined the late 1950s and early 1960s. While Gardner’s doomsaying was functional—it propelled the Air Force into action, and eventually got him and Schriever time with President Eisenhower—it had a lasting legacy in the form of threat inflation. This is the first lesson of the missile warriors: rhetoric in service of specific technologies can outgrow its origins and create political consequences outside of its intended purpose.

Gardner and Schriever didn’t only wield ideological weapons, however. Both were masters of bureaucratic manipulation. In 1953, Gardner became aware that thermonuclear warheads were on a path toward miniaturization, and could probably soon be mated to intercontinental missiles.

But he knew that to convince the Air Force of that fact, and of the importance of ICBM development, simply telling them would not be enough: he had to, in his own words, “create a document so hot and of such eminence that no one could pooh-pooh it.” He and Schriever brought together the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee, stacked it with prominent scientists that Gardner knew would favor missile development, and asked them to review the facts. They presented a predictably “hot” document. Soon the Air Force would set the ICBM as its highest priority project. Later, they organized a similar committee to break down the bureaucratic barriers to ICBM development, cutting the number of required approvals for project subtasks from forty-two to ten.

This put the Atlas on a rapid path to completion, but like a sprinter after a race, the missile soon collapsed. Made operational in 1959, the Atlas was retired just six years later in 1965. The development and operational deployment of the Atlas cost an estimated $43 billion; more than the Manhattan Project. And while the scientific breakthroughs from America’s first missile have been used to develop countless others, the massive cost of deployment could have been tempered. The missile warriors cut a burning path to the first ICBM, but ultimately played into the predictions of previous missile skeptics, who cautioned that “The possession of scientific knowledge and engineering techniques will prove more valuable in meeting the exigencies of a long war than a large stockpile of obsolescent missiles.” Indeed, the Atlas program is credited with the invention of concurrency, a development practice that has plagued even our most modern systems.

Thus, our second lesson from the missile warriors: once one accepts the existential stakes of a race for emerging technology, it is easy to believe that no cost is too great to win that race. But rapid, mass deployment of the first generation of a new technology is not the metric by which technological success should be measured. Instead, cost-benefit considerations and a forward-looking mindset should inform defense acquisition decisions, so that their end results are future-durable weapons systems rather than quickly obsolete first attempts.

There are perils to working from a single analogy in military thinking—Afghanistan was not Vietnam, and Vietnam was not Nazi Germany. But the ICBM’s development can be viewed less as an analogical case, and more as a parable: the experience of the missile warriors tells us how people can think and act when stakes are high, and how our best motivations can bring out our worst impulses. These behaviors may not always manifest, but knowing that they can informs how to think about our current conditions.