Taking Stock of Washington's Critical Minerals Push, One Year After the Busan Truce
In October 2025, the United States and China agreed to a one-year truce in Busan. Beijing paused the expansion of its rare earth export controls, Washington eased measures of its own, and both sides bought time. Twelve months later, the question is what Washington did with it.
The answer, on paper, is a lot. Washington has put real money and political capital behind rebuilding America's critical minerals industry: equity stakes, loans, price floors, and offtake agreements, spread across multiple agencies. But the truce bought time, not independence. Is the time being used well, and where is it leaking away?
In this webinar, Tomasz Nadrowski, Co-Founder & Portfolio Manager at Amvest Terraden and author of Mineral War: China's Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction, is joined by Dr. Tom Moerenhout, Director, Critical Materials at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy and Executive Director of the Geneva Platform for Resilient Value Chains. Together they will take stock of what the US government has actually built in the past year, where the money has and has not landed, and why so many projects stall at the two points in the cycle where capital is scarcest.
The discussion, moderated by Stuart Macliver, Co-Founder & General Partner at Amvest Terraden, will explore:
What the US government has achieved so far, from debt and equity to structured deals, across agencies, domestic and foreign projects, and binding and non-binding commitments
Where the money is going, and where it is not: the gap between announced and committed capital
The first "valley of death": mining projects stalling between pre-feasibility and definitive feasibility studies, when capital is scarce and risk is highest
The second "valley of death": recycling, refining, and processing start-ups waiting years for customer qualification before they earn revenue
What other approaches Western governments should test to reduce dependence on China
Most importantly, we will ask whether a year of spending has moved the West any closer to supply chain independence, or whether the truce has simply postponed the reckoning.
Join us for a frank discussion at the intersection of industrial policy, capital markets, and the global resource race, built for investors, project developers, policymakers, and anyone trying to separate real progress from headlines.