The concept of North American security has undergone a quiet but profound transformation over the past decade. What was primarily understood, particularly after 9/11, in military and counter-terrorism terms—the protection of borders, interception of threats, coordination of intelligence—has expanded into an integrated geoeconomic framework in which trade policy, energy infrastructure, supply-chain architecture, and mineral endowments are now explicitly recognized as elements of national and regional security for all three countries.
This transformation is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a tectonic structural shift in how governments across North America now need to calculate risk, project power, and design policy. Common prosperity and common security are becoming more intertwined than ever before.
The building blocks of this shift are visible on multiple fronts. The concept of North American “common domain awareness”—the shared surveillance and intelligence picture across air, land, maritime, and now cyber and space domains—is no longer an aspiration but an operational imperative. Recent events have accelerated the shift: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of globally distributed supply chains for goods once considered purely commercial, such as semiconductors, personal protective equipment, pharmaceuticals, and industrial inputs. The war in Ukraine demonstrated that energy dependence could be weaponized with devastating effect. Beijing’s dominance in the processing of rare earth elements and critical minerals—commanding over 60% of global lithium refining, roughly 85% of rare earth processing, and near-total control of certain battery supply chains—has concentrated a strategic chokehold in a single hand.
The response in Washington, Ottawa, and—with more unease—Mexico City has been to re-examine the economic architecture of the region through a security lens and to treat the sourcing, processing, and strategic stockpiling of key materials not as market transactions but as national security decisions requiring state intervention, coordination, and long-term institutional architecture. This reframing extends to critical minerals: a competitive advantage in the global contest over competitiveness and security, as a source of leverage and a hedge against instability elsewhere.
The strategic moment: The USMCA review as catalyst
It is against this backdrop—of a region rethinking its external perimeter, reimagining its internal economic architecture, and confronting a world in which minerals could become missiles in slow motion—that the 2026 USMCA statutory review must now be framed. The agreement is no longer simply a framework for managing North American trade; it’s the primary institutional vehicle through which three governments must decide whether to build a genuine security-economic union for the 21st century, or allow the continent to fragment under the weaponization of interdependence, the drag of bilateral deals, asymmetric dependencies, and the absence of trilateral will and strategic foresight. And further complicating this picture is the narrative of annexation toward the north and the threat of the unilateral use of force toward the south emanating today from the White House.
Nonetheless, what is also new—and consequential—is the extent to which economic security is forcing a reconsideration of this regional architecture. In the area of critical minerals, and across North America, the three countries hold complementary but distinct critical mineral endowments.
Canada is widely regarded as the most diversified of the three, with significant reserves and production of nickel, cobalt, uranium, potash (of which it is the world’s largest producer), niobium, cesium, platinum-group metals, copper, zinc, aluminum (via smelting), and growing lithium, graphite, and rare earth element deposits. The U.S. has substantial domestic resources of lithium, copper, molybdenum, beryllium (as the dominant global producer), helium, and the Mountain Pass, California, rare earth mine—the only rare earth mine of its size operating in the hemisphere—alongside meaningful reserves of zinc, palladium, and titanium, though it remains heavily import-dependent for roughly half of the 50 minerals on the USGS critical list, including manganese, graphite, and gallium.
Mexico is the world’s largest producer of silver and a top-tier producer of fluorspar (critical for fluorochemicals and steelmaking), copper, zinc, lead, bismuth, antimony, and molybdenum, and is believed to hold underexplored but potentially significant lithium deposits in Sonora (the Bacanora/Sonora project), although a 2022 reform nationalized lithium and placed it under the state-owned LitioMx, complicating development. Together, the three nations are positioning the USMCA bloc as a potential counterweight to Chinese dominance in critical mineral supply chains, though gaps remain in rare earths processing, graphite, and several battery-grade inputs.
Therefore, if critical minerals, semiconductor supply chains, and clean energy infrastructure are national security assets, then the logic of purely bilateral cooperation no longer maps cleanly onto the continent’s actual strategic vulnerabilities. The architecture required to address this expanded security agenda is one that North America has not yet fully built. The USMCA review is the most consequential available opportunity to begin building it.
Indeed, the review should not be seen merely as a trade technicality. It is a defining moment for continental economic architecture, forcing a reckoning with whether the agreement remains fit for a world defined by supply chain fragility, strategic competition with China, and the energy transition. The review, however, has launched bilaterally—between the U.S. and Mexico—rather than trilaterally, establishing a troubling precedent that risks entrenching a hub-and-spoke dynamic. If the ongoing U.S. strategic recalibration with China—the most important one for Washington’s defense and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War—is to succeed, it requires Canada and Mexico as key economic, trade, infrastructure, energy, critical minerals and cybersecurity components of that recalibration.
Lessons from the U.S.-Canada and the U.S.-Mexico critical minerals action plans
Critical minerals have emerged as one of the issues most likely to define what the “new USMCA” stands for: not merely a trade agreement, but the enforcement spine of a broader hemispheric economic-security strategy that integrates market access, technology governance, and supply chain integrity. If the review produces a meaningful minerals annex—or a trilateral minerals side agreement—it will represent a genuine architectural advance. If it fails to do so, the continent risks locking in bilateral templates.
There’s already a template. The Canada-U.S. Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals Collaboration, launched in January 2020, aims to secure, strengthen, and diversify supply chains for minerals crucial to defense, aerospace, and clean energy technology (e.g., EVs, semiconductors) to reduce reliance on foreign, particularly Chinese, sources. By 2026, this partnership has mobilized billions in investments, with Canada positioning itself as a reliable supplier through joint offtake agreements and efforts to create a “buyers’ club” for North American allies. The U.S.-Mexico Critical Minerals Action Plan, signed in February 2026, is another novel instrument—moving toward operationalizable mechanisms: price floors, coordinated trade policy against nonmarket producers, joint investment frameworks, and stockpiling coordination. However, its significance lies not merely in what it contains, but in what it signals: The U.S. is prepared to use bilateral urgency to construct de facto standards for North American minerals governance before the trilateral review table is fully constituted.
The 60-day timeline embedded in that plan—to develop coordinated trade policies and price floor modalities—underscores this dynamic. Washington is not waiting for a trilateral consensus that may prove elusive. It is moving, bilaterally, to set the terms of engagement, and inviting partners to join a framework already under construction. For Canada, this creates a stark challenge: engage proactively to shape these emerging standards, or risk finding itself in the position of acceding to a U.S.-Mexico template after its architecture has been set. Moreover, the technical cooperation dimensions of the plan—geological mapping coordination between the U.S. Geological Survey and the Mexican Geological Service, joint R&D frameworks, and regulatory standard alignment—represent exactly the kind of institutional infrastructure that a trilateral North American minerals framework would require at scale. Canada’s own geological survey capacity, its world-class mining regulatory environment, and its expertise in Indigenous consultation frameworks could serve as powerful additions to this template—but only if Canada secures a seat at the design table rather than the implementation table.
The scope of the plans—covering AI chips, electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors, and advanced defense systems—makes explicit what was previously implied: This is a national security arrangement as much as an economic one. The downstream industries named in it are not merely commercially important; they are the material substrate of military capability and technological leadership in the competition with China. Canada’s defense industrial base and its contributions to allied defence procurement are directly implicated in this calculus and must be integrated into the trilateral architecture accordingly. Notably, Canada and Mexico are preparing their own bilateral action plan on minerals, infrastructure, and supply chains for the second half of 2026—a welcome development, but one that underscores how trilateral coordination remains lagging and ad hoc, with bilateral instruments proliferating in the absence of a unifying framework. The risk is a patchwork of overlapping bilateral commitments that creates confusion, duplicates effort, and fails to deliver the collective market power that only a genuine trilateral framework could generate.
Building a North American critical minerals framework
The highest-leverage outcome of the USMCA review would be a dedicated critical minerals annex or side agreement that locks in four foundational elements: tariff elimination on intra-regional mineral trade; aligned rules of origin for downstream products incorporating North American minerals; coordinated external tariffs against nonmarket producers; and joint procurement mechanisms for defence and strategic stockpiling.
Together, these elements would constitute not merely a trade provision but the architecture of a North American minerals security system—one capable of competing with the scale and coordination of the Chinese industrial state. North America’s problem in the past has been not that it aims too high and misses, but rather that it aims too low and hits. Today the stakes are high. Critical minerals are not inputs to future industries alone; they are the material foundation of the defence systems, clean energy infrastructure, and digital technologies on which continental security depends. Getting the architecture right—trilateral, standards-based, sustainable, and institutionally durable—is not a second-order policy question. It is among the defining strategic tasks of this decade.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arturo Sarukhan
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Sarukhan is an international consultant based in Washington, D.C. A board member of the Americas Society, he is the former Mexican ambassador to the U.S. (2007-13) and a career diplomat for more than 20 years. He served as Mexican consul general in New York and chief of policy planning at the Mexican foreign ministry, among other posts.
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