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On January 14, Donald Trump issued a proclamation threatening yet more tariffs if “trading partners” fail to sign agreements on critical minerals and their derivative products within 180 days of his announcement.

There is no list of target countries, but it would be surprising if Aotearoa New Zealand is not one of them.

Trump’s pronouncement follows an investigation under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act 1962 that found the United States is too reliant on foreign sources of critical minerals and derivative products, threatening its national (and economic) security.

According to the investigation, this dependence and unpredictable supply chains create vulnerability that could be exploited by “foreign actors”.

Ultimately, this is the latest salvo in Trump’s economic war with China. Critical minerals are essential to advanced weapons systems, high-tech industries (including artificial intelligence and data centres), nuclear energy and electric vehicles.

China dominates the mining, processing and manufacturing supply chain for rare earth elements and rare-earth magnets used in wind turbines, medical devices, electric vehicles and military technology. It sources much of the raw product from investments offshore.

The United States is totally or largely dependent on imports of over 40 critical minerals. Those it mines it lacks the capacity to process, exporting raw materials for refining and importing the final product.

Trump blames lack of investment in US processing capacity on China buying up mining assets in other countries, processing raw materials cheaply in China, then manipulating prices by flooding the market with cheap products, making US domestic production uneconomic.

Tensions grew last year when China imposed export controls on critical mineral technologies in the tit-for-tat tariff war with the US.

What Australia’s deal tells us

Trump has directed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to pursue or continue negotiations with other countries to ensure an adequate supply of critical minerals, and to mitigate supply-chain vulnerabilities.

We should assume the template for these negotiations is the critical minerals framework agreement Australia secretly negotiated with the US over five months, and signed in October last year.

The agreement contains numerous commitments that were once anathema to free trade advocates, including:

• “price support mechanisms”, with a minimum price on “priority minerals” to come into effect in late 2026
• developing a global framework to support those price controls
• curbing Chinese acquisitions of new mining assets through domestic screening of investments and pressure on third countries.

On the investment side, a US$8.5 billion pipeline for targeted financing and joint ownership of projects between Australia and the US would see US$1 billion invested by each country within six months, and Australia fast-tracking approvals.

Australia’s mineral industry hailed the deal as “AUKUS in action”, with Australia also committing to major new military purchases.

Read more:
Australia is betting on a new ‘strategic reserve’ to loosen China’s grip on critical minerals

There’s a logic behind the deal. Australia is the world’s fourth-largest producer of rare earth elements, and home to BHP, Rio Tinto and Lynas Rare Earths, among other mining giants. It was the top investment destination for rare earth exploration in 2024.

But Australia now faces tricky questions about who it can and can’t sell these products to.

An Australian representative from a critical minerals mining operation has been reported as saying their company was “mindful of the context in which we’ve been funded” and there’s an assumption they “won’t be making many sales to Chinese customers”.

But Australia has free trade and investment agreements with China, its largest trading partner. Most of China’s investments in Australia are in mining and energy.

The text of the US–Australia critical minerals agreement says it is non-binding and unenforceable. But the US has many forms of retaliation for non-compliance.

Trump’s proclamation makes it clear that anything below what the US demands, either in these new agreements or their implementation, can face retaliation through trade sanctions.

The US–Australia agreement also said they would convene a ministerial mining, minerals and metals investment meeting within 180 days, but it is unclear with which countries.

Would NZ sign up to Trump’s agenda?

What does this mean for Aotearoa New Zealand? At this stage we don’t know if the government has been approached, and any deal would be secret until it is signed. But given the coalition government’s pro-mining agenda, the background context is important.

As part of a Critical Minerals Dialogue under the US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, New Zealand conducted a mapping of mineral reserves, resources and processing capacity in 2024.

The framework seemingly lapsed with the end of the Biden administration, but the critical minerals project lives on in another form.

In January 2025, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment published a Minerals Strategy, featuring a list of 37 critical minerals, 21 of which could be exploited here.

The strategy aims to double the value of minerals exports to NZ$3 billion by 2035, strengthen global minerals supply chains, and leverage relationships and international partnerships.

In November 2025, the government announced it had joined the international Minerals Security Partnership as a means to advance those goals.

At the same time, there is a current claim before the Waitangi Tribunal’s climate change inquiry challenging the government’s mining agenda as a breach of the Crown’s Treaty obligations.

To date we have heard nothing from the government about any demands from the Trump administration, and it is following a softly-softly foreign policy approach to the US.

But if New Zealand is a target of the latest Trump directive, there needs to be a full discussion about the implications – before, not after the fact.

Jane Kelsey advises countries, civil society and Māori entities on critical minerals and trade and investment agreements.

– ref. Trump is threatening more tariffs over access to critical minerals – will NZ be targeted? – https://theconversation.com/trump-is-threatening-more-tariffs-over-access-to-critical-minerals-will-nz-be-targeted-273780

The United States has now withdrawn from 66 international organisations, conventions and treaties, illegally invaded Venezuela, and promoted an “America First” agenda in its new National Security Strategy.

This all signals the collapse of a global system that has operated for the past 60 years. The old world order – driven by hyper-globalisation and US hegemonic power – is in its death throes, but a new era is yet to be born.

We now face a deepening ideological, strategic and military conflict over what shape it will take. The global “free trade” regime, overseen by the World Trade Organization (WTO), is one such battleground.

Largely designed to serve its strategic and corporate interests, the US now sees the WTO as a liability because of the economic ascendancy of China and a domestic populist backlash against globalisation and free trade.

But US antipathy to the current multilateral trade regime is not exclusive to the Trump administration. America has long resisted binding itself to the trade rules it demands other countries obey.

Congress reserved the power to review US membership when it authorised joining the WTO in 1994. Since then, both Republican and Democrat administrations have undermined its operation by:

• calling for an end to the Doha Round of negotiations launched in 2001

• breaking the WTO dispute mechanism by defying rulings that go against it, and refusing to appoint judges to the WTO Appellate Body so it is now moribund (effectively allowing rules to be breached)

• and starving the WTO’s budget during the latest US review of international organisation memberships.

To date, Trump has not withdrawn the US from the WTO. But his administration seeks instead to reinvent it in a form it believes will restore US geostrategic and economic ascendancy.

Rewriting the rulebook

In December 2025, the newly-arrived US Ambassador to the WTO warned its General Council:

If the WTO does not reform by making tangible improvements in those areas that are central to its mission, it will continue its path toward irrelevancy.

“Reform” in this context means abandoning the cornerstone most-favoured-nation rule that requires all WTO members to be treated equally well, which is the bedrock of multilateralism.

The US wants to reinterpret the WTO’s “security exceptions” (which apply to arms trade, war and United Nations obligations to maintain peace and security) to allow countries absolute sovereignty to decide when the exception applies – effectively neutralising the rules at will.

The WTO would also cease to address issues of “oversupply” and “overcapacity”, “economic security” and “supply chain resilience”, which the US believes have enabled China’s growing economic dominance, leaving the way open for unilateral action outside the WTO.

In the stripped-down WTO, decision-making by consensus would be abandoned and multilateral negotiations replaced by deals that are driven by more powerful players on cherry-picked topics.

Unilateral action is not an idle threat. Trump has imposed arbitrary and erratic tariffs on more than 90 countries for a variety of “national and economic security” reasons, demanding concessions for reducing (not removing) them.

Those demands extend way beyond matters of trade, and impinge deeply on those countries’ own sovereignty. There is nothing the WTO can do.

Weaponising tariffs is also not a new strategy. President Joe Biden maintained the tariffs imposed on China during the first Trump presidency, triggering WTO disputes which remain unresolved.

But Trump’s embrace of raw coercive power strips away any chimera of commitment to multilateralism and the model that has prevailed since the 1980s, or to the development of Third World countries that have been rule-takers in that regime.

Where now for the WTO?

Some more powerful countries have bargained with Trump to reduce the new tariffs. China’s retaliation generated an uneasy one-year truce. Brazil held firm against Trump’s politically-motivated tariffs at considerable economic cost. Australia made a side-deal on critical minerals.

The European Union remains in a standoff over pharmaceutical patents and regulating big tech. India has diversified to survive relatively unscathed, ironically forging closer ties with China.

Less powerful countries are much more vulnerable. Among other obligations, the full texts of “reciprocal trade agreements” with Malaysia and Cambodia, signed in October, require them to:

• replicate US foreign policy and sanctions on other countries

• consult the US before negotiating a new free trade agreement with a country that “jeopardises US essential security interests”

• promise to make potentially crippling investments in and purchases from the US

• involve the US in regulating inward investment and development of Malaysia’s rare earth elements and critical minerals (Malaysia has large unmined repositories, an alternative to China)

• and not tax US tech giants, regulate their monopolies or restrict data flows.

If implemented, these agreements risk creating economic, fiscal, social and political chaos in targeted countries, disrupting their deeply integrated supply chains, and requiring they make impossible choices between the US and China.

In return, the 2025 tariffs will be reduced, not reversed, and the US can terminate the deals pretty much at will.

This poses an existential question for WTO members, including New Zealand and Australia, at the 14th ministerial conference in Cameroon in late March: will members submit to US demands in an attempt to keep the WTO on life support?

Or can they use this interregnum to explore alternatives to the hyper-globalisation model whose era has passed?

Jane Kelsey is affiliated with a number of international NGOs that monitor and advise on developments in international trade law and the WTO.

– ref. The World Trade Organization is on life support. Will Trump’s new rules finish it off? – https://theconversation.com/the-world-trade-organization-is-on-life-support-will-trumps-new-rules-finish-it-off-273216

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When the Trump administration arbitrarily imposed 15% tariffs on New Zealand exports on August 1, up from a previously announced 10%, no one should have been surprised.

“Reciprocal” tariffs, based on the difference in value between what the United States imports from and exports to other countries, were signalled on April 2, Trump’s “Liberation Day”. New Zealand’s latest tariffs are higher than some, lower than many.

Many governments are now frenetically seeking deals before the tariffs take effect on August 7. New Zealand’s chief trade negotiator Vangelis Vitalis has been dispatched to Washington urgently to plead New Zealand’s case, with Trade Minister Todd McClay also on his way.

Labour’s trade spokesperson has declared the lack of a deal for lower tariffs – along similar lines to ones struck by the European Union and United Kingdom – a “major fail”.

But politicians should be careful what they wish for. Bigger countries have already caved in to Trump’s demands, signing vague deals at a high political and economic price with no real guarantees.

Trump’s economic rationale

Trump has a long expressed love for tariffs as leverage over countries that depend on US markets. Essentially, these are taxes the US charges on imported goods.

It’s not New Zealand exporters who “pay” these taxes, it is US importers, and likely their customers. Similarly, New Zealand exporters don’t “save” millions from tariff cuts.

Trump hopes making imports more expensive will spur domestic production, support local business and create jobs, and the trade imbalance with the US would decline. As a bonus, in June alone, tariffs earned the US$26 billion in revenue, partly compensating for massive tax cuts contained in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”.

By imposing tariffs unilaterally, Trump breaches the US tariff limits at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its “most-favoured-nation” rule of treating all countries equally. But the US has already paralysed the WTO’s dispute system. US tariff limits and other trade rules in US free trade agreements are also being ignored.

Domestically, Trump has used the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify bypassing Congress to impose tariffs, on the basis that threats to the US economy constitute a “national emergency”.

This was ruled unlawful by the Court of International Trade and is currently under appeal at the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the tariffs continue. The Trump-friendly Supreme Court would likely endorse them.

US economist Paul Krugman predicts this approach will not be rolled back by future administrations and will become “the new normal”.

Exaggerated claims, few guarantees

The various bilateral “deals” other countries have sought to mitigate Trump’s tariffs look vague and precarious.

The talks and the outcomes remain secret. The vaguely worded “frameworks” – not signed agreements – lack detail and allow Trump to make exaggerated claims at odds with the other country’s statements. Krugman describes these “understandings” as, for the most part, “vaporware”.

Take the European Union’s promise to buy goods worth US$250 billion a year for three years, mainly in fossil fuels such as liquefied natural gas. One commentator described this as as “delusional” and “totally unrealistic”, given EU imports of energy in 2024 were only worth about $65 billion.

The EU also admits it lacks the power to deliver on a promise to invest $600 billion in the US economy, because that would come entirely from private sector investment over which Brussels has no authority.

Nor is there any guarantee Trump will uphold his part of the deal or not demand more. The EU said its landmark regulations on Big Tech survived unscathed; Trump says they remain on the table as further “non-tariff barriers” – trade-speak for anti-business regulations.

To take another example, Japan has said its 15% tariff deal operates from August 1, while the US gives no start date.

The White House said “Japan will invest $550 billion directed by the United States to rebuild and expand core American industries” to be spent at “President Trump’s direction”. The investment will be in a list of industries, including energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals and shipbuilding, with the US retaining 90% of the profits.

Bloomberg reports Japan expects only 1–2% of that $550 billion to be actual investment, with the rest made up of loans, and makes no reference to Trump having control.

Trump’s political agenda

Trump’s demands are not just about trade. His strong-arm tactics – which Brazil, China and France have termed economic blackmail – aim to punish political foes and damage competing powers, notably China and Russia.

They are also a form of retaliation over other countries’ foreign policy decisions (such as Canada’s intention to recognise Palestinian statehood), a way to exploit foreign natural resources (such as Pakistan’s oil), and to remove obstacles to corporate donors (such as Canada’s digital services taxes).

What will Trump demand, and get, from New Zealand in these secret negotiations? Governments face high political costs as they navigate their own domestic processes to “secure” such deals.

At the very least, New Zealand’s negotiations need to be transparent and consulted on before commitments are made. More broadly, the country will need to rethink of its trade strategy in the light of the new international realities.

Jane Kelsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. NZ is looking for a deal over Trump’s new tariffs – that could come with a high political price – https://theconversation.com/nz-is-looking-for-a-deal-over-trumps-new-tariffs-that-could-come-with-a-high-political-price-262497