WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a rare earths and critical minerals deal Monday at the White House during Trump’s latest bilateral meeting with yet another world leader.
Trump, fresh off a trip to the Middle East to codify a historic peace deal followed by a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, hosted Albanese in the Cabinet Room on Monday during a press conference.
“So we’re going to be here to talk about lots of lots of different things, and we might take a few questions before, but we are discussing critical minerals and rare earths, and we’re going to be signing an agreement that’s been negotiated over a period of four or five months,” Trump said moments before the signing.
“And it was sort of good timing that we got it done just in time for the visit, and we work together very much on rare earths, critical minerals and lots of other things, and we’ve had a very good relationship. We’ve been working on that for quite a while,” Trump added.
Albanese lauded the agreement as taking the United States-Australia relationship to the “next level.”
“Today’s agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking it to the next level, seizing those opportunities which are before us, to take our relationship to that next level. And it’s been fantastic, the contact that we’ve had together, the friendship that we’ve developed,” Albanese said.
Albanese called it an “$8.5 billion pipeline that we have ready to go.” He also said the deal will include joint activities and U.S. investment in Australia, which includes processing:
There will be a billion dollars contributed from Australia and the United States over the next six months with projects that are immediately available. There’s three groups of projects, ones that are joint activities between Australia and the United States, such as Alcoa. Secondly is projects that will be US investment that the US will undertake in Australia, including processing and then ones that Australia will undertake some as well.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum praised the deal.
“Critical mineral independence is essential to our national security, and thanks to @POTUS, America is finally prioritizing the resources essential to our defense, technology, and energy sectors!” Burgum wrote in a post on X.
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