The Problem

The United States is discredited and isolated on the world stage. While the Trump administration has done much to accelerate this state of affairs, the chaos of the last two years is only the latest chapter in decades of failed wars, climate denial, and support for authoritarian regimes that have disgraced the American government and alienated our allies. To meet the environmental and economic challenges ahead, America must rebuild its standing in the world.

As of early 2026, the United States has announced its withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It has also walked out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that assesses climate research, pulling its authors and its funding. It has separately withdrawn its support for the Green Climate Fund, the main channel for rich nations to finance clean energy in developing ones. Direct foreign assistance through USAID, the agency that has channeled American development aid since 1961, has been gutted.

In addition to abandoning the climate movement, the United States has also abandoned the business of clean energy. Chinese firms now dominate the manufacturing, export, and financing of renewable power across Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. China now builds around three quarters of the world's clean energy equipment, including roughly 95 percent of the wafers that go into solar panels. Its financing tends to come bundled with Chinese equipment, Chinese contractors, and long Chinese maintenance contracts, so a country that builds its energy transition on Chinese terms builds it on Chinese supply chains.

Meanwhile, American trade policy has turned on its own allies and created global chaos. The Biden administration put a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. The Trump administration escalated, taxing steel and aluminum at 50 percent and then imposing sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs on dozens of countries under an emergency statute. The Supreme Court struck those down in February 2026, ruling that the president had overstepped his authority. He replaced them the same day under a different law, a temporary 10 percent global tariff that expires by statute within months, and a trade court has since struck that one down as well. In July 2026 he reached for a fourth authority, a provision of a 1930 tariff act that has sat essentially unused since the 1940s, to put an additional 50 percent on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, from cement to wine to hockey sticks.

The clean transition runs on international cooperation, and the United States has made itself into a country that few can trust.

The Mission

The Mission for America will rebuild the country's standing by putting money and coordination behind the global clean energy transition. It will finance a wave of new projects across the developing world on fair terms for borrowers, secure the minerals every other mission in this book depends on, and rejoin and rebuild the trade alliances it walked away from.

A Green Marshall Plan will lead the effort. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will set up an international lending arm and lend $150 to $200 billion over 10 years to governments and companies in developing countries. The money will build solar and wind farms, power lines, water systems, and public transport, and it will be repaid over decades out of what those projects earn. At that scale the RFC can stand beside China's state banks as a real alternative for countries that now borrow mainly from China. The RFC will not lend new money into an old debt crisis, and the United States will push to cancel debts that are never going to be paid.

Domestic American industries will see their markets expand worldwide. A transmission line financed in Nigeria can be an order for a transformer plant in Ohio. Borrowers will not be required to buy American, because that would mean higher prices or longer waits for things the world already makes cheaply. Instead the RFC will make the American option the best deal on the table, with a lower interest rate and longer repayment on the share of a loan spent on American-made equipment, and training and maintenance support built in. The tie is saved for the handful of things the world is short of and America can rapidly supply, like the enormous transformers every grid needs.

The clean economy runs on a short list of refined metals, and China does most of that work for the entire world today, which is a fragile arrangement for everyone else. America cannot mine and refine all of these metals at home. The RFC will finance American refineries and separation plants, hold a reserve that steadies prices when the market lurches, and sign long-term agreements with the countries that hold the ore, on terms that leave them owning a real share of the business and financed to do more of the refining themselves. The aim is a world where no one country owns the entire system.

None of this is a campaign against China. Ending American dependence on Chinese processing is what any country would want for itself, and it is what China itself did over 30 years, while the United States let its own industry thin out. China also builds more clean energy technology than any country on Earth, and there is no livable climate in which it stops. The United States will work with China as an equal on the transition itself, on research, on shared standards, and on financing the countries that need help.

The United States will also rejoin the global movement to clean up the world economy and move it onto clean power, returning to the UN climate treaty, the IPCC, and the Green Climate Fund it walked away from. The Climate Club is a group of roughly 50 countries, first agreed by the G7 in 2022, that work together on cleaning up heavy industry such as steel and cement. Members compare their climate policies, agree on common ways to measure the carbon in industrial goods, and help poorer members pay for cleaner plants. The United States helped found it and then walked out. The Mission will rejoin and help build it into something far larger, a trade alliance for the clean economy. Members will hold each other to a common standard for clean manufacturing and fair treatment of workers, trade with one another on better terms for meeting it, and charge a shared fee at their borders on the dirtiest heavy industry from outside, with an added charge where a product's low price comes from mistreating the workers who made it. Markets will open between members at a pace set by what those countries can actually build, and the money the fee raises will help the poorest of them pay for the transition. The Trump tariffs will end, and tariffs will be kept only where they help build an industry the Mission needs.

One of the hardest parts of the Mission will be regaining trust. The United States has spent years demonstrating that its commitments last about as long as an administration does, and promises will not fix that. So the financing, the carbon standard, and the mineral partnerships will be written into law, so that undoing them takes an act of Congress rather than a signature. The RFC will hold its own charter and its own balance sheet, which no single administration can quietly empty. And once the work is running in enough countries, walking away will become the expensive choice.

Solutions

Solution 1: The Green Marshall Plan (RFC Export Financing)

The United States built the postwar world through the Marshall Plan, which sent the equivalent of more than $150 billion in today's dollars, most of it in grants, to rebuild European economies, create lifelong allies, and open markets for American goods. The Mission for America will do it again for the clean economy, this time mostly through loans rather than grants, because clean energy infrastructure earns the revenue to pay them back whereas a war-ravaged 1948 Europe could not.

Developing nations need clean energy infrastructure and cannot afford it. China's policy banks are financing it for them, on terms that lock those countries into Chinese equipment, Chinese maintenance contracts, and decades of Chinese influence. The United States has no comparable tool. USAID did more of this work than people remember. Power Africa, which it led from 2013, was built to add 30,000 megawatts of generation and 60 million electricity connections across the continent by 2030, much of it renewable. By the time it was shut down in early 2025, five years short of that deadline, it had backed more than 41 million new or improved connections and financed projects representing roughly 14,300 megawatts. The Export-Import Bank still exists and does something close to what is needed, lending to foreign buyers so they can afford to purchase American-made goods, but it operates at a small fraction of the scale of its Chinese counterpart. What remains are the regional development banks, institutions like the African and Asian Development Banks that pool money from member countries to finance projects in their regions, alongside the development finance institutions, or DFIs, that governments use to invest in private projects abroad. Both do useful work, but neither was designed to create demand for American factories.

RFC creates an export financing arm. The RFC will establish a dedicated division for international clean technology financing, with the authority to build a loan book on the order of $150–200 billion over 10 years, capitalized the way the original RFC was. These will be loans, repaid over decades out of the revenue the infrastructure generates. A solar farm in Nigeria earns money for every kilowatt-hour it sells. A grid upgrade in Indonesia cuts blackouts and lifts economic output, and an electric bus fleet with its charging depot cuts a city's fuel bill and its air pollution at once. Most of that capital will come back. But competing with China's cheap lending is not free. Charging a borrower less than the government's own cost of money leaves a gap, and some loans will not be repaid at all. Both cost the Treasury real money, both amount to a small fraction of the total lent, and both will be written into the RFC's budget where Congress and the public can see them rather than buried somewhere. The RFC will also structure its lending so fewer loans fail in the first place. It will take the first losses on a deal, meaning it absorbs the opening share of any shortfall before its partners do, sharing that exposure with the regional development banks rather than leaving them to carry it, tie what a country owes each year to what the project actually earns, spread its risk across a large and varied portfolio, and write the terms for renegotiating a troubled loan into the original contract, so a country in difficulty already knows the process instead of discovering it in a crisis. That is the opposite of a loan a country cannot renegotiate when conditions change.

The RFC export financing arm will be modeled on the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, but will differ from them in three ways. The first is transparency. All loan terms, project details, and environmental assessments will be public, where China's lending is often opaque, leaving borrowing nations unable to renegotiate when conditions change.

The second difference is labor standards. Every RFC-financed project will carry commitments on local hiring, fair wages, and real workplace safety. These terms will cover the project the money is building, not how a country should run its economy, which is the practice that discredited the old lenders. They will be negotiated with the borrower rather than handed down, and they will bind the contractors and the RFC itself as much as the host government. They will go into the loan contract itself, where they can be enforced, rather than into a policy statement. Money will be released in stages against independent inspection, and local unions and civil-society monitors will have standing to file complaints and a published record of what those complaints found. A borrower or contractor that fails an inspection will have to fix it or forfeit the next payment, and a repeated pattern will cost eligibility for future RFC work. Because the money arrives over years, compliance will become a condition of each new installment instead of a promise made once at signing.

Third, rather than lock countries into permanent dependence on American maintenance crews, RFC-financed projects will include training programs so local workers can operate and maintain the equipment themselves.

Where the work starts. Africa comes first, because the need there is largest and borrowers have the fewest options. Hundreds of millions of people there still have no reliable power, African governments and the regional development banks have built real project pipelines that are waiting on capital, and China is currently the main lender willing to fund them. India is building one of the fastest-growing power systems in the world and has manufacturing ambitions of its own, which makes it a partner in production rather than only a customer. Southeast Asia has absorbed the clean technology supply chains that American tariffs pushed out, and several of those countries want to move up from final assembly into cells and components. Latin America holds much of the world's lithium and copper, and governments across the region have said plainly that they intend to process more of it at home rather than ship out raw ore. The RFC will finance that ambition. Work will begin in all four regions, on terms each of them has a hand in setting.

Coordination with regional development banks and DFIs. The RFC will not replicate what these institutions already do well. Regional development banks like the African Development Bank excel at project pipeline development, identifying which countries need what infrastructure, conducting feasibility studies, and structuring deals. The RFC will add the manufacturing connection. When a regional bank identifies a solar project in Senegal that can earn enough to repay its loan, the RFC can supply the financing that gets it built, and the panels can come from wherever they are cheapest and cleanest. When a DFI structures a grid modernization deal in Vietnam, the RFC can finance the transformers and switchgear from American plants, because those are the pieces the world is short of. Which of the two applies is set by the rule below, not deal by deal.

Public money, not a backstop for private funds. The RFC will lend its own public capital and take its own equity stakes. It will not simply guarantee a private investor's loan, which is the arrangement where the government quietly promises to cover the losses while the private fund keeps the gains. When it absorbs first losses, it will do so alongside the public regional development banks, never sitting underneath a private investor who collects the upside and walks away from the downside. And because some of what the poorest countries need most, clean water, rural power, and sea walls, will never earn enough revenue to repay a loan, the RFC will run grant and low-interest windows for those alongside its commercial lending. It will not turn a worthy project away only because it cannot be made to pay for itself.

Lend in the money the project actually earns. A loan written in dollars but repaid out of local earnings is a trap. A solar farm in Ghana sells its power in Ghanaian cedi. If the cedi loses a third of its value against the dollar, which happens regularly in economies that live off commodity exports, the farm's earnings have not changed at all but the debt has grown by half in the money the country actually has to find. Perfectly sound projects become unpayable debts this way. That mismatch, rather than bad projects, is what turned ordinary loans into crises across Latin America and Africa. So the RFC will write a meaningful share of its loans in the borrower's own currency and carry that risk itself, spreading it across many countries. It will arrange exchange-rate protection with the regional development banks to cover the rest, and tie payments to what the project brings in. Closing that gap is one of the clearest differences from Belt and Road lending.

Deal with the debt, not just the new loans. New lending, however cheap, means little to a country already spending more on debt payments than on schools or clean power, and dozens of nations are in or near that trap today. So the Green Marshall Plan will not lend into a debt crisis and call it help. Every RFC loan will carry a disaster-and-pandemic pause clause, an automatic halt on payments when a hurricane, drought, or health emergency hits, so a country in crisis is not also servicing debt in the same month. The RFC will not finance a country in active distress unless its existing debts are being restructured at the same time, so that new money does not simply pay off old creditors. Where the debt cannot realistically be paid, the United States will write off what it holds in the poorest countries. That is a small share, because the money is now owed largely to private bondholders and to China, and a government can only cancel what it is owed. But almost every developing-country government bond sold to foreign investors is written under New York or English law. If Congress makes a restructuring agreed to by most creditors binding on all of them, a holdout fund can no longer refuse a deal, sit out the losses everyone else accepts, and sue for payment in full. Relief would then no longer depend on every creditor volunteering. This costs the Treasury very little, and it protects the RFC's own loans.

American jobs without slowing the buildout. This financing has to do two things that pull against each other. It has to put Americans to work, because a Congress that authorizes $150–200 billion in lending will rightly ask what the country gets for it, and because export orders are what keep a domestic factory running a second shift. And it has to get clean infrastructure built fast, which means it cannot make every borrower wait for an American product that is expensive or not yet made at scale. The way to do both is to require American products only where American industry is the best thing on offer.

So most RFC financing will be untied by default. A borrower can buy the panels and the standard heat pumps wherever they are cheapest and cleanest, because in those products the world already has enormous low-cost capacity, much of it in China and India, and requiring American content would only mean a higher price or a longer wait. Cheap solar did more for the grid in Pakistan than any financing package could have, and the Mission has no interest in standing between a poor country and a cheap clean good.

Untied does not mean indifferent. On the share of a loan spent on American-made equipment, the RFC will offer a lower interest rate and longer repayment, and it will bundle in the training and maintenance support that keeps that equipment running for decades. A borrower stays free to buy elsewhere, but the American option will be the best deal on the table. Those terms will stay within the international rules on export financing that the United States has signed.

The tie belongs to a shorter list, the products where America is a scarce and capable supplier and the tie therefore costs the borrower almost nothing. Large power transformers are the clearest case. The world is short of them, lead times run to years, only a handful of plants can build them, and a grid cannot absorb new clean power without them. When RFC financing for a transmission line specifies American-built transformers, the borrower gives up nothing, because the real alternative was a two-year queue, not a cheaper option forgone. The same holds for high-voltage direct-current gear, grid switchgear, reactor components, electrolyzers, and the advanced battery cells underneath the packs, all of them heavy, engineered, capital-intensive, and in the tier the Mission is building at home.

That list is not permanent, and the plan will treat it that way. A chokepoint today becomes an ordinary competitive market once global capacity catches up, at which point the tie there becomes the same drag it would be on solar panels, so the list of tied sectors will be reviewed and pared back on a schedule rather than frozen into law.

Partner industry will be fully eligible for RFC financing. If India builds the world's cheapest heat pumps and meets the club's clean manufacturing and labor standard, RFC financing will help put Indian heat pumps in Kenya and Brazil, because the goal is to get clean equipment installed and to grow the partner's industry, whoever's name is on the box. And a real share of the financing, especially for the poorest countries, will be grants and concessional loans, meaning loans priced below what any commercial lender would charge, run through the regional development banks with no content strings at all.

Does helping others build undercut American industry? The answer turns on which part of the chain is at stake and on what decade it is. Through the 2030s the world needs several times the clean manufacturing capacity that exists today, so a battery plant in Indonesia takes no order away from a battery plant in Ohio while both run flat out against a global shortage. Wages matter less here than people assume, because this equipment is capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. When Chinese wages roughly tripled, solar assembly did move to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand, but it went to get around American tariffs rather than to chase cheap labor, most of it was built by Chinese firms anyway, and the core of the industry, the purified silicon called polysilicon and the thin wafers sliced from it, never moved at all. China's advantage came from scale, cheap state capital, an integrated supply chain, and cheap electricity far more than from cheap workers, and public financing and a clean grid can answer all of those. Where a wage gap does decide the outcome is in final assembly, module framing, and wiring, and that is the tier the Mission is glad to see a partner country take up, because it is where a national industry usually starts. What the United States will hold are the tiers that turn on scale, capital, and accumulated know-how, which means battery cells rather than the packs they are assembled into, wafers and the silicon ingots they are sliced from rather than finished solar modules, nacelles (the housing atop a wind turbine that holds the generator and gearbox) and power electronics rather than towers, and the mineral processing underneath all of it. Weight helps too. Blades, transformers, and structural steel are expensive to ship, so those industries cluster near their customers no matter what any trade schedule says.

What this delivers: An RFC export financing arm operating at a scale that competes with China's policy banks. Developing nations gaining access to American financing and clean technology on transparent, fair terms. American manufacturing gaining export markets that sustain domestic production. Durable alliances built on economic interdependence rather than political rhetoric.

Solution 2: Critical Mineral Security (Ending a Single Point of Failure)

The United States will build the domestic critical mineral processing industry it has never had. Every clean energy technology in this book runs on the same handful of inputs, lithium, cobalt, rare earths, nickel, manganese, and the platinum-group metals. The bottleneck is in processing them. China handles roughly 70 percent of global midstream processing and more than 90 percent of rare earth separation, meaning the smelting, refining, and chemical separation that turn raw ore into usable industrial material. That concentration is a risk to everyone, including China, and it would still be a risk if the country holding it were a close ally. Any single point of failure in a supply chain the whole world now depends on sits one accident or one dispute away from stalling the transition everywhere. China earned that position with decades of investment, made while nobody else was bothering. The United States will build, and help others build, until no one country carries all of it.

The current administration has started the work. Project Vault committed $12 billion to building a strategic reserve, most of it an Export-Import Bank loan alongside private capital. The government has put roughly $1 billion of Defense Production Act financing behind the sector and opened nearly $1 billion more in Department of Energy funding for processing. And it signed 11 new bilateral critical mineral frameworks at a single meeting of ministers in February 2026, with partners including Argentina, Peru, and the Philippines. The RFC will take that foundation and scale it to the size the Mission requires.

RFC finances domestic midstream processing at scale. The RFC will expand domestic critical mineral processing using the full toolkit described in the Mission for Natural Resources, including long-term loans, direct equity stakes, and government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) facilities, meaning plants the public builds and owns but hires a private operator to run, for the processing gaps no private company will fill.

The credits that ride alongside. Two tax credits do the supporting work here. The Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, section 45X, pays a producer for every unit of clean energy equipment made on American soil, which closes the operating-cost gap against a subsidized competitor abroad. The Advanced Energy Project Credit, section 48C, covers part of the capital cost of building or retooling a plant, which is what gets a lithium refinery financed in the first place. The Mission will widen 48C to cover midstream mineral processing explicitly and lift the competitive cap that rations it to a handful of Treasury-selected winners. Both will be rebuilt around four rules. Every credit will be fully refundable, paid out in cash to a company that qualifies whether or not it owes tax that year, because a credit that only helps firms with existing tax bills is worthless to exactly the startups and cooperatives this Mission is trying to call into being. Both will run for 10 years from the Mission's launch, because nobody commits to a refinery on a two-year incentive. Eligibility will be written tightly enough that high-carbon production cannot claim a clean credit, measured against the same Clean Manufacturing Standard the carbon border fee uses. And both will step down on a published schedule, at full rate through year three, at about two thirds of that through year six, and at roughly a third through year 10, after which they end. By then the industry should be able to stand on its own.

Resource agreements that build the partner's industry too. The United States cannot dig and refine all of this inside its own borders. The 11 bilateral frameworks already in place are the foundation. The RFC will formalize and finance them, and pursue new partnerships with the countries that actually hold the ore, from Australia, Canada, and Chile to Argentina, Indonesia, Peru, and the Philippines. These will be joint ventures with local participation and ownership, not extractive arrangements that replicate colonial patterns.

The partnership will not stop at the mine mouth. Where a producing country wants to refine its own ore instead of shipping it out raw, the RFC will finance that plant on the same terms it would finance one in Nevada. Indonesia already bars the export of unprocessed nickel ore for exactly this reason, and Chile has moved to keep more of its lithium value at home. Those policies help this Mission, because a world with refineries on four continents is harder to disrupt than one with refineries in two. Every partnership will carry environmental and labor standards written into the agreement itself, so that allied minerals can be shown to be clean, not merely sourced from somewhere other than China.

Strategic Mineral Reserve. The Mission for Natural Resources will rebuild the National Defense Stockpile and establish an RFC-managed buffer stock that buys when prices are low and releases supply when they spike, and the full mechanism is described there. Its value to foreign policy is that it protects domestic and allied processors when a flood of cheap processed material would otherwise make their own plants uneconomic before they are established. The reserve will require standing capital, will not always trade at a gain, and will be sized to buffer normal volatility rather than to win an open-ended price war against a larger balance sheet, which is why diversified allied processing, not the reserve alone, is the real defense against dumping. Price stability is what makes allied supply chains worth building in the first place.

No single-source dependency. Replacing dependence on China with dependence on another single country would solve nothing. For every critical mineral, the RFC will work toward at least three independent supply sources, drawing on domestic production, on two or more allied partners, and on a growing recycling stream. A few materials, some of the platinum-group metals among them, are too geologically concentrated for that to be reachable this decade, and for those the RFC will hold a deeper reserve and fund substitution research instead of pretending the target is met.

Where cooperation with China still makes sense. Diversifying away from a chokepoint does not mean cutting a country off. Refining and separation chemistry is a mature, well-understood field, and China leads it. Where joint research, shared environmental standards for mining and refining, or common recycling and materials specifications would speed the transition, the United States will pursue them with China as it would with any other capable partner. American plants will also keep buying Chinese processed material while domestic capacity is still being built, because pretending otherwise would only stall the buildout the Mission depends on. The aim is a world where every major economy has real alternatives, and that is better for China too.

The same standards at home. The environmental and labor standards the RFC requires of allied and foreign mineral partners will apply in full to domestic processing too. Every RFC-financed facility will meet or exceed federal environmental review, and any project affecting tribal lands will require government-to-government consultation and the tribe's free, prior, and informed consent, meaning consent given in advance, without pressure, and with full knowledge of what is planned, before financing closes. The Mission will not demand fair practices abroad while imposing pollution on communities at home.

What this delivers: Domestic midstream processing capacity sufficient to supply MFA demand without Chinese dependence. A strategic stockpile that stabilizes prices and buffers against supply disruption. Bilateral resource partnerships with allied nations on fair terms. No critical mineral with 100 percent import reliance.

Solution 3: The Climate Club (A Trade Alliance for the Clean Economy)

Agreed by the G7 nations and the EU in December 2022 and launched at the COP28 climate conference a year later, the Climate Club forum now has roughly 50 members working to align clean manufacturing standards. The United States stopped showing up, part of the same retreat that pulled it out of 66 international organizations by January 2026. The Mission will rejoin, and then work with allies to build the forum into a trade alliance for the clean economy.

Under the structure the Mission will help build, members will agree to common standards for clean manufacturing and labor practices. They will trade on preferential terms with each other for goods that meet those standards. Non-members will face a common external carbon border adjustment mechanism. The club will grow large enough that meeting the standard is worth more to a producer than avoiding it. Nothing will stop a country from trading outside it. The Mission's job is to make joining the better deal, and to help the countries that want in but cannot yet afford the upgrade.

Rejoining as equals. The United States helped found the Climate Club and then abandoned it. The Mission will rejoin on Day One and add the weight the club has lacked, meaning RFC export financing that makes membership worth something to a new member, a domestic Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) that aligns with the EU's, and the diplomatic effort to help the club grow. Europe has moved ahead on climate trade policy and needs the United States as a partner to give the system global weight. The two are also bound together more tightly than before. After cutting off most Russian pipeline gas, Europe now depends heavily on American liquefied natural gas, which is natural gas chilled to a liquid so it can travel by ship. The United States will not use that dependence as a threat, and will say so publicly, because a partnership cannot work if Europe suspects it is being squeezed. Both sides have good reason to grow out of that exposure together, and it can be the starting point for the deepest U.S.-EU economic partnership since the Marshall Plan.

Who joins next. The existing coalition of roughly 50 nations is a starting point. India, with its vast and fast-growing industrial base, is the most important economy not yet in the club, and Brazil and Saudi Arabia matter nearly as much. Each new member enlarges the zone where clean goods move cheaply, and each one will arrive with conditions of its own, because the club is a negotiation among members rather than a set of terms the United States hands out. The club will not require all members to have identical domestic policies. It will require mutual recognition of clean manufacturing and labor standards and a common external carbon border adjustment.

Trade among members, decided good by good. Membership will lower the cost of moving clean goods between member countries, but not by throwing every market open at once. Which products move freely, and how quickly, will be weighed against the industries the United States and its allies are trying to build. Opening the border on a product nobody in the club yet makes at scale costs domestic industry nothing and gets clean technology deployed faster. Opening it on a product where three member countries are each standing up their first factories would strand all three. So the removal of trade barriers will run on a schedule tied to capacity. As domestic and allied production of a given product reaches the point where it can meet demand, the barriers on that product will come down among members, and members will negotiate those schedules together rather than each quietly defending its own list. Protection for a new industry is a normal part of building one, and every member will be able to use it, including the poorer members, who have the most catching up to do and the least room to give that tool away. The club will not open every market on Day One, but it will make trade predictable. A manufacturer will be able to see years ahead which barriers are coming down and when, and invest against that instead of against the next election.

Common external carbon border adjustment. Non-members will face a unified carbon assessment at every club border, a fee based on how much greenhouse gas was created making the product, not where it was made. A ton of steel from a clean electric arc furnace in Indiana will pay nothing. A ton from a coal-fired blast furnace will pay the full amount. This will sharply reduce carbon leakage, the shift of polluting production to places that do not charge for carbon, because when every member charges the same fee there is nowhere inside the club to move it. The CBAM will cover steel, cement, aluminum, and chemicals, the heavy industries where a carbon-intensity standard exists to measure against.

A labor adjustment alongside the carbon fee. A fee on carbon alone has a gap. A factory where workers cannot organize, are paid below their own country's legal minimum, or work in unsafe conditions can look clean on paper while it pushes its costs onto the people who work there instead of onto the atmosphere. So the border fee will carry a second, separate adjustment for goods whose low price comes from substandard working conditions rather than real differences in productivity. It will not be keyed to how low a country's wages are. A poor country with lower pay and decent conditions will owe nothing extra, because charging it would amount to taxing a country for being poor. A producer that changes those practices will stop paying the adjustment. Goods made with forced labor, which U.S. law already bars from entry, will stay barred. Fair labor standards will also be one of the conditions for entering the club's zero-fee zone, so a country that meets the clean manufacturing standard and treats its workers decently will trade on club terms, and the poorest exporters will get the same longer phase-in and help building inspection capacity that they get on carbon. The labor adjustment will distinguish the U.S.-led system from the EU's, which weighs carbon alone.

The EU's CBAM entered its definitive phase on January 1, 2026, and U.S. alignment will create a unified transatlantic standard covering the two largest consumer markets in the world. The domestic benchmark is the Clean Manufacturing Standard from the Industry chapter, and imports from producers who meet it will owe no CBAM. The CBAM will phase in over two to three years.

End the Trump tariffs, and use tariffs on purpose. On Day One, the president will revoke what remains of the Trump administration's tariffs, including the 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum and the tariffs on Canadian goods, and will end the 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. Tariffs will stay in the toolkit, but only where they help build an industry the Mission needs. Inside the club, protection for a new industry runs on the negotiated schedules described above. Outside it, each tariff will name the industry it protects, step down on a published schedule as American and allied production catches up, and come paired with RFC financing for the plants it is protecting, because a tariff with no plan behind it only raises prices. The rules for these tariffs will be written into the same law as the CBAM, so a manufacturer can plan around them instead of waiting for the next proclamation. Where a Trump tariff happens to shield an industry the Mission is building, steel and aluminum among them, a targeted tariff under existing trade authority will take its place the same day, so that industry is never left exposed while the CBAM phases in. Finished electric vehicles are the exception. As the Mission for Electric Vehicles sets out, the domestic EV industry will be built with RFC financing and tax credits rather than tariffs, because the country needs EVs on the road fast, tariffs would invite retaliation against American exports, and foreign automakers that sell well here tend to build plants here.

International Decarbonization Fund for the hardest sectors. A capped share of CBAM revenue, not an open-ended draw, will seed an International Decarbonization Fund that will finance clean-industry projects abroad in the same sectors the CBAM covers. It will lend where a project earns enough to pay a loan back and give grants where it does not, which for the poorest exporters will usually mean grants. Content will follow the same rule as the rest of this Mission, set out in Solution 1, so money is untied where the world already builds a thing cheaply and tied where America is one of the few suppliers who can deliver. In practice this fund will land on the tied side more often than the Green Marshall Plan does, because of what it buys. Cleaning up steel and cement means electrolyzers, direct-reduction iron plants, and industrial heat systems, which are engineered, capital-intensive, and in short supply everywhere, rather than commodity panels the world already turns out by the shipload. A clean direct-reduction iron plant in India will buy American electrolyzers and licenses because there is a queue for them, not because a rule says it must. It will run through the RFC's export financing arm, and it will be capitalized rather than fed from a volatile annual fee, so a shrinking CBAM base as producers clean up will not strand it. If the goal is to decarbonize the steel sector, the work cannot stop at the U.S. border, and helping a trading partner build a clean iron plant with American equipment cuts global emissions, sells American goods, and gives that country a stake in the Climate Club. The poorest exporters, who did least to cause the problem and can least afford to decarbonize on the club's timeline, will get a longer phase-in and priority access to the fund, plus help building the carbon-accounting capacity the standard requires. For developing-country governments, the carbon border standard will then come with financing for their own industry, built with American technology, instead of acting only as a barrier.

Joint critical mineral sourcing. Club members will pool their bilateral mineral agreements into a shared network, so that no member has to bargain alone against a single dominant supplier. Routing everyone's ore toward a handful of allied refineries would only rebuild the same concentration somewhere friendlier, so the network will spread refining across the club, including in the countries that dig the ore. A disruption in any one place will then be survivable everywhere else. The RFC's mineral security investments in Solution 2 will plug directly into that network.

Shared research, and clear rules about what gets shared. The Manhattan Projects chapter builds technology worth having. The club is where allies will pool the parts of it that are stronger when shared, through joint research programs, shared testing facilities, and coordinated demonstration projects, all of which reach a working technology faster than any member would alone. Sharing has limits. Training a country's workers to run and repair what it buys costs the United States nothing and earns decades of goodwill, so it will be standard on every deal. Licensed manufacturing, where a partner builds American-designed equipment and the royalties come home, is a good trade and will be used widely. Handing over frontier process technology that American public research paid to develop is a different matter, and it will be decided case by case on whether the United States gains more from a partner building it than from building it here. Publicly funded breakthroughs will not be given away by default, and they will not be hoarded to squeeze partners on price either.

Take climate measures out of investment treaties. A quieter obstacle to the whole energy transition sits inside a web of older trade and investment treaties. Many of them contain a clause called investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, that lets a foreign company sue a government before a private arbitration panel when a new law cuts into the profits it expected. As the United States and its partners wind fossil production down, the affected companies will reach for exactly this tool, demanding compensation for the reserves and pipelines they can no longer exploit, and the panels tend to value those claims generously. The Climate Club is the vehicle for defusing it. On Day One, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) and the State Department will begin renegotiating the highest-exposure bilateral investment treaties to carve climate and transition measures out of arbitration, and club membership will be conditioned on partners mutually waiving ISDS claims against one another's decarbonization policies. The United States never joined the Energy Charter Treaty, the agreement invoked most often in these disputes, which keeps its own exposure manageable. The EU has already withdrawn from it, so the United States would be joining an effort already underway. This is the machinery the Fossil Fuels chapter counts on to protect its managed wind-down.

Coordinate the supply drawdown. The club's producer members will also coordinate the timing of their own fossil fuel supply drawdowns and pledge not to backfill the barrels the United States retires. A wind-down that simply hands market share to another producer removes no oil from the world, so the drawdown only works if producers coordinate it.

No collapse for oil-dependent nations. The transition cannot mean fiscal collapse for the countries whose national budgets depend on selling oil and gas. The Green Marshall Plan and the International Decarbonization Fund will prioritize fossil-fuel-dependent economies for clean energy financing, industrial-diversification loans, and workforce-transition support, so that falling global demand becomes a managed shift for them rather than a cliff. This is the Mission's own initiative, the global counterpart to the coordinated fossil fuel drawdown.

Ocean governance. Beyond trade, the Mission will take up allied coordination on the ocean, kept separate from the carbon-focused Climate Club. The United States will work with its partners on enforcement against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and on seafood-import monitoring that keeps illegally caught fish out of allied markets. It will help build a coalition to set shared standards for any future seabed mining, an effort it is in a weak position to lead while it sits outside the treaty that governs the seabed. And it will publish its own model for governing its exclusive economic zone, the waters within 200 nautical miles of its coast where it controls fishing and seabed resources, as an open template that other countries can adopt, adapt, or ignore, rather than as a standard it expects anyone to take up.

The obvious question is whether the International Maritime Organization can carry this work, and mostly it cannot. The IMO governs ships, meaning safety at sea and pollution from vessels, which makes it the right body for the shipping work in the Shipping chapter and the wrong one here. It does not manage fisheries and has no authority over the seabed. Illegal fishing is governed through the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Port State Measures Agreement, which lets a country shut a suspect vessel out of its harbors, and through the regional fisheries management organizations that set catch rules ocean by ocean. Seabed mining sits with the International Seabed Authority. The one piece the IMO does own is worth using, since its ship identification numbering scheme has been extended to fishing vessels, and a permanent number that follows a boat through every renaming and reflagging is the backbone of any serious enforcement. So the Mission will work through the FAO agreement and the regional bodies on fishing, press for IMO numbering on every industrial fishing vessel, and engage the Seabed Authority on mining standards. The Seabed Authority is harder. The United States never ratified the Law of the Sea treaty, so it sits at the Seabed Authority as an observer rather than a voting member. Ratification would give the country a real say over the rules governing a third of the planet, and the Mission will press the Senate for it.

Answering the "carbon tax on everything" attack. The border fee will draw the predictable charge that it is a carbon tax that raises the price of everything Americans buy. The fee will fall only on high-carbon imports in four heavy industries, steel, cement, aluminum, and chemicals, not on the everyday goods in a shopping cart. The labor adjustment will apply to the same products. Domestic clean producers and clean allies will pay nothing. The fee will replace the interim tariffs in those industries rather than stacking on top of them, so for compliant goods the net price effect will be flat or lower, and its phase-in will be paced to the availability of domestic clean supply. Unlike a flat tariff, the fee will be set by carbon intensity, so a cleaner producer, foreign or domestic, will always pay less. And the CBAM revenue not sent to the International Decarbonization Fund will go to offsetting costs for working households.

What this delivers: A trade alliance of the world's largest economies with preferential internal trade for clean goods, opened product by product on a published schedule, and a unified external carbon standard. A CBAM aligned with the EU, replacing the tariff patchwork with a system where the cost of crossing the border is determined by how cleanly the product was made and how its workers were treated. Coordinated mineral supply chains that reduce dependence on any single country. A standing forum where the countries doing the building set the rules together.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the president will promise more than undoing the last administration. The system that came before it had already failed on its own terms. It was sold in 1945 as the guarantee of stability and steadily rising prosperity, and it delivered those unevenly, to some countries barely at all. The resentment it built is a large part of why walking away from it proved so easy and so popular. The president will say that the goal is not to reassemble the old arrangement, and that the countries doing the work of the clean transition will have a real say in its rules.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will open direct diplomatic channels with the Climate Club secretariat and founding member governments to prepare for Day One rejoining. The team will name the RFC's international division director and the USTR lead for CBAM alignment negotiations. Preliminary talks will begin with allied mineral producers and buyers, including Australia, Canada, Chile, and Japan, on formalizing existing bilateral frameworks under RFC coordination. The legislative package will be drafted during the transition so that it can land on the Hill in the first hundred days.

On Day One, the president will sign executive orders rejoining the Climate Club and directing the U.S. representative to resume participation across all working groups. The State Department will be directed to formally re-enter the UNFCCC and the IPCC. The Treasury will be directed to rescind the withdrawal notice it filed against the Green Climate Fund in January 2026 and to reclaim the American seat on the Fund's board, neither of which needs anyone else's permission. The president's first budget will carry a number for the rest of it, restoring the roughly $4 billion in pledges the previous administration rescinded. The president will revoke the Trump administration's tariffs and the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and, where a tariff shields an industry the Mission is building, replace it with a targeted tariff the same day. The USTR will be directed to open formal alignment negotiations with the EU on mutual CBAM recognition, building the diplomatic framework that the legislation will later codify, and to open the investment-treaty renegotiations described in Solution 3. The RFC will be directed to begin standing up its international clean technology export financing division, and in the interim the president will direct the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation to start clean technology export financing under their existing authorities, until the first-hundred-days charter folds that activity into the permanent RFC division.

The full legislative package will go to Congress in the first hundred days. It will include the CBAM bill with its detailed product coverage, the labor adjustment, the rules for strategic tariffs, and EU mutual-recognition authority, the RFC Export Financing Division charter with full authorization to make long-term loans for clean infrastructure abroad, including to foreign buyers of American clean technology, the Mineral Security Partnership Act formalizing RFC coordination of bilateral agreements with allied mineral producers, the investment-treaty reform authority that carves climate measures out of ISDS, and the sovereign-debt bill that binds holdout creditors to a restructuring most creditors have accepted.

The president will also have to fight for this in public, because the opposition is real and some of it is popular. The hardest attack is the simplest one, that this is foreign aid in a new suit, money shipped overseas while Americans go without. The financing in Solution 1 is built to answer it. It will be untied where the world already builds a thing cheaply, so nothing is slowed, with the best terms reserved for American-made equipment, and tied to American plants in the scarce-supply sectors where a borrower loses nothing by buying from us. The president will make that case in the places where the work actually lands, in the towns that build the transformers and the switchgear. These countries are going to electrify either way, and American factories should get a share of the work.

Then there are the named fights. Steel and aluminum importers, and the trade associations they fund, will run a campaign against the carbon border fee as a tax on everything Americans buy. The president will answer it plainly and repeatedly, that the fee touches four heavy industries and not the shopping cart, and that a clean American mill should not lose a contract to a coal-fired competitor because the competitor was allowed to pollute for free. The arbitration industry will fight the removal of climate measures from investment treaties, and that is a fight worth having loudly, because almost nobody outside the trade knows that a private tribunal can order American taxpayers to compensate a foreign company for a law Congress passed. The holdout funds will fight the sovereign-debt bill, and the president should welcome that argument in public.

Where members of Congress block the Mission, the president will campaign to replace them. The CBAM statute, the RFC Export Financing Division charter, and the Mineral Security Partnership Act are the core pieces, and a member who blocks them is choosing Chinese supply chains over American factories in a district that will feel the difference. The president will say so in that district, back primary challengers against the members who will not move, and make the next election a referendum on whether the country intends to build. Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty is its own long fight, lost repeatedly for 40 years, and it will take the same treatment rather than another decade of polite deferral.

Rejoining a club or a treaty by executive order is easy to reverse, and the last administration proved it. So the weight of this strategy will rest on things a later Congress has to affirmatively repeal, and on commitments already signed and money already committed. The CBAM statute, the RFC charter, and the Mineral Security Partnership Act will be law rather than executive action. The multi-decade export loans and mineral offtake agreements, long-term contracts to buy a set amount of a producer's output, will be binding commitments that survive a change of administration, and capital already out the door is the hardest thing of all to recall. Club and treaty re-entry will ride on top of that statutory and contractual base as a reversible top layer, so the other chapters can rely on this framework.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

Foundations by Year 1 (2030)

• RFC export financing arm stood up and operational, first deals closing in Africa and India
• Executive order signed Day One directing USTR to begin EU CBAM alignment negotiations
• Full legislative package sent to Congress in the first hundred days, including the CBAM bill with its labor adjustment and strategic-tariff rules, the RFC Export Financing Division charter, the Mineral Security Partnership Act, investment-treaty reform, and the sovereign-debt bill
• Trump tariffs and the Chinese EV tariff revoked on Day One, with targeted tariffs in place the same day for the industries the Mission is building, so there is no gap in protection
• RFC midstream mineral processing loans flowing, building on the roughly $1 billion of DPA financing deployed and the DOE processing funding already opened
• Project Vault expanded; RFC-managed Strategic Mineral Reserve established and taking in first stockpiles
• First bilateral mineral agreements signed under RFC coordination, with talks opened across Australia, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Peru, and the Philippines
• First domestic rare earth separation and lithium refining facilities funded by RFC, with site work begun
• U.S. formally rejoins Climate Club; active participation restored across all working groups
• First product-by-product schedules for removing trade barriers negotiated with club members, tied to domestic and allied capacity
• U.S. formally re-enters the UNFCCC and IPCC; Green Climate Fund appropriations request submitted to Congress
• U.S.-EU mutual CBAM recognition negotiations underway; India and Brazil in accession talks
• Direct climate and clean energy cooperation channels reopened with China alongside the diversification program
• ISDS / investment-treaty reform negotiations launched with the highest-exposure partners
• Disaster-and-pandemic pause clauses and local-currency windows built into RFC loan terms
• Law of the Sea ratification sent to the Senate

Scale Up by Year 5 (2034)

• RFC export financing portfolio reaching tens of billions; American clean tech flowing to 20+ countries
• Bilateral mineral agreements formalized under RFC coordination across the major producing countries, several of them financed to refine at home rather than export raw ore
• Domestic midstream processing capacity online for lithium, rare earths, and cobalt; 100 percent import reliance reduced from 16 minerals to fewer than five
• CBAM fully operational, replacing the tariff patchwork with carbon-intensity and working-conditions standards
• EU-U.S. mutual CBAM recognition in effect, so a producer certified under one system is accepted by the other
• Climate Club membership expanding well beyond 50 nations; common external CBAM covering majority of global consumer market
• Strategic mineral stockpile actively stabilizing prices; domestic producers insulated from Chinese dumping
• Recycling facilities operational, recovering lithium, cobalt, and rare earths from end-of-life batteries and equipment
• Regional development bank and DFI coordination channels established; RFC export financing integrated into allied project pipelines
• At least one bilateral investment treaty renegotiated to carve out climate measures; producer no-backfill coordination in effect among Climate Club members
• Partner-country manufacturing standing up under RFC financing, starting with assembly and moving into cells and electrolyzers where countries are ready

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• The United States finances clean energy infrastructure in the developing world at a scale that rivals China's policy banks
• No critical mineral with 100 percent import reliance; domestic and allied processing capacity sufficient for all MFA missions
• No single country is a chokepoint for any critical mineral, and the United States buys from China as one capable producer among several rather than depending on it
• CBAM is the global standard for clean trade; Climate Club membership covers the great majority of global GDP and industrial emissions, up from more than 50 percent at the outset
• The tariff patchwork is gone. Heavy-industry imports are priced by the carbon and labor adjustments, the strategic tariffs that remain step down on published schedules as American and allied production catches up, and trade among club members runs on published schedules for removing trade barriers, with room for a new industry to get started
• Allied mineral supply chains diversified across three or more sources for every critical input that can support it, with a deeper reserve and substitution research covering the few too geologically concentrated to reach that bar
• Domestic midstream processing is a mature industry employing tens of thousands of workers
• Developing nations are building clean infrastructure with RFC financing, and the scarce equipment American plants supply, from transformers and switchgear to electrolyzers and advanced battery cells, has steady export demand
• The Climate Club has become the central diplomatic forum for the global clean economy, with the United States and EU as co-leaders
• RFC international lending established as a transparent, fair-terms partner to the regional development banks, with disaster pauses, local-currency terms, and debt restructuring built in