Mission for America Foreign Policy

No country will build a clean economy alone. The minerals, the factories, the shipping lanes, and the financing all cross borders, so the transition depends on nations that can cooperate and keep their word. The system that cooperation runs through is in shambles, and the United States did most of the breaking, withdrawing from 66 international organizations, gutting its foreign assistance, and replacing a coherent trade policy with five contradictory tariff regimes in under two years. It has also walked away from the business of clean energy, and China now builds around three quarters of the world's clean energy equipment.

The Mission for America will rebuild the country's standing by putting money and coordination behind the global clean energy transition, with most of the work running through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It has three parts.

• The Green Marshall Plan. The RFC 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. Borrowers will be free to buy from any country, and American-made equipment will come with a lower interest rate, longer repayment, and training and maintenance built in. American products are required only where the world is short of them and America can rapidly supply them, like the large transformers every grid needs. 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.
• Critical mineral security. China does roughly 70 percent of the world's mineral processing and more than 90 percent of rare earth separation. Any single point of failure in a supply chain the whole world depends on is one dispute away from stalling the transition everywhere. The RFC will finance domestic refining and separation, run a Strategic Mineral Reserve that buys low and sells high to blunt price shocks, 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 Climate Club. The United States will 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 will also rejoin the Climate Club, a group of roughly 50 countries working together to clean up heavy industry such as steel and cement, and help build it into a trade alliance with common clean manufacturing and labor standards, a shared carbon fee on high-carbon imports from outside, an added charge on goods made cheap by mistreating the workers who produce them, and internal trade opened product by product on a published schedule tied to what member countries can actually make. The Trump tariffs will end, and tariffs will be used only to protect the new industries the Mission is building, each stepping down on a published schedule.

Much of this is about ending dependence on Chinese processing and Chinese financing, and giving other countries the same freedom to choose. Any nation would want that for itself, and China did the same, deliberately and well, over 30 years. There is no version of a livable climate in which China does not build an enormous share of the world's clean technology. So the Mission will work with China as an equal on the transition itself, on research, on standards, and on climate finance.

One of the hardest parts will be regaining trust. The United States has spent years showing that its commitments last about as long as an administration does. So the financing, the carbon standard, and the mineral partnerships will be written into law, so that only an act of Congress can undo them. Once the work is running in enough countries, walking away will become the expensive choice.