Here are some projects US is pushing, working on, or already locked in to counter China.

Idea that this administration is "soft on Xi Jinping" or that "US is in decline" is incredibly misleading

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Middle East / Gulf
1- Stargate UAE (OpenAI, G42, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, Cisco): 1GW Abu Dhabi AI cluster, first 200MW live 2026

Locks G42 into the US AI stack and forecloses Huawei and Alibaba cloud penetration of the Gulf

2- Project Vault (Feb 2): $10B EXIM critical minerals reserve plus 11 bilateral mineral MOUs (Argentina, Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, UAE, UK, Uzbekistan)

Breaks Beijing’s monopsony on processed rare earths and builds non-Chinese refining capacity

3- Amazon $5B Saudi HUMAIN AI hub; Google Cloud-HUMAIN $10B; Microsoft-G42 $1.5B equity stake

Embeds US hyperscalers as the default compute layer for Saudi industrial policy, displacing Chinese vendors

4- Qatar QIA $500B committed to US data centers, AI, and healthcare; Gulf total $2.5T pledged to US tech

Redirects sovereign wealth flows from Belt and Road and Chinese AI firms into the US

Central Asia / South Caucasus / India

1- TRIPP Implementation Framework (Jan 13): US holds 74% of TRIPP Development Company for 49 years, corridor through Armenia cuts Iran out of Caucasus transit

Gives the US structural control of a Middle Corridor link that BRI needs to reach Europe overland

2- US-Azerbaijan Charter on Strategic Partnership (Vance Baku visit, first since Cheney 2008)

Anchors Baku as a Trans-Caspian hub for non-Chinese energy and logistics flows

3- US-India trade deal (Feb 6): India eliminates tariffs on US industrial goods, retains ag protections; 2.2M tons LPG long-term LNG deal

Pulls India deeper into US supply chains and replaces Russian and Iranian energy with US LNG

4- FORGE launched (Feb 4): 54-nation critical minerals platform, chaired by South Korea, coordinates pricing floors and supply chain investment

Creates a buyers’ cartel against Chinese price manipulation in lithium, cobalt, and rare earths

Southeast Asia

1- Philippines 4,000-acre Luzon Economic Security Zone (Apr 16-18): first AI-native Pax Silica industrial hub at New Clark City, Tarlac, US common law governance, special 5-day visa lanes

Plants a US-governed industrial enclave on the South China Sea perimeter, directly opposite Chinese maritime claims

2- Philippines joins Pax Silica as 13th signatory (Apr 16): brings semiconductor and electronics capacity plus nickel, copper, chromite, cobalt reserves

Moves Philippine mineral output out of Chinese smelting chains and into allied processing

3- US-Indonesia Major Defense Cooperation Partnership (Apr 13) plus $23B reciprocal trade deal (aircraft, ag, energy, critical minerals access)

Signed the same day Prabowo visited Putin in Moscow, signaling Jakarta will not slide fully into the China-Russia axis

Latin America / Caribbean

1- Operation Absolute Resolve (Jan 3): Delta Force captures Maduro in Caracas, narco-terrorism trial in Manhattan

Removes Beijing’s most important political client in the hemisphere and tests whether China defends its partners

2- Panama Canal port annulment (Jan): Panama Supreme Court strips CK Hutchison concessions, US-backed

Ends Chinese-linked operational presence at both ends of the canal, the single most strategic chokepoint in the Americas

3- US-Argentina trade and investment agreement (Feb 4): Buenos Aires prioritizes US for copper and lithium over “market-manipulating economies”

Peels the world’s lithium triangle anchor off Chinese off-take contracts

4- Dominican Republic $600M spaceport (Launch on Demand), framed explicitly as counter-China in LATAM space

Preempts Chinese space-tracking footprint identified by the House Select Committee on China across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela

Africa

1- Morocco bilateral critical minerals framework (Feb 2)

Locks in phosphate and cobalt cooperation with the US’s oldest treaty ally, reducing Chinese leverage in North Africa

2- Guinea critical minerals framework, same ministerial

Targets the bauxite supply that feeds Chinese aluminum smelting, the single most concentrated dependency Beijing has in Africa

Washington spent years treating competition with Beijing as a discrete series of problems — of the Indo-Pacific, or artificial intelligence, or trade balances — as though China were competing selectively, in specific theaters.

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