In April 2025, the United States declared deep seabed mining a national priority. The decision had a clear motive: over the last year, China’s escalating export restrictions on critical minerals essential to defense systems, advanced semiconductors, and AI hardware had transformed supply chain vulnerability from a theoretical concern into an emergency.
Since then, the policy response has been swift. Executive Order 14285 directed federal agencies to maintain leadership in deep sea science, technology, and seabed mineral resources. In January 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration consolidated and accelerated its permitting process for deep seabed mining. The following month, Washington launched Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic mineral reserve.
Each is a reasonable response to a real strategic vulnerability. However, the question is no longer whether the United States should pursue seabed minerals; it is how. The current trajectory privileges unilateral action outside the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the International Seabed Authority (ISA). That choice may secure minerals in the short term while eroding the Pacific partnerships and deterrence architecture the United States needs for long-term mineral security. Bypassing the ISA, and demonstrating that a major power can do so without consequence, threatens the framework that currently constrains Chinese action in the same zones.
A Diminished ISA
The contradiction is already visible in the case of The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian firm that has held ISA exploration contracts sponsored by Pacific Island countries since 2011. After Washington revived the long-dormant 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, TMC moved quickly to apply for U.S. permits over the same seabed areas covered by its ISA contracts.
The result is parallel authorizations from two different legal regimes for the same seabed. Nauru and Tonga went through ISA processes, took on legal responsibilities under international law, and put their credibility on the line as sponsoring states. The United States is now overriding those commitments using a domestic statute of a country that has never ratified UNCLOS. Sponsoring states have been told their participation in the international framework does not matter.
The U.S. approach will not be judged in American courts alone. It will be judged by the Pacific Island countries that sponsor ISA contracts, the 37 nations that have called for a deep-sea mining moratorium, and the broader international community that views the ISA as the legitimate governance structure for the seabed.
The ISA secretary-general’s response to Executive Order 14285 was direct. She called the order “surprising,” noted that the United States has been a reliable observer and significant contributor for over 30 years, and warned that unilateral action “sets a dangerous precedent that could destabilize the entire system of global ocean governance.” When the institution responsible for seabed governance publicly declares that the United States has broken a 30-year cooperative relationship, Pacific Island states hear it.
The ISA framework is currently the primary international constraint on which countries can mine where. If the United States demonstrates that a major power can bypass this system without consequence, it weakens the framework for everyone.
China Fills the Vacuum
China already holds more ISA exploration contracts than any other country and is actively building bilateral mineral partnerships across the Pacific. A diminished ISA removes the one multilateral structure that also constrains Beijing. The United States may produce the opposite of the intended outcome: a less constrained China operating in a governance vacuum the United States helped create.
China already dominates global critical mineral refining, and its 2024-2025 export restrictions demonstrated a willingness to weaponize that position. However, Beijing’s Pacific strategy extends well beyond processing dominance. China wants to continue its dominance over supply chains by locking in access to new sources of critical minerals – including those found under the sea.
In February 2025, the Cook Islands and China elevated their relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority signed a memorandum with China’s Ministry of Natural Resources covering exploration and resource management within the Cook Islands’ exclusive economic zone. This was the culmination of nearly two decades of groundwork, including Chinese deep-sea mineral surveys conducted in South Pacific waters as early as 2009.
Kiribati shows what happens when the Western-led system fails a Pacific partner. Its Exclusive Economic Zone spans approximately 3.5 million square kilometers and straddles some of the most strategically significant waters in the central Pacific. In 2015, Kiribati sponsored a TMC subsidiary, Marawa Research, for a 75,000-square-kilometer ISA exploration block. At the end of 2024, the agreement was mutually terminated, with TMC calling Kiribati’s rights “less commercially favorable” than its other contracts. By March 2025, Kiribati was holding talks with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin about deep-ocean mineral collaboration.
The pattern is consistent. Every vacancy left by Western partners becomes an opening for Beijing.
What Pacific Leaders Actually Want
The China-U.S. framing is useful for understanding the structural costs but obscures the main actors: the Pacific Island countries themselves. And they are divided on deep-sea mining.
Nauru is the most consistent advocate for mining; President David Adeang told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024 that “the greatest risk we face is not the potential environmental impacts of mineral recovery but the risk of inaction.”
By contrast, French Polynesia President Moetai Brotherson and Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. urged governments to avoid “irreversible environmental damage” and “needless economic and geopolitical risks” stemming from deep-sea mining projects.
One issue where the Pacific Island countries should be united is the quest for fair compensation. Independent analysis projects that under proposed ISA revenue-sharing mechanisms, Pacific Island Countries would receive approximately $46,000 per year in the short term and average $382,000 per year over 28 years. Mining companies would capture roughly 98 percent of revenues.
Even pro-mining Pacific leaders should find that split alarming. Distant-water actors capturing the bulk of value extracted from Pacific waters is a pattern the region knows intimately.
The Pacific already offers a precedent for equitable resource governance. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement, a coalition of eight Pacific Island Countries, collectively control around 50 percent of the global skipjack tuna supply. Through the Vessel Day Scheme, member countries moved from receiving a fraction of the value of fish caught in their waters to generating approximately $500 million annually. The scheme works because Pacific Island countries organized collectively rather than negotiating individually with distant-water fishing nations.
There are distinct differences, to be sure: deep-sea minerals are finite where tuna is renewable. But the structural lesson still holds: collective bargaining produces better terms than individual states can achieve.
A similar collective framework for seabed minerals would give Pacific Island countries bargaining power, positioning them as stakeholders in the resource architecture rather than leaving each country to negotiate alone against companies and great powers.
The United States has already signaled interest. In August 2025, Washington and the Cook Islands issued a joint statement committing to cooperation on seabed mineral research within the Cook Islands’ EEZ, pledging “gold standard science” and “transparent seabed resources management.” Yet such bilateral agreements replicate the structural dynamic that disadvantages Pacific Island countries: they allow larger partners to set terms individually.
A stronger approach would scale bilateral commitments into a regional framework. The Pacific Islands Forum is already moving in that direction. In February 2025, the Forum convened its first-ever Deep Sea Minerals High-Level Talanoa in Suva, building consensus on a regional knowledge hub, a seabed minerals atlas, and transboundary impact assessments. A minerals governance annex to existing Pacific institutions could provide the structural home.
It would need three elements: environmental standards that Pacific Island countries help set, revenue sharing that reflects resource value, and technology transfer that makes them co-governors of their resources rather than merely permit-issuing jurisdictions. This framework would not require Washington to slow domestic permitting; it would build the legitimacy infrastructure that makes long-term access durable.
This is not altruism. A partnership model strengthens regional deterrence because it gives Pacific Island countries a stake in the U.S.-led order. Unilateral access may secure minerals in the short term, but China can play that game as well. True partnerships secure the relationships that make mineral access strategically durable.
What’s at Stake
The United States is right to take critical mineral security seriously. The question was never whether to pursue seabed minerals but whether that pursuit strengthens or erodes the partnerships the United States depends on across the Indo-Pacific.
The current trajectory risks the latter. Bypassing the ISA weakens the one multilateral constraint on Chinese action in the same zones. TMC’s overlapping permits signal to sponsoring Pacific Island countries that their participation in the international framework does not matter. The unilateral approach also forfeits the distinction the United States could draw against Beijing’s bilateral model: that American partnerships offer Pacific Island countries co-governance, not extraction on different terms.
Minerals will come from the seabed regardless. The question is whether the United States extracts them in a way that strengthens the deterrence architecture it needs across the Indo-Pacific, or in a way that hands Beijing the narrative it is already writing. How the United States handles seabed governance will signal to the entire region what kind of partner Washington intends to be.