Spending this week inside Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s press pool gave me an unusually close view of where American diplomacy is moving. It was not the familiar reel of world leaders’ speeches at the United Nations that told me the most. It was what happened several blocks away, behind the doors of the Lotte New York Palace on Madison Avenue, where Rubio moved from one carefully chosen bilateral meeting to the next.
Across those meetings, a pattern began to emerge: Critical minerals. Supply chains. Strategic investment. American companies. Private capital.
Different countries, different relationships, but the same vocabulary kept returning.
‘A key point for our strategy’
I saw that clearly when Rubio and Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani signed a critical-minerals agreement.
It establishes a new framework for cooperation across supply chains, including extraction, processing, recovery and recycling. Italy made clear that public and private capital would be part of that effort.
Rubio called critical minerals a “critical topic.” Tajani was even more revealing when he described the agreement as a “key point for our strategy, for our industrial policy.”
In that room, it did not look like a technical minerals agreement. It looked like industrial policy becoming foreign policy.
China was never far from the logic of the agreement.
Washington and its partners are trying to build alternatives to a system in which too much strategic dependence sits in China. The Italy agreement was one piece of that effort.
More than extraction
Then came Kenya.
When Rubio sat down with President William Ruto, critical minerals were again on the agenda, this time through the lens of an African economy that wants more than extraction.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the discussion included opportunities for American firms to provide “value addition.”
Kenya does not want simply to ship raw materials overseas and watch somebody else capture most of the economic value. Ruto wants more processing and industry at home. Washington wants American companies involved.
The emerging proposition was fairly clear: a country has resources; America has capital, technology and companies; diplomacy can bring the two together.
That is not traditional foreign aid. It is commercial diplomacy with geopolitical implications.
Trade Over Aid
By the time I walked into the Palace ballroom later in the week for the Trade Over Aid Deals Showcase, what I had watched emerge across Rubio’s bilateral meetings was being said openly from the stage.
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said economic and commercial questions had spent decades taking “a back seat in the world of diplomacy.”
Then he went considerably further. Economic prosperity, he said, was not separate from diplomacy. “That is the core of diplomacy.” Governments come and go, he acknowledged. Officials leave office. The objective, he said, should be to create “things that are real, that last.”
An aid program can disappear. A political declaration can be reversed. But a mine, power project, processing facility or factory creates contracts, jobs, investors, suppliers and interests that remain long after the diplomatic delegation has gone home.
Landau described the role of the U.S. government as becoming an “intermediary between our dynamic private sector and opportunities abroad.”
Washington is trying to use diplomacy to bring American capital into places where the United States wants stronger economic relationships.
John Jovanovic, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank, made the geopolitical purpose even plainer.
He described his earlier work opening the Development Finance Corporation’s first overseas office and said his real mission had been to “flush malign influence out of critical infrastructure.”
That was perhaps the best formulation I heard all week. Because once you hear it, the pieces fall into place.
A railway is no longer simply a railway. A power project is not merely an energy transaction. A mine is not simply a hole in the ground.
Who finances it matters. Who supplies the technology matters. Who builds it matters. And who controls the supply chain around it matters.
‘Where are the Americans?’
Jovanovic also put his finger on the problem Washington still has to solve.
“But we have to show up,” he said.
Landau had heard the same complaint in his travels. Foreign governments ask him why they receive several bids from competitors and none from American companies.
“Where are the Americans?” he said.
Jovanovic made a distinction that I suspect will become increasingly important in how Washington sells American partnership abroad.
His grandmother, he said, taught him that there is “a price of something, but then there’s the value of something.”
That is the argument America is making.
The cheapest infrastructure bid is not necessarily the most valuable long-term partnership. Washington’s challenge is to make American companies competitive enough to be chosen while demonstrating that American capital brings more than money: standards, technology, access to markets and political relationships that carry value of their own.
The real test
There are obvious limits to this approach. Deals still have to survive due diligence, political risk, regulation and financing before anything gets built. Private capital does not go everywhere, and it cannot replace humanitarian assistance or solve every development problem. Investors demand returns, and strategic priorities do not automatically make a project bankable.
Landau himself offered the right measure of success. He said his tenure should ultimately be judged by “the kind of deals” discussed at the showcase and the deals still to come.
Some of American diplomacy’s most consequential documents may no longer be communiqués. They may be term sheets.
The deals are becoming American diplomacy.
read MORE
Trump’s Day in Office: September 28, 2026
8:00 AM President Trump participates in Executive Time 11:00 AM President Trump participates in a Policy Meeting 12:30 PM President Trump participates in a Policy Meeting 1:00 PM President Trump participates in a Policy Meeting 2:00 PM …
Andy Burnham Pledges Universal National Care Service at Labour Conference
Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged Sunday to create a universal national care service free at the point of use, putting an overhaul of Britain’s social care system at the center of his first Labour Party conference as party leader and…
Trump Reacts To UK Arrests Near RAF Fairford
President Donald Trump said Sunday that the United States had been working with Britain in connection with the arrest of several men near RAF Fairford, a British military air base used by the U.S. Air Force. “Working with Britain, it…
