The U.S.-Saudi mining pact isn’t “green”—it’s imperial recolonization in disguise. A rare earth extraction blueprint for the technofascist war machine, exposed.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 6, 2025
I. How Reuters Launders Empire’s Green Grab
Reuters wants you to believe this is just business: “Saudi Arabia, US to discuss deal in mining, mineral resources.” Just another memorandum. Just another handshake between allies. But read closer—or rather, read what’s missing—and you’ll see the sleight of hand. This isn’t economic cooperation. It’s imperial realignment masked as development. It’s a recolonization pact under a “green” banner. And Reuters isn’t a neutral observer—it’s a stenographer for empire, laundering this imperialist recalibration into the bloodstream of global public opinion.
Who shapes this narrative? The article’s authors, Jaidaa Taha and Yousef Saba, both veteran reporters specializing in Gulf energy and finance coverage, reproduce the Saudi state’s talking points verbatim. Their editors at Reuters—operating under the stewardship of Paul Bascobert, Reuters’ CEO and former CEO of Gannett—allow these uncritical dispatches through because their business model depends on staying in the good graces of Gulf regimes and Wall Street investors. Behind them sits the parent conglomerate, Thomson Reuters, whose biggest shareholder is Woodbridge Company Limited, the investment arm of the Thomson family, a Canadian billionaire dynasty deeply entangled with Western financial capital. Reuters doesn’t inform—it integrates imperial propaganda into the information economy that its owners profit from.
Notice the framing: Vision 2030 is presented as “diversification.” U.S. involvement is painted as “partnership.” The long history of colonial extraction and imperial monopolies disappears. We’re told Saudi Arabia is “seeking partners.” We’re not told those partners include MP Materials, whose boardrooms link BlackRock to Raytheon, or that the U.S. Department of Energy is coordinating mineral policy with the Pentagon’s critical minerals strategy. Rare earths aren’t neutral commodities—they’re the bones of missiles, satellites, drones, and the technofascist security infrastructure encircling the globe.
The omission isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s narrative warfare. By keeping these linkages hidden, Reuters grooms its audience to see imperial mineral capture as ordinary, inevitable, even benevolent. The silence surrounding Ma’aden’s pending partnership with MP Materials, the absence of scrutiny over Saudi sovereign wealth funds’ stake in Vale Base Metals, the invisibility of Washington’s hand in shaping the kingdom’s mining roadmap—this is how ideological consent is manufactured, not through lies, but through omission.
Meanwhile, for the working class in Saudi Arabia—and across the colonized Global South—this “partnership” signals more of the same: extraction without sovereignty, environmental ruin without accountability, export dependency without development. Every mine mapped into U.S.-aligned supply chains becomes another node in the imperial logistics grid, not a pathway to autonomy but a tether to empire’s militarized circuits of accumulation.
Reuters won’t tell you that. So we will. We’ll name it plainly: this isn’t a trade agreement—it’s a recolonization pact. It’s a greenwashed logistics imperialism designed to chain Saudi Arabia’s economic future to Washington’s imperial war machine. And every headline like this is an ideological bullet, softening the terrain for extraction. This is narrative warfare. And our task is to break it.
II. Beneath the Surface: Extracting the Facts, Contextualizing the Pact
Reuters’ omissions aren’t oversight—they’re the grease lubricating empire’s resource gears.
Strip away Reuters’ euphemisms and here’s what’s really happening: Saudi Arabia and the United States are negotiating a memorandum to deepen cooperation in mining and mineral resources. The Saudi Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources and the U.S. Department of Energy are the official actors. On the table: deals to extract, process, and control gold, phosphate rock, bauxite, and—most critically—rare earth elements. Behind the scenes: U.S. firms like MP Materials jockeying to secure exclusive partnerships with Ma’aden, Saudi Arabia’s state mining giant, while Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund funnels billions into global mining assets through its joint venture Manara Minerals.
Saudi Arabia isn’t just expanding its mining sector for internal growth. It’s positioning itself as a mineral supply hub for U.S.-aligned global value chains. This isn’t a neutral economic pivot—it’s a structural tethering. Every memorandum signed deepens the kingdom’s dependence on Western technology, Western finance, and Western commodity markets. Every U.S.-aligned processing facility built on Saudi soil shifts control of raw material flows from Riyadh to Washington, ensuring that strategic inputs for semiconductors, defense systems, and energy infrastructure remain locked within imperial circuits of accumulation.
Reuters notes Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goals to “diversify” beyond oil. But what it omits is that this diversification reproduces the same colonial extractivist logic—just swapping oil wells for rare earth mines, and fossil fuel pipelines for mineral corridors. Instead of transitioning toward sovereignty, the kingdom’s mining boom is plugging its economy deeper into imperial supply chains structured to keep the periphery exporting raw materials while the core controls value-added processing, technology patents, and geopolitical leverage.
And the stakes are global. Rare earths aren’t just about iPhones or electric cars. They’re about the militarization of space, drone warfare, missile guidance systems, and the digital infrastructure of technofascist governance. As the U.S. recalibrates its imperial strategy for the multipolar era, securing critical minerals is as strategic as securing oil fields was in the last century. This is resource imperialism wearing a green mask.
What’s more, the timing of this pact—coinciding with President Trump’s upcoming visit to Riyadh—signals that this isn’t just a technocratic trade issue. It’s part of a broader recalibration of U.S.-Saudi relations under the Trump 2.0 regime, aimed at shoring up Gulf monarchies as subordinate partners in Washington’s economic, military, and logistical war to suppress multipolarity. Just as oil once secured the petrodollar system, rare earths now underwrite the material foundations of empire’s “green transition.”
Meanwhile, alternative alliances are emerging outside imperial circuits. China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand mining partnerships across Africa and Central Asia. Russia has brokered new mineral deals with Sudan and Zimbabwe. BRICS+ forums are proposing regional processing hubs for critical minerals independent of Western finance. In this context, the U.S.-Saudi pact doesn’t represent autonomy—it represents a choice to remain tethered to dollar hegemony’s mineral foot soldiers, rather than joining multipolar efforts toward sovereign development.
The environmental stakes are just as high. According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, over 70% of rare earth mining waste in the Global South contaminates local water supplies. Reuters doesn’t mention the toxic tailings, the displaced communities, the radioactive sludge left behind by rare earth extraction. These aren’t side effects—they’re baked into the extractive model. And every deal inked between Riyadh and Washington doubles down on a resource paradigm where brown and Black lands are sacrificed to feed imperial technologies sold as “green.”
None of this is reported in Reuters’ bland headline. But it’s there, beneath the surface, for anyone willing to excavate the imperial architecture embedded in every memorandum, every supply chain, every cargo shipment crossing the Red Sea. The question isn’t whether Saudi Arabia is diversifying. The question is: diversifying for whom? Toward what end? And at what cost to its sovereignty, its workers, and the broader Global South struggling under the weight of empire’s extractivist demands?
III. Extraction or Sovereignty? Unmasking the Pact
Let’s be clear: this is not economic development. This is recolonization through mineral corridors. The Saudi-U.S. mining pact is being sold as “diversification,” as “green modernization,” as a pathway toward a post-oil future. But beneath the PR gloss lies an old imperial formula: extraction without sovereignty, accumulation without self-determination.
Vision 2030? More like Vision 1492: Columbus with a mining drill.
Every U.S. firm courting Saudi Arabia’s rare earth supply chain isn’t just a business partner—it’s an imperial intermediary embedding Washington’s geopolitical dominance into the kingdom’s industrial base. Every processing plant run by MP Materials or its proxies becomes an imperial chokepoint, a lever to throttle production, redirect flows, or apply coercive pressure in moments of geopolitical rupture. Saudi Arabia may dig the minerals, but it won’t control the circuits of value or the technology pipelines those minerals feed into. That power will remain anchored in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Pentagon.
Reuters and its imperial amplifiers call this “win-win.” But the winners are clear: U.S. defense contractors securing a stable supply of critical inputs for missile guidance systems. (In fact, Pentagon reports admit that 90% of U.S. rare earth imports feed Lockheed Martin’s missile systems.) Western tech monopolies ensuring a non-Chinese source of rare earths to fuel their “green capitalism.” And Saudi royal elites fattening their sovereign wealth portfolios by playing junior partners in empire’s resource matrix.
The losers? Saudi workers trapped in extractive labor with no pathway to technological sovereignty. Local communities displaced and ecologically devastated by mining operations. And the broader Global South, locked deeper into a global economy designed to keep it supplying raw inputs while imperial cores hoard value-added profits.
And we must reiterate again: colonial extraction doesn’t disappear with the flag of the colonizer—it mutates through new structures of economic dependence. “Colonialism was not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the land of its riches,” Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. “It tried to control their minds and to shape their way of life.” The Saudi-U.S. pact embodies that mutation: an extractive model dressed in the language of modernization, locking the kingdom’s future into the value chains of empire’s military-industrial complex.
This isn’t just about mining. It’s about logistics imperialism. Every mine mapped, every supply chain inked, every refinery financed by Washington embeds the Arabian Peninsula deeper into an imperial infrastructure engineered to bypass multipolar alternatives like BRICS+, China’s Belt and Road, or Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. The pact isn’t closing a door on oil dependency—it’s opening a new one onto mineral dependency, with the same imperial landlords holding the keys.
To reframe this moment is to reject the lie that resource extraction under imperial management is “sovereignty.” It’s to insist that real sovereignty cannot coexist with imperial logistics, imperial finance, and imperial military protection underwriting every shipment of rare earths. The Saudi-U.S. mining pact is not a step forward for national development—it’s a strategic tether chaining the kingdom’s post-oil future to empire’s mineral wars.
And the silence of Western media isn’t accidental. It’s a necessary shield. Because to tell the truth would be to expose the green mask of resource imperialism, the continuity of extractivist domination beneath the rhetoric of “sustainability,” and the ways in which empire recalibrates its resource dependencies to maintain global supremacy in a multipolar age. That silence is ideological warfare. And our task is to break it.
IV. Mobilize: Breaking the Chains of Imperial Extraction
Comrades, the Saudi-U.S. mining pact isn’t just a foreign deal. It’s an imperial recalibration—a logistical weapon aimed at securing mineral chokepoints for the technofascist war machine. And it’s a warning: as empire shifts from oil to rare earths, from pipelines to mineral corridors, the underlying architecture of extraction remains intact. The beneficiaries remain the same. And the global working class remains locked in the same colonial relation: digging, dying, displaced for the profits of the imperial core.
MP Materials’ boardroom: where BlackRock meets Raytheon for a mineral blood pact.
But we are not condemned to be raw material in their system. We can fight back. We must fight back. And we must do so on both fronts: abroad, in solidarity with the workers and communities resisting extraction in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the Congo, and beyond—and here, inside the imperial core, where our complicity is material, and our responsibility is historical.
We must reject the false “green” imperialism that cloaks itself in sustainability while enslaving the Global South’s mineral wealth. We must organize to expose and dismantle the imperial supply chains that bind Saudi Arabia’s future to U.S. military and economic domination. Every port handling Saudi rare earth exports, every refinery run by imperial monopolies, every trade agreement cementing mineral dependency must become a site of struggle.
- Target U.S.-Saudi Ports: Blockade shipments at Jubail Industrial City tied to MP Materials and Ma’aden partnerships.
- Solidarity Networks: Amplify Sudan’s Anti-Mining Front resisting gold extraction contracts with U.S. firms.
- Educational Tools: Create Redline infographics tracing rare earths from Saudi mines to U.S. military supply chains.
- Direct Action: Organize “Hack the Supply Chain” campaigns to expose imperial logistics platforms fueling technofascism.
This isn’t just a policy fight. It’s an existential fight for sovereignty, for dignity, for liberation from a system that treats land and labor alike as disposable inputs for imperial profit. As Omali Yeshitela teaches us, building dual and contending power means forging institutions of people’s control in opposition to the imperial structures that seek to manage, discipline, and extract from us. Every worker council in logistics, every tenant union blocking eviction-linked construction for extractive companies, every student movement demanding divestment from imperial mineral partnerships is a node in this emergent network of counterpower.
Rare earth “partnerships” are not trade—they are financial piracy dressed in an ESG badge. This isn’t sustainability; it’s extraction rebranded for Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors eager to greenwash their portfolios while tightening their grip on global value chains.
Our task is clear: reject empire’s mineral wars. Refuse to be junior partners in extraction. Build dual power to sever the logistical lifelines of imperialism. And fight—side by side with the colonized, the exploited, and the oppressed—for a multipolar future rooted in sovereignty, solidarity, and liberation from imperial extraction.
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