The American Government has spoken. After a 15-day government shutdown and with 24 hours remaining until the country plunged headlong off the fiscal cliff, the Congress and President have agreed on a grand plan: In 61 days, Congress will impanel a "supercommittee" that will do what a 2011 equally super committee -- appointed to do what a 2010 Presidential Commission failed to do -- also failed to do, with a deadline of 76 days to pass a budget for the fiscal year that began 15 days ago. As for the fiscal cliff, the plan is to roll it forward 115 days, papering over the debt crisis with a budgetary blank check. Then Congress and the President will do it all over again: debt ceiling déjà vu.
Welcome to Washington, 2013, where "Wayne's World" -- "Live in the Now, Man!" - is no longer a slacker classic, but the bipartisan budget philosophy.
Compare that to the wider world, where countries that will define the 21st Century global order are focusing a decade and more downfield.
What's happening while America is writing itself hot checks and holding congratulatory press conferences?
India, which will reach 2050 as the world's largest nation, is busy locking down the resources it will require to support 1.7 billion people. State-owned NMDC -- with mines producing iron ore, copper, diamonds, tin, tungsten and graphite -- has ventured into South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in search of coal projects. State-owned NALCO -- India's national aluminum company -- has taken stakes in projects in South Africa, Indonesia and Iran.
On the private-sector side, India's Vedanta Resources produces zinc, copper, iron ore, cobalt, silver, lead -- plus oil and gas. Already Africa's largest zinc producer, Vedanta has invested $4 billion in African resource projects in the past eight years alone. India-to-Africa plays also include Tata Steel and Essar Group, active respectively in iron-ore and coal projects in Mozambique, and OP Jindal Group, prospecting for coal in South Africa and Mozambique. Dharni Sampda -- "Earth's wealth" in Sanskrit - mines manganese in Côte d'Ivoire and has exploration permits for bauxite and manganese there, along with tantalite in Sierra Leone and uranium in Niger.
Yet India's external mining investment is easily eclipsed by the state-owned enterprises of China. Just this month, China's Minmetals -- a state-owned enterprise, with origins dating back to the early months after Mao took power --- made a stop in Sri Lanka, looking for copper, zinc and aluminum. Geologically, Sri Lanka has little to offer there, but the Chinese shopping list is instructive. These three metals featured in American Resource Policy Network's "Gateway Metals" study: Primary metals that serve as the source for by-product metals increasingly critical to high tech and green tech applications -- and advanced weaponry. By focusing on copper, zinc and aluminum, Minmetals is putting itself in a position to access indium, cadmium and germanium (via zinc); rhenium, selenium, tellurium, molybdenum and in some instances rare earths (via copper); plus gallium and vanadium (via aluminum). In short, those three mainstay metals are the gateway to 10 more metals that figure in key manufacturing applications.
Nor is Minmetals confining itself to the Asian sub-continent. In Peru, the company has tendered a $5.9 billion offer for the Las Bambas mine, slated for divestiture by current owner Glencor-Xtrata (a neat side-benefit resulting from Chinese insistence that last year's Glencore-Xtrata mega-merger would pose anti-trust issues in the copper market). Should Minmetals prevail, it will join Chinalco -- China's state-backed aluminum company -- already active in Peru, with its $2.2 billion investment in the Toromocho copper, molybdenum and silver mine.
In Africa, it's more of the same: Sinopec -- China's chemical and petroleum company -- has resource projects in South Africa, Cameroon, Gabon, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria and Angola. And CNPC -- China's mammoth state-owned oil and gas company, with an estimated market cap of $1 trillion -- has earmarked $15.7 billion for investments overseas this year alone, in Africa, Australia, Central Asia and Canada.
What about the U.S.? We're doing our part, too -- to make the world safe for foreign resource competitors.
Alaska's proposed Pebble Mine copper project just lost a partner company, as anti-mining groups press the EPA to preemptively veto the project, before its mine plan is even introduced. Resolution Copper mine in Arizona remains snagged in the U.S. Congress, waiting for approval of a land swap that would allow it to proceed. Either project on its own would nearly close the current U.S. copper gap; both together would vault the U.S. from a position of import dependence to copper exporter -- with positive results for the U.S. balance of trade, American jobs and GDP.
Instead, both projects remain in limbo, in a system where the average U.S. mine takes 7 to 10 years to work through the permitting process and into production.
At the present pace, or lack of one, the U.S. should remain import-dependent on copper -- and selenium, tellurium and rhenium -- for years to come. As an added bonus, each pound of American copper -- or any of the 19 metals and minerals for which the U.S. is 100 percent import-dependent -- that remains in the ground acts as a "price support" for the millions of tons of foreign-sourced metals we must buy to meet our internal demand.
Three-quarters of a century ago, Winston Churchill wrote his famed "While England Slept," a devastating indictment of the eyes-wide-shut appeasement policy that gave Nazi Germany time to gestate into its war machine. Today, "While America Slept" might be the sad sequel, as a great nation flirts with fiscal Armageddon while the world's rising powers lock down the scarce resources that will determine who thrives in the 21st Century.