The division of global labor remains unchanged: the Global South specializes in losing so that the North may keep winning. In Eswatini, a 'miracle' drug called lenacapavir offered the hope of ending the AIDS epidemic, but that hope is being strangled by the cruel arithmetic of imperial triage. Following massive US aid cuts, Washington is now weaponizing life-saving healthcare as a tool of mineral diplomacy. In Zambia, the State Department has explicitly threatened to withhold PEPFAR HIV assistance unless the nation grants exclusive access to its critical lithium and cobalt reserves. This is the new face of mineral imperialism: the exchange of human lives for the raw materials of a 'green' transition that the victims will never benefit from.

While the United States uses the threat of biological abandonment, it is simultaneously coordinating the acquisition of the DRC’s Chemaf mines via Virtus Minerals to bypass Chinese dominance. Even Somaliland is being drawn into this web, offering the US military basing rights and access to coltan in exchange for a bid for diplomatic recognition. This is not trade; it is extortion. The Biden-Trump era's 'Project Vault' reveals the structural truth of our time: the transition to renewable energy is being built on the same old foundations of extraction and colonial coercion. The 'green' battery in a Western electric vehicle is increasingly powered by the blood of the Global South.