Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA —  July 1970. The Cold War is thawing, but far from over; the Nixon government is retreating from Vietnam in the face of an enormous anti-war movement; and a corporation called Deepsea Ventures is conducting the world’s first deep sea mining test on the Blake Plateau, 300 kilometers off the US east coast. There, the sea floor is littered with nuggets of valuable minerals like cobalt, nickel and manganese, some 60,000 of which will be dredged up from a test area spanning 43 kilometers.  

The Deepsea Ventures test and the oil shock of 1973 heralded a flurry of investment in seabed mining through the 1970s, as US fears about dependence on foreign sources of raw materials grew – the CIA even used one test to hide an operation to recover a wrecked Soviet submarine. But by the 1990s, the momentum behind the emerging industry had dissipated. Resource competition was incongruent with the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” of globalization and free trade and minerals were never extracted from the ocean floor on a commercial scale. 

Five and a half decades later, the damage inflicted on Blake Plateau by the Deepsea Ventures test remains. While scientists are still studying the real environmental toll of deep sea mining, available research paints a concerning picture: the release of carbon sequestered in seabeds, permanent ecosystem disruption and fishery contamination are just some of the possible costs. 

Nonetheless, with demand for critical minerals surging due to their role in digital and renewable energy (not to mention military) technologies, in April US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to restart the deep sea mining drive.

Wherever resource extraction might augment US power, the second Trump government seems ruthlessly committed to pursuing it – be it opening 60 million acres of national forest for logging and mining, repealing barriers to oil drilling in the Arctic or reinvigorating US coal production. Its determination to “unleash” deep sea mining is just another expression of the administration’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra. 

But the geopolitical ambitions behind the move are not restricted to the Republican party. As Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze wrote in his “Bidenomics” postmortem last year, a strategy of excluding China from key technology supply chains is now effectively bipartisan policy. In these terms, deep sea mining would be wholly consistent with Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, for instance. Just as the latter aimed to promote US economic independence from China by subsidizing domestic semiconductor production, the Trump government presents deep sea mining as a matter of national security – of “securing reliable supplies of critical minerals independent of foreign adversary control.” Independent, in other words, of China, which currently dominates the global critical mineral supply chain. 

OPPOSITION

The waters of a far-flung US territory in the south Pacific are emerging as a forefront in this new drive to plunder the deep. 

Coinciding with Trump’s executive order, California-based firm Impossible Metals in April applied for a commercial mining lease in an 18 million-acre area off the coast of American Samoa. Undaunted by the evidence of environmental risks, the company brands itself as a model of social responsibility. Its website is awash with references to sustainability, fairness and equity. Its number one “core value” is “planet comes first: environment and people before profit.” It promises to deliver “seabed harvesting without destroying the habitat.”

In a world where corporate greenwashing is rife, however, one would be forgiven for taking the firm’s claims with a pinch of salt – and the people of American Samoa, for one, are not convinced. Since making its application, Impossible Metals has been on the ground in the territory trying to win local support, presenting at public meetings and promising 1% of its profits to the islands. 

But the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s call for public comments on Impossible Metals’ application attracted not only an overwhelmingly negative response but also a substantial petition of opposition. American Samoa’s political leadership, too, is united in rejecting deep sea mining. In 2024 then-Governor Lemanu Mauga enacted a moratorium on seabed extraction in American Samoan waters, and this year, Governor Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula, who took office in January, reiterated that opposition in a joint-statement with other key leaders.

American Samoans have good reasons to be circumspect of deep sea mining in their corner of the Pacific. As the American Samoa Resilience Office outlines in its submission on Impossible Metals’ application, the local tuna industry, which employs 5,000 people out of a total population of less than 50,000, “could be severely impacted by sediment plumes, toxins and habitat disruptions.” The material and economic risks are matched by social, cultural and spiritual ones. As another submitter writes, to Samoans “the ocean isn’t just a resource or commodity; it is our relative, an integral part of our culture, our provider, and our home… To threaten its health is to threaten who we are as Pasefika people.”

But while American Samoans’ opposition seems emphatic, what influence this might have on US government decision-making is less clear. As author Daniel Immerwahr shows in his book How to Hide an Empire, American Samoa and the other US territories exist in an implicitly colonial relationship with Washington. American Samoans cannot vote for President and have no Senator, and their representative in the House is excluded from voting on legislation. 

Impossible Metals’ application must now pass a government environmental impact assessment but if the Trump government proves resolute in its commitment to extraction, American Samoa may not have the power to stop it. As Immerwahr pithily puts it, “empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it’s impossible to miss.”                                                            

According to Adam Tooze, the “daunting historical significance of the [anti-China] policies that have been enacted under Biden” – and which are being extended under Trump – “is that they mark the definitive and self-conscious end of the globalizing post-Cold War moment.” It is logical, then, that this should be the moment when the prospect of deep sea mining, dormant since the end of US-Soviet competition in the late 1980s, should resurface. Before us is a new abyss of great power politics, threatening to envelop in its callous gravity both the deepest places in nature and the Indigenous people closest to them.