On the day Trump told the UN General Assembly he could annihilate the Islamic Republic quickly if it refused his terms, his administration was circulating a draft that treats the damage from that same war as an investment opportunity. The Partnership for Allied Construction and Trust, or Pact, would see Washington put $5bn into a holding company and ask Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq and Jordan to match it. The US Development Finance Corporation would manage the fund, the US would chair its board, and the draft pitches it as a $50bn+ platform with Blackstone, BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and KKR listed as co-investors. Technical negotiations are pencilled in for October. The stated purpose is to rebuild war-damaged energy assets and lay new routes around Hormuz.
Pact is not a one-off. It is the 5th iteration of a template this administration has applied to every territory its wars and pressure campaigns have broken open. Washington creates a vehicle it governs, commits little or no cash of its own, gets others to fund it and invites private capital to co-invest. In return, the US acquires governance rights over national assets it neither built nor paid for. What distinguishes this edition is the paymaster. The Gulf is being asked to finance the template at the precise moment its treasuries are running out of cash.
One template, 5 theatres
Ukraine was the prototype. The reconstruction fund created under the 2025 minerals deal was seeded with $75m from the DFC and $75m from Kyiv, governed jointly, and pointed at critical minerals, energy and logistics with US access to offtake written into its purpose. The DFC itself presents it as a new model that aligns reconstruction, investment and geopolitical interests. Its first approved investment went into a Ukrainian firm building radio control systems for military drones.