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There may be a light at the end of the tunnel as representatives from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda are hoping to end the violence between them by signing a peace deal in a joint signing ceremony in Washington today.
This comes after the United States and Qatar have been working for months to mediate an end to the conflict roiling the eastern DRC for years.
As a corollary to the peace accord, the United States is also in the process of negotiating a minerals deal with the DRC and a separate deal with Rwanda, which is expected to bring billions of dollars of American investment to the region. For the U.S. government, access to precious minerals in the region has been an incentive for helping to end the war.
Many of the minerals essential to modern technology flow from the troubled region. In the DRC, vast deposits of coltan, cobalt, and gold that power smartphones and electric vehicles, among other technologies, have become a driver of the decades-long conflict. This resource-driven struggle has transformed the eastern DRC's extraordinary mineral wealth into a source of persistent violence and instability.
The strategic importance of these resources has placed the Congo at the center of U.S. geopolitical calculations in Africa. Washington has increasingly recognized that securing reliable supply chains for these materials represents a national security imperative.
The DRC holds 60% of global coltan reserves. It is also the world's largest producer of cobalt, amounting to approximately 70 percent of the world’s production in 2024.
Coltan and cobalt form the backbone of the global digital economy and clean energy infrastructure. For example, cobalt extracted from Congolese mines powers the rechargeable batteries in smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. Meanwhile, Congolese copper is critical to the electrification of energy and transport. These minerals can be found in everything from electrical vehicle batteries to solar panels and wind turbines.
Beyond cobalt and copper, the country's coltan deposits provide tantalum, a metal crucial for manufacturing capacitors used in virtually every electronic device. The DRC also possesses significant reserves of other rare earth elements that support technology manufacturing and are of major interest to the United States.
Currently, the DRC mining sector is largely dominated by Chinese companies, particularly in the production of cobalt. Chinese state-owned enterprises and policy banks control approximately 80% of the total output from cobalt mines. China’s increasing ownership reflects broader investment strategies across the continent, where various joint ventures and infrastructure deals by Chinese companies are now a common occurrence.
Complicating this landscape further, Rwanda has gained significant influence over mineral extraction in eastern Congo through its backing of the M23 rebel group that’s fighting the DRC’s army. The M23 has monopolized the export of coltan to Rwanda, which is then sold on the international market. It is estimated that rebels in eastern DRC fraudulently exported at least 150 metric tons of coltan to Rwanda last year, representing what UN experts described as the largest contamination of the region's mineral supply chain.
The United States has pursued its interest in establishing supply chain resilience and ensuring American access to these critical minerals. In fact, the U.S. has pledged about $4 billion to the Lobito Corridor project, an infrastructure initiative linking Angola's Atlantic coast to the DRC through Zambia.
Even before the reemergence of M23 as a serious security threat, financial challenges and short-sightedness led several leading American mining companies to decrease their footprint in the Congo. For example, following poor investment decisions in the oil industry, Arizona-based Freeport-McMoRan, one of the largest American mining companies, sold its stake in the Congolese mine Tenke in 2016 to Molybdenum, a Chinese mining company.
Despite being aware of the importance of the region's critical minerals, successive U.S. administrations have largely failed to provide sufficient incentives to encourage American mining companies to stay active in the region.
By working to end the conflict, the Trump administration is seeking to reverse this trend. Ending the war would remove one of the biggest disincentives to investing in the region, opening the door to greater American private sector investment in central Africa.
Among the companies poised to take advantage of sustained peace in the region is KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence to explore new mining sites. KoBold recently announced that it will expand its operations into the DRC. And just last month, it was reported that KoBold had reached a tentative agreement to buy the stake of an Australian mining company in a Congolese lithium deposit.
KoBold’s interest in the Congo is significant because major investors in KoBold have contributed to Trump’s political efforts. Marc Andreessen, whose firm holds the largest stake in KoBold Metals and who has worked with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as well as another KoBold financier, Ben Horowitz, each donated $2.5 million to a Trump-supporting Super PAC during the last presidential election.
Other wealthy and influential backers of KoBold — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates — each contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Beyond supporting the business dealings of those who contributed to his campaign and inauguration, augmenting a peace deal with mineral agreements also provides Trump the opportunity to promote key American industries that rely heavily on critical minerals whose deposits are found in great quantities across central Africa.
An effective peace deal and subsequent mineral deals would also allow Washington to respond to Beijing’s growing global economic footprint without risking a direct military escalation between the two in central Africa; instead, using economic competition with China to deliver beneficial results for Africans and Americans.
Realizing this, Trump’s team has already played a hands-on role in trying to maintain American mining presence in the region. In March, when the M23 rebel group was bearing down on the Bisie tin mine, which produces approximately 6% of the global tin supply and is operated by a partially US-owned company, Alphamin, the U.S. government reportedly stepped in to negotiate a deal, allowing Alphamin to continue operations without fear of an attack.
Still, though, this intervention was not enough to retain the American stake in one of the world’s largest tin mines. In early June, Alphamin reportedly agreed to sell its U.S. stake to an Emirati firm.
Trump’s team hopes greater access to Congolese mines will accelerate American-based manufacturing of certain technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries and semiconductors. Trump has argued that onshoring the manufacturing of these technologies is both a national security imperative and economically advantageous to the country, creating jobs for many of the Americans who voted for him in part because they believed he would deliver them from financial strain.
But before all of these economic opportunities and benefits can happen, the war must end. Today’s signing ceremony will be the first step.
On the same night President Donald Trump ordered U.S. airstrikes against Iran, POLITICO reported, “MAGA largely falls in line on Trump’s Iran strikes.”
The report cited “Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and critic of GOP war hawks,” who posted on X, “Iran gave President Trump no choice.” It noted that former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, a longtime Trump supporter, “said on X that the president’s strike didn’t necessarily portend a larger conflict.” Gaetz said. “Trump the Peacemaker!”
Republican Senator and Trump supporter Tim Sheehy (R-Mont), was quoted as saying that ordering the strikes was the “right decision.”
The first U.S. airstrikes on Iran on Saturday happened at 6:40 p.m. Eastern time. The timestamp on the POLITICO story was 9:48 p.m., a mere three hours after the first bombs were dropped.
In fact, MAGA did not largely “fall in line” with Trump’s airstrikes. The real picture is more complicated, and less categorical than the mainstream media has allowed.
Some have come out loud and clear against the strikes from the first. You don’t get more MAGA than devout Trump loyalist, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose first X post addressing the strikes on Saturday night read, “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation.”
“This is not our fight,” Greene said. “Peace is the answer.”
On Sunday, Greene followed up with a lengthy anti-war post that asked why the U.S. was fighting abroad instead of dealing with America’s border problems. Greene wrote, “Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map.”
Other major voices — including non-MAGA conservatives and libertarians — have challenged the legality of the strikes, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Others, once the ceasefire was put into place overnight Monday, have chosen not to dwell on Saturday’s bombing operations or their efficacy, but have focused on the risk of regime change, U.S. ground action, or being lured into a long war by Israel.
Tucker Carlson, Trump supporter and arguably the most high profile conservative pundit today, reflected this strategy on Monday. He had been out front and center against a possible war with Iran. In his first appearance on Emily Jashinsky’s new show, he did not indicate that his views had changed.
“I don’t want to relive Iraq,” Carlson told Jashinsky in the interview, referring to the dynamics that led to the protracted Iraq war. He said he was grateful that Trump “took this in for a landing” and appeared in no mood to continue strikes or engage in the regime change that neocon voices were demanding.
“I know the people who did it,” he said, referring to the Iraq War architects. “I’ve lived among them, and defended it. I’m not doing that again,” he said. “We came very close to doing that again because of Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and the rest of these morons.”
Former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon is not criticizing the strikes outright but has supported the president declaring the war over and making sure the ceasefire works. In repeated episodes of his “War Room” podcast, Bannon has warned against getting sucked into a regime change war and has turned his ire on Israel’s role in encouraging Trump’s involvement, saying, “my issue isn’t whether Iran has a nuke. My issue is that (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, for his own political dilemma, created a false sense of urgency.”
He called neocon voices like radio host Mark Levin, "town criers for Netanyahu."
For his part Gaetz has shifted his focus to Israel, too, suggesting “Israel doesn’t want peace” but only “regime change.”
Meanwhile, Christian conservative Matt Walsh of the Daily Waite has been a blunt non-interventionist, writing Tuesday that “I want the U.S. to back out of (the Middle East) completely and focus on its own problems. Call that simplistic or ‘isolationist’ if you want. I don't care,” he said.
“Our country is in a state of existential crisis on multiple fronts internally. We don't have the time, resources, manpower, will, or ability to fix problems for other countries right now. We need to focus on ourselves and let them handle their own disputes.”
“America first,” Walsh added.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who was not supportive of prospective strikes before Saturday, told Bannon that “the president getting a cease fire is a big deal,” he said, noting he hoped this would be the first step in extricating the U.S. from the region. “We need to have less presence in the Middle East. This is not a sustainable posture for us.”
Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, who many might consider MAGA or at least MAGA adjacent, said during an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), “I think the whole MAGA thing right now is very divided, particularly because one of the things they voted for was no war.”
“Well now it seems like we’re in a war,” he added. “And it’s quick. We’re six months in and that’s already popped off.”
Rogan is half right. You can find those who identify as MAGA who outright support the strikes — some early polls appear to bear that out — but there is still a collective resistance to war, especially a long, regime change war that resembles anything like the 20 years of protracted conflict that loomed over the youth of America's youngest generations.
Arguably the truly great divide now is between these aforementioned conservatives — MAGA and those who MAGA support — encouraging Trump’s instincts for restraint, and the neoconservatives who are likely upset that Trump didn’t go further militarily, or better yet, that he had forced Israel into a ceasefire with Iran on Monday.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board certainly wasn’t happy, suggesting Trump was treating Israel and Iran equally, and giving Iran a “reprieve.”
“I hate this word ceasefire, the president hated it a few days ago too,” exclaimed Levin, calling it a “life line” and saying the Iranians should have been “forced to sign a surrender document” instead. “Does this mean the regime survives? I guess so.”
The epitaph for MAGA restraint is not only premature, it is inaccurate. Some would even suggest that meetings that Trump had before the strikes Saturday, particularly with Bannon, had reminded him that his base had certain expectations and would not support an Iraq 2.0. They hope, at least at this moment, that the U.S. has avoided that fate and that it is important to keep pushing Trump in the right direction.
Eighty years ago, on June 26, 1945, the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco. But you wouldn’t know it if you listened to European governments today.
After two devastating global military conflicts, the Charter explicitly aimed to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” And it did so by famously outlawing the use of force in Article 2(4). The only exceptions were to be actions taken in self-defense against an actual or imminent attack and missions authorized by the U.N. Security Council to restore collective security.
And yet, after the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear program last weekend, the leaders of the E3 countries (the United Kingdom, France and Germany) released a joint statement that made no reference to international law, let alone the U.N. Charter whose 80th anniversary was just days away. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s post on X mentioned the risks of a nuclear Iran and the need for regional stability ahead of respect for international law, almost as if the latter were an afterthought.
When Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, European leaders most certainly did not underline the need to preserve stability on the European continent above all else. Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbor was seen as an attack on Europe itself and on everything that it stood for. A herculean effort was undertaken to punish Moscow and provide Kyiv with military assistance, financial support, and a path toward joining the West. EU leaders have even endorsed the establishment of a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression.
Due to pressure from the Trump administration, European decisionmakers have finally come around to the idea of a ceasefire in Ukraine. But after three years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead, they are still not prepared for a veritable and unavoidable compromise. Ukraine’s right to join NATO is still defended in many circles as a matter of principle, even though the administration ruling it out has rendered the entire discussion a moot point. Sanctions cannot be lifted while Russian troops remain on Ukrainian soil, even partially as a means of advancing a delicate peace process.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we were told, left the world a binary choice: either fight to preserve the “rules-based international order” or enter a dangerous new reality defined by the “law of the jungle.”
To be fair, the “rules-based order” was always a deliberately opaque term, designed to allow a subset of states to dictate the terms of legitimate interstate behavior. But while the U.S. under Joe Biden conceived of this order as a bloc with both proponents and opponents, the Europeans seemed to view it more earnestly as a neutral description of the post-World War II global system based on multilateralism, international law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Unfortunately, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed — and deepened — Europe’s dependence on the United States for its security. This came after the EU’s worsening ties with Russia in the years prior to the war had already illustrated the tension between Brussels’ desire to “speak the language of power” while remaining a normative actor. As a matter of principle, no third country could exercise a veto over the EU and Ukraine pursuing mutually beneficial cooperation — but what if such cooperation exacerbated security tensions on the continent and was, therefore, of dubious strategic utility?
Three years ago, Brussels elites were patting themselves on the back over the resurgence of transatlantic unity and the EU’s newfound status as a “geopolitical actor.” Unbeknownst to them, they were actually laying the groundwork for the world to roll their eyes at any European reference to the “rules-based international order.” That European leaders continue to fall in line with the U.S. despite the major (and crudely manifested) rift that has opened up between them under Trump speaks volumes.
Going forward, appeals to international norms in the case of Ukraine will carry far less water. It has become clear as day that European governments refuse to compromise on Ukraine not to uphold universal principles, but rather because of their perceived security (and status-related) interests and fears. Ironically, this will come at the expense of Europe’s ability to get much of the rest of the world on board for its strategy of isolating Russia and increasing pressure on Vladimir Putin to compromise.
Twenty months of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza have not prompted a significant break in relations between Jerusalem and European capitals. In that case, at least one could argue that Hamas was systematically violating the laws of war as well. But Israel’s attack on Iran was a clear-cut violation of international law — a preventive rather than pre-emptive war, aimed at averting an unfavorable security situation in the future rather than thwarting an imminent threat. In that sense, it was not entirely dissimilar from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which ostensibly aimed to halt Kyiv’s deepening ties with NATO.
All too often, we hear that the existence of a rules-based international order is the sine qua non of a European Union that itself is a rules-based organization composed of 27 equal member states. Yet Europe’s evident double standard in responding to the events of the past three years has laid bare its contradictory aspirations and the rudderlessness of its foreign policy.
With the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s more recent assault on Ukraine, the great powers have set a precedent that rising middle powers appear all too happy to emulate. To help reverse this trend, European governments will need to condemn violations of international law more consistently. They should also consider rallying a global coalition behind an effort to forge new and tighter international norms to regulate the use of force — a campaign that would also offer an opportunity to reset relations with Global South states that have been alienated by Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine.
Moreover, in recent years, countries such as Azerbaijan and Israel have succeeded in demonstrating that conflicts that high-minded internationalists insisted only had a political solution may have a military solution after all. It is imperative that Europe lead by example in sending a message to the world that diplomacy, rather than military coercion, represents the best way to achieve one’s political goals.
If Europe were more open to a genuine compromise peace with Russia — one that compartmentalizes disagreements but reaffirms key international norms — this would affirm quite powerfully that negotiations, rather than territorial gains, offer the most reliable means of guaranteeing one’s core security interests. Successful negotiations would also help to avert a decades-long cold war that risks going hot — and dealing the final blow to the world that the U.N. Charter envisioned in the process.
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