When the presidents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda met in Washington, D.C., in early December 2025, for a ceremony sealing the peace deal that ended four years of fighting, it was meant to showcase U.S. President Donald Trump’s ability to settle even the most intractable conflicts. Trump blanketed the signing event with his trademark hyperbole: “Look at how they love each other,” he marveled about the two presidents. But Congo’s Felix Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame refused to shake hands. Rwandan troops were already massing in South Kivu Province to launch a major new offensive. Within days, the South Kivu town of Uvira—the last urban center north of the resource-rich Katanga region, 150 miles to the south—had fallen to the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group.
The Trump administration’s approach to Congo has offered a test case for its new Africa strategy—a transactional one that prioritizes dealmaking, trades political support for natural resource deals, and threatens foreign governments with sanctions or the withholding of U.S. foreign assistance. Over the past 18 months, Washington has taken on a prominence in Congo not seen since the Cold War. It has sought to mediate the conflict in eastern Congo; supported U.S. companies seeking access to the country’s substantial cobalt, copper, and lithium reserves; and helped build one of the largest economic corridors on the continent. The Trump administration is betting it can use its economic and political leverage to wrest control of Congolese critical minerals while gaining prestige by imposing peace in the east.
Washington has made some progress toward both of these aims. But its handling of Congo is also a demonstration of the limits of Trump’s transactional method. His administration’s reliance on swift, broad agreements that postpone haggling over tough details will make it harder to achieve its long-term goals of establishing lasting regional stability and disrupting China’s dominance over critical minerals supply chains. Most worryingly, an “America first” policy is likely to favor close relations with Congolese political leaders over democracy and human rights, an approach that could end up destabilizing the country. Unless the administration adjusts its approach, the peace process in eastern Congo is at risk of collapse, U.S. mining ventures could amount to little, and the Congolese president could accelerate his authoritarian turn.
PEACE DIVIDEND?
Conflict in eastern Congo stretches back 30 years. Over the course of many rounds of fighting involving different permutations of antagonists, the main axis of violence has been between the governments in Kinshasa and Kigali. The Rwandan army invaded for the first time in 1996, in pursuit of armed groups that helped perpetrate the Rwandan genocide two years prior; since then, the Rwandan government has backed four rebellions in the area. It cites the threat of Congo-based Rwandan rebels (which, in fact, has declined dramatically since 1996), but its motivations also include the establishment of a buffer zone, the extraction of natural resources, and the need to manage potential challenges by its own army and justify suppression of domestic dissent.
In late 2021, the M23 rebel group, which had been largely dormant since its defeat in 2013, began a new series of attacks in eastern Congo. The ensuing war has displaced several million people. The East African Community, an eight-country intergovernmental organization promoting regional integration, attempted to broker talks between Congolese belligerents and deployed an intervention force; the Angolan government hosted talks between Congo and Rwanda on behalf of the African Union; and the Southern African Development Community sent troops to back the Congolese army. All these initiatives failed, stymied by the dysfunction of the Congolese army and the recalcitrance of the Congolese and Rwandan governments. The European Union, meanwhile, has been unable to find consensus to implement broad-ranging sanctions or other measures against Rwanda, largely due to some members’ eagerness to maintain good relations with Kagame.
It seemed that Trump’s reelection, in late 2024, might exacerbate the fighting. Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, fell to M23 rebels just a week after Trump’s second term began, and most observers suspected that Rwanda and the M23 had timed the assault to take advantage of the interregnum, when key administration officials would not yet be in place to enable a quick and decisive reaction. With a push from career diplomats (and after an M23 advance on a U.S.-owned tin mine), however, the Trump administration began to intervene, sanctioning a key adviser to Kagame in February 2025 and naming Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as his senior adviser for Africa in April. A fluent French speaker with business experience in Nigeria, Boulos quickly organized talks between the Congolese and Rwandan governments, while Qatar hosted negotiations between the Congolese government and the M23. Boulos’s intervention, just a week after his appointment, was also crucial in securing the withdrawal of M23 forces from the area surrounding the tin mine, which was later sold to an Emirati group.
Traditionally, U.S. policy toward eastern Congo had been coordinated through an interagency process led by the National Security Council and involving the State Department’s Africa Bureau, the Treasury Department, intelligence agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and, in some cases, other parts of the State Department as well as the Department of Defense, incorporating a wide variety of career diplomats and regional experts. The Trump administration has short-circuited this process. Formal responsibility for Africa policy remains within the State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but key decisions on the Congolese-Rwandan-M23 crisis involve Boulos, who had no government experience before his appointment. As with U.S. envoys to the Middle East and Ukraine, Boulos’s influence derives less from his institutional position than from what interlocutors perceive as his intimate relationship with the president and his ability to operate across diplomatic, commercial, and political domains.
It seemed that Trump’s reelection might exacerbate the fighting.
The lack of policy process produced some quick results that previous U.S. administrations had failed to achieve. Diplomats and Treasury officials were able to overcome the typical pushback against sanctions on Rwanda from the Pentagon (which has strong ties with the Rwandan army) and admirers of Rwanda’s economic development. And just weeks after Boulos’s appointment, the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers signed a joint declaration pledging their intent to end the war. In June 2025, a Congolese-Rwandan peace agreement was signed (the same agreement Kagame and Tshisekedi ceremonially re-signed in December in Washington), ending hostilities, addressing Rwanda’s security concerns, and mandating the withdrawal of Rwandan forces. November 2025 brought a Qatari-brokered framework agreement outlining a future peace deal between Congo and the M23. These efforts helped bring an end to Rwanda’s rapid advances on the battlefield.
The Trump administration’s overt mixing of economic interests with peacemaking also initially helped the negotiations. In December 2025, alongside overseeing the signing of the peace deal, the Trump administration brokered a parallel regional economic integration agreement that proposed U.S. funding for a hydroelectric plant on the border between the two countries, joint national parks and tourism management, and a mineral supply chain that could provide revenue for both countries. Washington also signed a strategic partnership agreement with Kinshasa. The terms of the agreement required Congo to give the United States and its allies—“U.S. aligned persons” in the agreement’s text—the right to bid first on certain critical minerals projects. U.S. companies then pledged to make large investments in the Congolese mining sector. In private conversations, senior Congolese officials told us their pitch to the Americans was “Get Rwanda off our back, and we will give you minerals.”
Congo quickly delivered on its end of the deal. The day after the agreement was signed, the Congolese mining parastatal Gécamines and the Swiss-based energy and commodity trader Mercuria announced a joint venture (backed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government agency that finances private-sector infrastructure projects in developing nations to advance American interests) to market cobalt, copper, and other critical minerals to the United States and its allied buyers. In January, Gécamines announced that it would exercise its right to purchase 100,000 tons of copper from the Tenke Fungurume mine for export to the U.S. market. Other deals followed: the New York–based Orion Critical Mineral Consortium signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding to acquire a 40 percent stake in Glencore’s Congolese copper and cobalt assets; Virtus Minerals, a U.S.-based firm founded by former military and intelligence officials, moved to take over the copper and cobalt assets of Chemaf, a mining enterprise owned by a Dubai-based company; and Ivanhoe Mines, a Canadian company presenting itself as a U.S. strategic partner, entered advanced talks with Gécamines and Mercuria to supply the United States with critical minerals from one of its Congolese mines.
These moves, a mix of concrete wins and as-yet-unfulfilled ambition, fit into the Trump administration’s broader “America first” strategy in Africa, which seeks to improve U.S. control over supply chains and boost U.S. companies on the continent. One of the main tools of this strategy is the Development Finance Corporation. In 2025, Congress expanded the agency’s maximum contingent liability cap more than threefold, to $205 billion. It has bought equity in and given loans and loan guarantees to projects in Angola, Gabon, Malawi, Rwanda, and Zambia, as well as Congo. It is one of the main funders of the Lobito Corridor, a project to modernize port infrastructure, roads, and 800 miles of railroad within Angola to connect the copper and cobalt belts of Congo and Zambia to the Atlantic Ocean, potentially reducing dependence on Chinese-dominated logistics and processing networks. In West Africa, a similar project, the Liberty Corridor, is also trying to attract U.S. government support.
SOFTBALL DIPLOMACY
Washington has also successfully applied significant pressure on the Rwandan government as part of peace negotiations, recently levying sanctions on the Rwanda Defence Force and several of its top officers, former Congolese President Joseph Kabila (accused by Kinshasa of aiding the M23), and a government-owned gold refinery. In response, the M23 and the Rwandan army have withdrawn troops from some areas. Without an overarching strategy, however, pressure alone is unlikely to work to stop the conflict. Rwanda’s withdrawals appear largely tactical, and fighting has continued between the M23 and the Congolese army. The Congolese army, assisted by private military companies, and the M23 have begun to rely more on drones, which are also killing civilians. In March, a drone attack in Goma, authorized by Kinshasa, mistakenly killed a UNICEF humanitarian worker.
Any peace deal will require compromises from both sides. Rwanda and its M23 allies—militarily superior to Congolese forces in most areas—are unlikely to cede control of a territory the size of Maryland after having lost hundreds of troops in the war. And yet this is the current stance of the Congolese government, which demands that Rwanda lay down its weapons before talks can begin. Faced with this maximalism, Rwanda is likely to dig in and wait—for Trump to leave or for a new crisis to engulf Kinshasa. The economic incentives on offer from Washington also appear to have failed to convince Rwanda to give up its pursuit of long-standing security, economic, and political interests in eastern Congo.
Instead, Trump’s focus on U.S. economic interests in the region has resulted in a lopsided pressure campaign in which Washington has worked to police Rwandan behavior without applying equally forceful measures on the Congolese. This imbalance could encourage Kinshasa to refuse to compromise, which would undermine the grand bargain required for lasting peace and create the conditions for an authoritarian drift in which the Congolese president grabs more power for himself and weakens democratic institutions.
That last danger has become increasingly apparent. In October 2024, Tshisekedi began signaling his interest in revising or replacing the Congolese constitution, potentially to run for a third term. Since Washington’s latest round of sanctions on Kigali, Tshisekedi’s coalition has even more aggressively pursued constitutional change, cracking down on opposition members and critics. In private conversations, members of Tshisekedi’s administration have not been coy about their conviction that Trump will accept a third Tshisekedi term in return for access to Congolese minerals and other favors, such as agreeing to host migrants who have been expelled from the United States. (A first wave of such migrants arrived in Kinshasa in April.)
The Trump administration has made it clear that it has little interest in promoting democracy or human rights, but banking on Congolese authoritarianism as a guarantor of stability will undermine the economic interests the administration has prioritized in negotiations. Unaccountable leadership and bad governance in Kinshasa will embolden opposition to the government, an especially dangerous prospect given how weak and fractious Congo’s security services are. A U.S. embrace of Tshisekedi would send the message that the only way to remove him is through extralegal means, pushing moderate opposition leaders to ally with or join armed rebel groups.
It is not even clear that the administration’s approach will yield significant returns for the United States. Washington is interested in African minerals to reduce dependence on China, whose companies already dominate industrial, small-scale, and artisanal mining in Congo. But even a huge expansion in U.S. presence is unlikely to displace Chinese supply chains in Africa. Over two-thirds of Congo’s copper and cobalt exports go to China; over half the continent’s bauxite, manganese, tantalum, and tungsten follow the same route. Because industrial capacity is overwhelmingly concentrated in China, the next part of the supply chain—higher-level refining and manufacturing—is also dominated by companies based there.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s scattershot diplomatic approach may ultimately hurt U.S. power in the region. The gutting and weakening of the State Department continues apace, with harsh consequences for U.S. policymaking. The Africa Bureau was led by a succession of acting heads for the first 16 months of the administration, and Washington does not have an ambassador in 39 of its 52 embassies in Africa, including those in Congo and Rwanda.
This lack of capacity has already undermined the country’s ability to conduct complex diplomacy, leading to incoherent policy. Since Rwanda escalated its meddling in Congo in late 2025, for example, Washington has announced a plan to provide Rwanda up to $158 million for health-care assistance and signed a memorandum on strategic civil nuclear cooperation, undermining the pressure it has put on Kigali with sanctions.
THE LONG GAME
Breaking the mold of past administrations’ dealings with Africa is not a bad thing in itself. Reining in Rwanda had to be the first step toward resolving the M23 crisis; on this, the Trump administration has made some progress. But the disadvantages of Trump’s approach are now starting to overwhelm its victories. Ad hoc, unpredictable foreign policy by a superpower like the United States can produce quick results, but over time, however, actors adjust and recalibrate; already, some Western diplomats in Kigali suspect that Rwanda may simply weather the punishment from Washington while waiting for Trump to leave office or lose interest. Even if there is a peace deal between the two countries, the complexity and entrenched nature of the conflict, which includes dozens of armed groups, will still require a comprehensive, long-term peace plan.
The time frame for U.S. commercial diplomacy to flourish in Congo is years and decades, not months, and the United States must play a longer game. Primarily pressuring Rwanda while cozying up to Congo will not end the war. Washington should instead impel Congo to stop seeking a military solution to the conflict, to make compromises in negotiations with the M23, and to respect the current constitution’s term limits. The White House can use sanctions, visa restrictions, and high-level political messaging to push for a sustainable peace and protect Congo’s democracy—including clearly stating that it opposes a third term for Tshisekedi or any other attempts by him to remain in power beyond the end of his term, in 2028.
For now, despite the many ceremonies, declarations, and photo ops, the conflict in Congo remains deadlocked. None of the belligerents have an immediate interest in compromise, and Washington’s approach to balancing its roles as mediator and economically interested party has begun to reach its limits. And by needlessly antagonizing the United States’ traditional partners, including European countries, South Africa, and the United Nations, Washington has made it even more difficult to coordinate policy in ways that have been useful in advancing past peace processes. The worst-case scenario is that U.S. policy in Congo freezes the M23 crisis while Congo turns increasingly authoritarian, and little is accomplished in diversifying mineral supply chains away from China. A short-term victory without a long-term strategic goal will soon feel like no victory at all.
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