On December 4th, the presidents of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda ratified a peace agreement, described as the Washington Accord, in an event that became Donald Trump’s platform to brag about how US firms will move to Eastern DRC to extract rare earths and make a lot of money.
Sensationalized Peace
Trump’s DRC-Rwanda peace deal, a.k.a. the Washington Accord, is supposed to end the protracted conflict in eastern DRC and was first signed in June 2025 by the foreign ministers of both countries. The agreement calls for Rwanda to withdraw its troops from DRC and for the latter country to cease supporting Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), but mysteriously leaves out Rwanda-Backed M-23. M-23, despite claiming to be defending the interests of Congolese-Tutsis in the DRC, has primarily advanced in regions rich in critical minerals, while its advance has coincided with the expansion of Rwanda’s export of these minerals without additional development of the country’s mining activities. The said deal already shows an overt preference for M-23 rebels by Trump and Rwanda since the group is excluded from those supposed to be disarmed, meaning the mines it controls are unlikely to revert back to the DRC.
Kenyan President William Ruto, witnessing the ratification of the Washington Accord, mentioned how Africa had economically stagnated because it exported cheap raw materials and imported expensive finished products, a model that the US enforced and enabled Western European colonialists to continue in the DRC and across the African continent. Surprisingly, Mr. Ruto attempted to launder Washington’s image, praising Trump for now proposing integration that will promote the development of mineral value chains and agro-processing, suggesting the US will suddenly shift from its established policy of driving divisions and plundering Africans’ raw materials. The world has changed to force Washington to rebrand itself in an attempt to compete with powers that have been guided by foresight and strategic thought over the last decades and that present an alternative to Washington-imposed division and plunder.
Pursuit of Peace or Economic Maneuver
In an interview titled Truce or Theatre which aired on Citizen TV on November 6, 2025, international relations scholars argued that the US is primarily driven by a rush to establish alternative value chains for rare earths and critical minerals using resources in the DRC and Africa. Similarly, a BBC article published in June 2025 revealed that Trump’s DRC-Rwanda peace deal was a ploy to cash in on the mineral-rich DRC as opposed to a genuine effort to help parties achieve sustainable peace. Therefore, the highly dramatized peace deal is likely a façade to conceal efforts to establish rare earth and critical mineral value chains using the DRC’s minerals, which the US refused to do in the last decades. Since China restricted its export of rare earth materials and magnets and critical minerals in response to Trump’s trade war, Trump was launched into a frantic search for alternatives. However, this rush could be futile and misplaced, since mining and creating technologies for processing rare earth materials may need decades to achieve. Meanwhile, Washington’s past failure to build these technologies despite having access to the DRC’s minerals reveals a lack of foresight. It seems the global geopolitical and geo-economic space has experienced rapid changes that have made the West’s previous mode of obtaining resources through divide-and-rule or colonial plunder inadequate.
An uncomfortable reality seems to have dawned on the US and its Western allies: they are unlikely to wrest control of the rare earths and critical minerals value chains from China through whichever plans they might have had. Instead, the US leadership may have arrived at the conclusion that securing and developing value chains of critical minerals from Africa is a practical alternative. As earlier noted, Washington had complete access to resources in the DRC for decades but declined to propose their development in favor of fanning perpetual chaos and converting the country into a battlefield. Noteworthy, the US stole from Congo, among others, the uranium it used to develop the nuclear weapons it would use during WWII, and participated in destabilizing the Congo for decades. It has continued to support Rwanda, which funds the M-23 rebels, and purchases critical minerals smuggled from DRC territories controlled by M-23 and sold via Rwanda.
From Decades of Fanning Chaos to Suddenly Supporting Development
Trump’s attempt may soon show that it is impossible to fuel wars for decades and later attempt to stop them by a stroke of a pen. The war in Eastern DRC is unlikely to end simply because Washington wants to transform the region into its supply base for critical minerals. The ratification meeting for the Washington Accord exposed deep mistrust between the presidents of Rwanda and DRC, which is justified based on the West’ long-term tradition of wheeler-dealing. Each of the two leaders probably feared that Washington could be in secret arrangements with the opponent. For context, it should be noted that the peace deal leaves out M-23, a group that can easily advance Rwanda’s interests even if the country decides to withdraw from eastern DRC. Meanwhile, M23 was already claiming that Tchisekedi was a fraud and anticipated continued fighting. Tchisekedi has also run a corrupt regime that has weakened the state and the military, which made it easier for M-23 to overrun.
Violations of the ceasefire have been recorded in many instances since the peace deal was first signed in June, which shows that Trump’s efforts to rapidly transform this battlefield into an alternative supply chain for rare-earth and critical minerals for the US are unlikely to be realized. Also, if the war were to stop, the US would still be unable to obtain an alternative to China’s critical mineral value chains, as the country takes about 29 years from discovery to first production of minerals. Other sources note that China developed its advantage in the rare earths and critical minerals value chain over the last 30 years. Therefore, the US needs many decades to successfully develop alternative value chains for critical minerals from China. The establishment in Washington will only have itself to blame for failing to develop alternative rare earth and critical mineral value chains in the DRC over the last decades, a period it chose to initiate and fan conflicts and plunder.
Simon Chege Ndiritu, is a political observer and research analyst from Africa
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