In the cavernous Treaty Room of the State Department on June 27, 2025, a brittle hush settled as Congo’s Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner and Rwanda’s Olivier Nduhungirehe inked the “Washington Accord.”
Above them, gilt-trimmed ceilings and polished mahogany walls bore silent witness. Cameras flashed. A lone Congolese activist watching via livestream, a mother of five who’d lost everything in North Kivu, gestured toward her screen, as if demanding the moment mean more. She knows better. In eastern DRC, peace has always had a price.
This was no ordinary agreement. Standing beside Secretary Rubio, President Trump proclaimed a “glorious triumph,” and Kayikwamba Wagner affirmed that “interest-driven decisions tend to be the most sustainable,” referring pointedly to looming deals granting U.S. firms access to Congolese cobalt, copper, lithium, and coltan.
Years of diplomacy, underwhelming ceasefires, shadowy mineral trades, and a resurgent M23 militia coalesced into a bold U.S. gambit. Broker peace by dangling billions, and in turn undercut China’s stranglehold on 70 percent of the world’s cobalt output.
Yet beneath the polished rhetoric lay fault lines. Scholars at CSIS warned that by centering minerals, the accord bypasses chronic culprits. Ethnic grievances, impunity, land rights, and citizenship exclusion.
The Guardian’s editorial cautioned that this “minerals-for-protection” pact smacks of a neocolonial racket, echoing the “heart of darkness” era where sovereignty was bartered for resource access.
And Then There’s Rubaya
Masisi Territory, North Kivu, DRC
Coltan (Tantalum), Tin, Tungsten
70% America First Global, 10% Cominière, 20% Local Entities
Transitional; prior rebel control; legacy disputes
~35,000 metric tons (non-JORC)
1,500–2,000 metric tons projected by 2026
Post-rebel transition; U.S.-backed rehab phase
$80M–$100M (rehab, ESG, infra)
45 km to Goma, road/airstrip access
Talks with U.S. EV firms, Mercuria
ITSCI-affiliated; flagged for 2024 fraud issues
High upside; tied to EV and defense demand
High – active rebel/factional zone
Key to U.S.-China mineral rivalry
Labor, legacy violations, community restitution
DFC, America First Global, Mercuria
This is the coltan mine at the epicenter. Stolen by M23, now eyed by a U.S.–backed consortium led by Trump ally Gentry Beach who's staking its claim as a “world-class operation” backed by the DFC.
While no formal allegations have been made, critics point to perceived conflicts of interest in the structure of the America First Global bid. But ask Congolese miners who work barefoot in open pits, and they’re skeptical, “business building bridges,” one worker said, “but not for us.”
Beneath the Hills of Masisi
Rubaya wasn’t always a pawn on the global chessboard. Located in the hills of Masisi Territory, the mine has for years been a flashpoint. It’s grey dust coating the lungs of child miners, its proceeds smuggled across the border in burlap sacks marked “coffee.”
The mine changed hands between armed groups, militias, and state proxies, becoming both lifeline and curse. When the M23 rebels seized it, the violence surged.
Now, under the Washington Accord, Rubaya is poised to be rehabilitated. Not through Congolese initiative, but through a U.S.‑facilitated public–private venture involving Beach’s America First Global Partners, logistical backing by Mercuria, and financing from the U.S. Development Finance Corporation.
Details of the deal structure, quietly brokered through Delaware holding companies and Congolese parastatals, suggest a tiered equity setup. The U.S. consortium receives initial mineral rights guarantees through a DFC loan tranche, with Congo’s state mining agency holding a minority stake capped at under 10% financial terms.
The deal, collateralized on future production volumes, hinges partly on conditional security cooperation from Rwandan forces—with Kagame maintaining that no full withdrawal is possible until the FDLR, a Congo-based Hutu militia linked to the 1994 genocide, is fully neutralized.
“This isn’t peace,” murmurs a Congolese human rights lawyer in Goma. “It’s a securitized asset swap.”
Capital and Leverage in Kinshasa
Indeed, the DFC’s involvement was carefully choreographed. In early March, the U.S. opened negotiations with Kinshasa under the banner of “critical minerals cooperation,” promising jobs, transparency, and ethical sourcing.
But leaked financial memos reviewed by investigative outlet Africa Confidential suggest otherwise. Equity structures favor foreign stakeholders, while Congolese state royalties are capped below 8 percent, far beneath IMF advisory levels.
These are not new problems; they are old ghosts in new suits.
In the capital, the rhetoric is jubilant. Tshisekedi’s administration paints the deal as geopolitical mastery, balancing Chinese hegemony with Western patronage. But for the artisanal miners of North Kivu, some 200,000 of them, the promises feel eerily similar to the ones made in 2001, 2009, and 2016.
Back then, the story was always the same. Peace talks that yield resource concessions, foreign firms that arrive with spreadsheets and security escorts, and then silence as the villages go dark again.
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The costs aren’t only economic. To secure the Washington Accord, Rwandan demands had to be met, notably, a loosening of U.N. scrutiny over its involvement in M23 operations and a discreet withdrawal of EU sanctions.
In return, Rwanda agreed to cease logistical support to rebel units. But United Nations experts remain skeptical. “There’s no verification mechanism,” one diplomat confided. “Only market incentives.”
This model, peace through capital, is seductive. It aligns perfectly with Trump-era doctrine… diminish Chinese influence by creating corridors of transactional stability. And to some degree, it’s working.
U.S. firms now lead explorations into copper reserves near Kolwezi, a $400 million logistics contract has been granted to Halliburton-affiliated shippers, and cobalt refiners in Michigan have signed supply MOUs tied to the Washington Accord.
Extraction Diplomacy by Another Name
But strip away the glitz, and the structure begins to wobble. Experts at the Atlantic Council have raised alarm.
No independent oversight, no environmental accountability, no reparative justice for past human rights violations. In Rubaya, mothers still grieve sons conscripted by militias now legitimized as “local partners.”
In Bukavu, union leaders protest wage suppression and exclusion from negotiations. “This is extraction diplomacy,” says one researcher at Chatham House. “Stability becomes a side effect, not the goal.”
A particularly damning thread is traceability. The DRC participates in the ITSCI traceability scheme, a system meant to certify mineral origin.
Still,a Le Monde investigation found that over 40 percent of supposedly traceable coltan was fraudulently tagged, often sourced from conflict zones and smuggled via Rwanda. This finding was echoed in a Global Witness report that identified systemic manipulation of tagging systems.
With Rubaya’s new ownership structure, activists fear that cosmetic reforms will mask continuity in illicit trade, legitimizing exploitation under a U.S.-approved banner.
A New Empire of Interests
The framing of China as villain and the U.S. as rescuer has served its rhetorical purpose. But when interrogated, the dichotomy frays. China, through CMOC and Sicomines, maintains a deep presence, controlling refineries, logistics corridors, and nearly half of DRC’s cobalt output.
Its grip on the upstream and midstream supply chain is not accidental but engineered over two decades of quiet state-backed dealmaking.
According to Bloomberg data, Chinese entities have invested over \$10 billion in the Congolese extractives sector, with Beijing using commodity-backed loans, infrastructure-for-minerals swaps, and opaque joint ventures as geopolitical tools. It’s a model heavy on control and light on transparency.
But their excesses are well documented. Forced relocations, opaque tax structures, and debt-for-resource swaps have made the Chinese approach infamous. What the U.S. now offers is not a corrective, but a rival playbook.
Instead of authoritarian leverage, it wraps extraction in the language of democracy, ESG, and market liberalism. Analysts say this isn’t a reversal but a shift in narrative architecture.
What’s emerging, then, is not an alternative but a competitor. Another empire of interests, cloaked in liberal values, with each superpower selling a different brand of dependence, both claiming to save Congo while anchoring their own critical mineral supply chains.
The Cold War never ended here—it simply mutated into trade corridors, cobalt stockpiles, and photo ops in the Treaty Room.
Why the Deal Risks Repeating History
At the core of this mineral-centered “peace” lies a systemic misalignment between extractive capital and structural reform. The DRC remains one of the most resource-rich yet institutionally brittle nations on earth. U.S. intervention here, framed as developmental, is in fact a tactical realignment of supply chains.
But the model replicates familiar patterns. Limited equity redistribution, performative oversight, and regulatory capture masked as diplomacy. The absence of grassroots consultation, reparative frameworks, and enforceable governance obligations reflects a transactional worldview devoid of political empathy.
Regulatory failure is not incidental. It is structural. Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, once a pillar of conflict mineral accountability, has been hollowed out since 2017. The ITSCI system lacks third-party audits, and DFC-backed projects rely on political goodwill rather than legal guarantees.
Without enforcement teeth or local co-ownership, these deals will continue to deepen precarity even as they create “peace on paper.”
What emerges, then, is a high-stakes experiment in geopolitical alchemy. Can resource extraction stabilize a nation long destabilized by it? Or are we simply rehearsing new scripts atop old ruins?