On a recent episode of Fox News’ “Special Report,” the host, Bret Baier, turned his attention to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that doesn’t frequently make headlines in the United States. Using a map of the country, which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, to educate his viewers, Baier began by outlining the regional conflicts in which the D.R.C. has been engaged, dating back to the refugee crises triggered by the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He added that “Congo is considered the world’s richest country in terms of natural resources,” containing untapped supplies worth “an estimated twenty-four trillion dollars, with a ‘T.’ ” Those resources include gold, diamonds, and so-called critical metals, such as cobalt and lithium, which are used in rechargeable batteries. Baier then introduced, via video link, the D.R.C.’s President, Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo.
Tshisekedi’s intended audience, it quickly seemed clear, was not Baier, nor most of the the program’s viewers, who number on average roughly three and a half million, but President Donald Trump, who is known to tune in to Fox regularly. Tshisekedi, speaking in French, touted the D.R.C.’s mineral wealth and hinted at a potential deal with the Trump Administration: access to the country’s minerals in return for American weapons and military support against rebels who, since the beginning of the year, have seized a large chunk of the east of the country—an area rich in resources. “We have established partnerships with many other countries, and we think the United States of America, given its role and influence around the world, is an important partner to have,” Tshisekedi said. Earlier in the week, he had written to Trump, telling him, “Your election has ushered in the golden age for America.” The Administration apparently likes Tshisekedi’s idea: last week, Trump’s new adviser to the region, Massad Boulos (who also happens to be the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany), said that a deal, whose details were not disclosed, is under review. Boulos added, “I am pleased to announce that the President and I have agreed on a path forward for its development.” The negotiations seem to be already yielding fruit: three Americans captured after a coup attempt last year were released to serve their prison time in the United States, and Alphamin, a massive tin-mining complex whose ownership includes an investment firm based in the U.S. and the U.K., has resumed mining after M23 rebels retreated from the area.
Currently, a bevy of companies, owned mainly by Chinese and Congolese entrepreneurs, ship unprocessed and lightly refined mineral products out of the D.R.C. Chinese companies have invested many billions of dollars in the country’s mines and infrastructure, and the Chinese government is also deeply invested in the country’s mining system, through a giant joint venture with the D.R.C.’s government. Tshisekedi himself has visited China twice, and members of his inner circle have helped Chinese firms to thrive in the D.R.C. Tshisekedi told Baier that Beijing had replaced Washington in his country to fill a “vacuum,” one that had been created as the United States and Europe retreated from Africa during the past few decades. But Tshisekedi thinks that the current arrangement is depriving the D.R.C. of opportunities to profit, and that his nation should refine its own critical minerals.
Since Trump took office, critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, and tantalum, which are arguably as important to the tech world as oil is, have been top of mind. China’s export ban of rare earth metals over the weekend reinforced how vulnerable U.S. firms are to Beijing’s supply chain controls; a halt in the flow of battery metals would arguably be even more problematic. Trump has repeatedly stated his desire to annex resource-rich Greenland, but that country’s new prime minister has said that the U.S. will not “get” the territory. The Administration has also proposed a minerals deal with Ukraine, which has significant deposits of rare-earth metals, as a means of paying for the U.S.’s past military support against Russia. Observers, however, note that Ukraine’s deposits may be hard to access, and that some are situated in territory that has been captured by Russian forces.
A deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then, would give Trump a much-needed win in the foreign-policy sphere, but U.S. mining companies need assurances of security—that they won’t be undercut by other firms the next time the Congolese government wants to raise money, and that the firms won’t be expropriated, as has happened under previous governments. Conversely, the D.R.C. needs investment from companies that will help build its economy in a way that is not purely extractive.
The D.R.C. has been engaged in its current conflict since late 2021. The rebels whom the government are most concerned about are loyal to a coalition of two groups: the March 23 Movement and the Alliance Fleuve Congo. Experts from the United Nations have shown how both groups are supported by Rwanda and are under its de-facto control. In February, that country’s authoritarian President, Paul Kagame, told CNN that he did not know whether Rwandan troops were in the D.R.C., although the U.N. has provided extensive photographic evidence of Rwandan soldiers and matériel supporting the M23, and the U.S. State Department has sanctioned some Rwandan entities and officials for such support. For the Congolese, it may seem that history is repeating itself: in the late nineteen-nineties, a rebellion backed by Rwanda toppled the government of what was then Zaire, and helped to unleash a conflict that is thought to have killed more people than any other since the Second World War. The United Nations has staged one of the costliest peacekeeping operations in its history in the country, but has not been able to quell the violence.
As the rebels take more land, minerals are trucked out of the region and sold—mainly to be processed in China. The profits, in turn, are used to fund the rebellion. (China, for its part, has sold weapons to both the D.R.C. and Rwanda.) In December, a U.N. panel of experts wrote that, in 2024, rebels in one area generated more than eight hundred thousand dollars a month from illicitly taxing minerals that passed through their checkpoints, and from taking over mining concessions. In late January, the M23-A.F.C. alliance captured Goma, the capital of North Kivu province and probably the most important hub in the country’s east. In February, the rebels seized Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu. In mid-March, Kagame called for a ceasefire, alongside Tshisekedi, at a meeting in Qatar, but the fighting continues. Tshisekedi’s officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, recently approached the American private military contractor Erik Prince to provide security. (According to several Washington sources, Congolese politicians had also been in conversation with Prince during Joe Biden’s Presidency.)
The U.S. is not the only country whose potential relationship with the D.R.C. would combine minerals and security. South Africa deployed soldiers as part of a regional peacekeeping force in the D.R.C. beginning in 2023. According to a senior U.S. official, some of their military support was meant to defend mines. But that nation withdrew its troops in March, after nineteen South African, Malawian, and Tanzanian troops were killed in Goma.
“President Tshisekedi understands that being close with the Americans will make Kagame back off,” Karl Von Batten, who is both a lobbyist for Tshisekedi’s government in Washington and the chairman of the development committee of the Republican Party in the District of Columbia, told me. He added that President Tshisikedi is trying to establish a “legacy” of good governance and was committed to leaving office when his term ends in 2028. “Whatever deal is made, Tshisekedi wants to make sure that it benefits the D.R.C.,” Von Batten said. “He knows that he is not going to be in power forever.” Other observers are not so sanguine. Human-rights abuses against journalists and civil-society actors have been mounting. In a recent essay for the Egmont Institute, a Belgian think tank focussed on international relations, Erik Kennes, an academic who has worked in the D.R.C. for both the U.N. and the Carter Center, wrote that Tshisekedi is notoriously unreliable, that his regime has “clear issues with corruption,” and that he remains in power in part thanks to an “apparatus of repression.”
Tshisekedi’s government, in fact, has not always been friendly to U.S. interests. On January 28th, as the war in the east ramped up, a mob attacked the U.S. Embassy and some other embassies in Kinshasa, protesting nations that were perceived to support Rwanda. The senior U.S. official told me that Tshisekedi’s justice minister, Constant Mutamba, had orchestrated the attacks through social media. (Mutamba had posted on X encouraging citizens to take part in a protest against aggression from Rwanda.) “The reporting we have is that it came from him,” the official said. Tshisekedi’s party often blames outside forces for failings of its own making, and is affiliated with mobs of young men, known as the Forces of Progress, who have been accused of bullying his opponents. The U.S. and Europe were convenient foils following the losses in the east, because Kagame has cultivated relationships with some Western governments; despite U.S. sanctions on a member of his government, Kagame’s wife, Jeannette, led a prayer in Washington at the 2025 National Prayer Breakfast, an event with congressional ties. The gathering took place in February, only a few days after the rebels took Goma.
By then, talks for a critical-metals deal with the D.R.C. were already under way, but off to a rocky start. Congolese officials first met with the Trump Administration to propose a deal soon after Trump’s Inauguration. They wanted a codified provision in U.S. law setting out a minerals deal. Trump’s foreign-relations team demurred; there is a narrow bench on Africa in the current Administration, and the top Bureau of African Affairs job at the State Department remains unfilled. (It was only in early April that Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman who has worked for decades in Nigeria, was appointed senior adviser for Africa.) But Representative Ronny Jackson, of Texas, who was the Chief Medical Adviser to the President during the first Trump Administration, set out on a fact-finding mission to the D.R.C., in March.
The negotiations soon descended into confusion. A group of Congolese politicians had contacted the Florida congressman Brian Mast, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. According to Julian Pecquet and Romain Gras, writing in The Africa Report, the D.R.C. representatives proposed minerals partnerships and the development of a port on the country’s coast. Mast scheduled a meeting between the Congolese and senior officials in Washington, but this was called off when it became clear that some of the Congolese officials were about to be replaced in a cabinet reshuffle. Jackson returned from his mission and, far from endorsing a deal, he told a congressional committee that “Eastern D.R.C. is a completely ungoverned area—it’s like the wild, wild east. I truly believe there is no ability for the government in Kinshasa to actually control that area right now.”
Another issue that has caused friction in the U.S. and Europe is the human-rights abuses involved in the mining of critical minerals: even as the mines often provide the only source of income for people in the region, the use of child labor and forced work is widespread. International groups have tried to regulate the mineral trade in the D.R.C. and elsewhere, and the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 contains provisions to insure that companies properly report their supply chains of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, a suite of metals that is known in the industry as 3TG. But such efforts have not stopped profits flowing to corrupt actors and armed groups. This has led to renewed claims from N.G.O.s that cellphones and electric cars, including Teslas, are made with “blood minerals” or “conflict minerals.”
The D.R.C.’s government, meanwhile, is legally pursuing large companies that it claims use such minerals. It targeted Apple, which has used Congolese minerals, processed in China, in iPhones and other devices. Patrick Muyaya, the minister of communication and media, told the Associated Press, last year, “We want clarification on the sources of supply for major technology companies, in particular Apple, to verify whether they are acquiring minerals produced in completely illegal conditions.”
In December, a team of international lawyers hired by Tshisekedi’s government filed suit against Apple in France and Belgium, accusing the company of using conflict minerals in its supply chain; Apple strongly disputed these allegations. The company did not respond to an e-mailed query, but the its most recent report on conflict minerals and its supply chain, issued in April, 2025, stated that it had “found no reasonable basis for concluding that any smelters or refiners of 3TG identified in our supply chain as of December 31, 2024 directly or indirectly financed or benefited armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo... or an adjoining country.”
After the lawsuit was filed, Apple announced that it had already ordered its suppliers to stop buying 3TG minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in June, and the D.R.C.’s legal team took this development as a partial victory. (Other essential minerals—such as cobalt, which comes mostly from mines in the southern D.R.C.—were not included in this announcement.) Such tactics, however, are not likely to please Trump, who prefers to pick his own targets—and the U.S. official chalked them up to the “inconsistency” of Tshisekedi’s foreign-policy team. Trump’s team hasn’t been exactly consistent either: the D.R.C., like most other nations, was hit with tariffs of ten per cent last week, as the Administration imposed protectionist levies on global imports into the U.S.
Despite the clear difficulties, some U.S. firms are keen to do business with the D.R.C. Bloomberg News reported that KoBold Metals, a company that counts Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos among its investors, was planning a major offer to develop a giant lithium mine in the southern Congolese town of Manono. The deal would require some sort of compensation for the Australian company with a stake in the project (in a cautionary note, the government in Kinshasa effectively prevented that firm from operating, and later cut a separate deal with a Chinese company) and would rely on a planned extension of a railway corridor to the Atlantic coast of neighboring Angola, to ship lithium concentrates to the U.S. KoBold began exploring mining in Manono before last year’s election, but a deal between the Trump Administration and Tshisekedi’s government would give the firm more confidence to invest, a source close to the negotiations told me. A deal does seem to be slowly progressing. Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, the D.R.C.’s foreign minister, has acknowledged that talks are in early stages, noting that both parties are “investing the necessary time, but also the necessary effort,” Bloomberg reported.
Still, it’s hard to imagine a realistic proposal that Tshisekedi’s government could make without alienating China, which is currently engaged in a tit-for-tat tariff war with the Trump Administration. Moïse Ekanga, one of the architects of a six-billion-dollar resource deal with China under the former Congolese President, said that the Chinese deals with the D.R.C. should stand, and that Tshisekedi would have to strip owners of mining concessions to give them to U.S. companies, a measure that would add to the unstable business environment. “You can’t mortgage the country’s resources just to stay in power,” he said, although the previous D.R.C. government was often accused of similar fiscal maneuvering.
With the return of realpolitik, the Trump Administration may yet find ways to access D.R.C.’s minerals, just not in a way that Tshisekedi might want. Two sources told me that the possibility of Tshisekedi’s “riding off into the sunset,” in the event that the rebels continue to take more territory, had been recently discussed in Washington. The U.S. official told me that the U.S. remains wary of supporting Tshisekedi because of his close connections with China. “As much as he purports to be Western-orientated, a question mark remains. It’s always in the back of my mind: Are we being played?” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the viewership numbers for Fox News’ “Special Report.”
