The U.S.-brokered agreement could mean American access to valuable minerals, freezing China out of a region it prizes.
JOHANNESBURG—Congo and Rwanda have now signed a U.S.-brokered agreement that could end almost 30 years of war in Central Africa, igniting a race for access to vast reserves of critical minerals and precious metals.
The United States is after Congo’s resources, which include cobalt, tantalum, and lithium. These are essential to the global energy transition to electric power and are used in electronics, such as computers and cell phones, as well as in the production of weapons and military equipment.
Washington played a key role in the peace talks, with U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulous, negotiating a minerals-for-peace agreement with Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi.
The International Energy Agency has projected that demand for critical minerals could increase by more than four times by 2040, as the world moves from fossil fuels to clean energy.
Major powers, especially China, the United States, and the European Union, are competing for the minerals, with Congo in the middle of what many analysts have called a global scramble.
Trump has made securing American access to critical minerals a centerpiece of his administration’s agenda, as he considers the materials indispensable to U.S. national security.
The United States has been losing out to Beijing in the arena of critical minerals, with China currently dominating global supplies largely due to its control of at least half of Congo’s mines, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Tshisekedi has been hanging on to power in recent months while Rwandan-backed M23 rebels seized control of large swaths of eastern Congo, vowing to oust him and driving out U.N. peacekeepers.
Thousands have died and thousands have been displaced in the past few months, adding to a death toll estimated at 6 million since conflict first erupted in 1996, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
In February, the president of the Africa-USA Business Council wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on behalf of a Congolese senator, offering the United States access to minerals in exchange for Washington’s help in securing eastern Congo. The lobby group also asked for an urgent meeting between Trump and Tshisekedi.
The offer could allow the United States to usurp China, which signed a minerals extraction deal with Kinshasa in 2008 and promised to build infrastructure such as schools and hospitals across the poverty-stricken nation.
