Highlights
- The Atlantic Council’s report seeks to reframe the DRC’s narrative from conflict to opportunity, focusing on critical minerals and potential transformation.
- The analysis critiques foreign involvement in the DRC, highlighting contradictions in peace efforts, mining codes, and infrastructure development.
- The paper calls for radical honesty, transparency, and structural reforms to create genuine partnerships that benefit Congolese communities.
The Atlantic Council, (opens in a new tab) one of Washington’s most influential foreign policy think tanks with deep roots in transatlantic security and business interests, has released a new issue brief titled “Beyond Critical Minerals: Capitalizing on the DRC’s Vast Opportunities (opens in a new tab).”
It is an ambitious report co-authored by respected scholars and policy actors, including Dave Peterson, Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, Rabah Arezki, Nicole Namwezi Batumike, and others. The paper seeks to reframe the conversation on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from one solely focused on minerals and conflict to one of opportunity and transformation.
Yet despite its narrative of hope, development, and responsible investment, this paper is riddled with contradictions, institutional blind spots, and uncomfortable omissions. While the Atlantic Council and its Africa Center aim to position themselves as honest brokers for reform and stability, their paper fails to grapple with the raw mechanics of corruption, power, and extraction that define foreign involvement in the DRC—particularly by Western actors themselves.
What the Paper Gets Right
The brief Rare Earth Exchanges (REE) deserves credit for several key observations we bulletize below.
- It spotlights the geostrategic importance of DRC’s cobalt, copper, lithium, and coltan supplies in the global energy transition.
- It rightly criticizes the West’s past neglect and China’s first-mover advantage, including the $6 billion Sicomines minerals-for-infrastructure deal (opens in a new tab) that continues to set the pace.
- It embraces the DRC’s 2018 Mining Code as a potential platform for responsible sourcing and local beneficiation.
- It emphasizes the need for peace and justice, and calls for U.S. leadership that transcends extractive transactionalism.
In sections penned by Nicole Namwezi Batumike (opens in a new tab) and Rabah Arezki, (opens in a new tab) there is a commendable push for legal compliance, community investment, and shared value—a break from the sordid past of “take the ore, leave the people.”
REEx Critique
But the veneer of reform cannot hide the paper’s most glaring flaw: its unwillingness to confront the foundational extractive logic at the heart of U.S., Chinese, and European engagement in the DRC. Despite rich prose about democracy, human rights, and local empowerment, the entire paper reads like a roadmap for stabilizing elite access to resources, not democratizing them.
1. Talk of Peace, While Funding War
The paper calls for U.S.-led peace efforts while ignoring the grotesque contradiction that both the U.S. and EU are cutting mineral deals with Rwanda, the very actor responsible for backing M23—one of the bloodiest militias active in eastern Congo. European memoranda signed with Rwanda in 2024 are criticized, but the U.S. strategy to broker simultaneous peace and minerals deals with Kigali is treated as clever diplomacy. This is more supply chain realpolitik than it is moral leadership.
2. The Mining Code as Panacea
The 2018 Mining Code is celebrated as a compliance tool, but no author dares ask: Who enforces it? In a state where corruption and coercion are endemic, and where provinces receive little to no infrastructure benefits from mineral wealth, laws on paper are not worth much. The Mining Code may be progressive, but in practice, foreign companies routinely dodge royalties, violate environmental norms, and exploit child labor with impunity.
3. Infrastructure Development for Whom?
Infrastructure is rightly framed as the DRC’s developmental bottleneck. But the paper praises projects like the Lobito Corridor without discussing who owns it, who profits, and whether parallel port and rail efforts in Congo’s west are being sabotaged to funnel minerals westward under foreign control. Rawbank’s support for the Atlantic Council—paired with its ties to the Africa Finance Corporation leading the Lobito Corridor—raises serious conflict-of-interest questions that go unaddressed, does it not?
4. Corporate Benevolence–A Myth?
The brief elevates KoBold Metals (opens in a new tab) (backed by Gates and Bezos) as a harbinger of responsible capitalism. But history says otherwise. From Freeport-McMoRan to Glencore, global firms have long enriched foreign shareholders while Congolese communities remain poor, poisoned, and policed. No author addresses the fact that Congolese artisanal miners are being pushed out of deposits they have worked for decades to make room for corporate giants operating under a new “clean energy” pretext.
African Moves & Implications
We should also be mindful of the Burkina Faso story. Burkina Faso’s military leader Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in a 2022 coup, has become a cult-like figure across Africa, celebrated online with AI-generated tributes and praised for his anti-Western, anti-colonial stance and efforts to reclaim national control over mineral resources.
Despite his popularity, especially among disillusioned African youth, Traoré’s government has been marked by authoritarian practices, including repression of press freedom, forced conscription of dissidents, and failure to control escalating violence in the country’s east. While his alignment with Russia and rhetoric against France have boosted his image as a revolutionary akin to Thomas Sankara, critics warn that his rise is being romanticized and manipulated, possibly aided by Russian influence campaigns, despite deep human rights abuses and governance failures. The enthusiasm reflects both genuine frustration with Western-backed democracies and a growing openness to non-Western alternatives, highlighting the geopolitical vacuum the West itself has helped create.
The intellectuals in Washington, D.C., and the Eastern Seaboard of the USA need to be mindful of unfolding forces in Africa at the ground level. Candor, honesty, and frankness may be the best way to start understanding the situation.
A Better Path Requires Radical Honesty
To its credit, the Atlantic Council is trying to engage the private sector and civil society in the same conversation. But it still operates under a flawed assumption: that foreign capital, if regulated slightly better, will suddenly uplift Congolese lives.
This is the same logic that justified China’s Sicomines deal. It didn’t work then. It won’t work now unless foreign actors relinquish control and Congolese governance truly democratizes.
Any real transformation in the DRC will require:
- Enforcing environmental and labor protections with teeth, not just with words.
- Revenue transparency, including publication of all royalty payments and profit repatriation.
- No more partnerships with Rwanda until it halts M23 support and ceases looting Congolese territory.
- A moratorium on land expropriations affecting artisanal miners and farming communities until local alternatives are negotiated and backed by enforceable social benefit agreements.
REEx Commentary – Toward Truth and Trade Justice
The Atlantic Council’s latest brief tries to strike a balance between pragmatism and principle but leans heavily toward elite-managed stability over underlying structural reform. But can this work with China well in advance of the USA across Africa? And with Russians knocking on populist-nationalist movement doors?
Until that balance shifts, the DRC will remain a theater of international mineral scavenging, not a partner in global development. The Trump administration can use creativity and business savvy to change the paradigm.
The Congolese people don’t need another glossy roadmap. They need a movement for sovereignty, transparency, corruption reform, and solidarity, not to mention true long-term business partners, and the USA has the potential to do just that. Many of the Atlantic Council recommendations make sense, especially once some of these underlying forces manifest.
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