On December 4, 2025, the presidents of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda signed what U.S. President Donald Trump called a “historic deal.” The ceremony, held at the recently renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington, appeared more filled with theatrical confidence than genuine mutual conviction.
At the Washington signing, the clearest signals were not in the agreement’s wording but in the silence, stiffness, and restraint of the leaders who had to endorse it. As excitement grew far from Africa’s battlefields, a distance remained between men whose countries still bear the scars of war. Their expressions alone posed a sobering question: how can foreign-brokered deals truly heal Africa’s wounds?
Ironically, even as these leaders celebrated the so-called historic deal in Washington, Kivu was already trembling under renewed shelling. The language of peace proclaimed abroad starkly contrasted with the violence unfolding on the ground. According to an article published by Agence Press International on December 5, 2025, “Residents of eastern Congo said fighting has intensified despite a peace agreement that was signed by the Congolese and Rwandan presidents in Washington, D.C., with U.S. President Donald Trump in attendance.”
At that moment, residents of Kamanyola were fleeing their villages amid ongoing exchanges of fire between the Congolese armed forces and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group. For those caught in the crossfire, the promise of peace had not yet materialized; war remained the immediate reality.
This raises a necessary question: does this widely publicized agreement truly matter in practice, or does it risk becoming just another diplomatic gesture made in a Western capital, detached from African realities? Time will reveal whether Pax Trumpanica has real substance or is simply another agreement that serves as a rubber stamp for Washington’s wishes and economic and ideological posturing in Africa.
To understand the kind of peace being envisioned, it is useful to step back and evaluate the strategic reasoning behind it. On May 2, 2025, Jahara Matisek and James Farwell published an analysis examining how a second Donald Trump presidency would change U.S. security strategy — from Pax Americana to what they call Pact Americana. According to their article published in The Strategist, a commentary and analysis platform of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the liberal international order, long associated with U.S. leadership, is shifting toward a more transactional model where alliances are conditional, interests are narrowly defined, and American power is exercised assertively.
Under Pact Americana, they argue, security guarantees are no longer open-ended commitments, but bargaining tools—offered in exchange for access to critical minerals, arms deals, trade concessions, or strategic cooperation. U.S. military deployments are scaled back beyond priority regions, while emphasis shifts toward hemispheric dominance, supply-chain control, and industrial competition. In this model, power is less mediated through diplomacy and more consolidated through coercion, commerce, and transactional bargaining. For countries outside the U.S.-centred core, such a system risks turning peace into a commodity and sovereignty into collateral.
Indeed, the United States is rarely the first empire to pursue peace through order. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana all achieved relative stability—though often at the expense of justice, equality, and self-determination.
What happened in Washington last week, however, doesn’t quite match these historical models. The event was less about a calculated strategy of order and more about a display focused on presidential symbolism. The peace agreement was signed at the recently renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, a move that blurred the line between institutional diplomacy and personal political branding — Pax Trumpanica. As Politico Pro noted, “President Donald Trump took the stage at the newly branded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to sign a minerals-heavy peace deal with two African nations, marking his first appearance at an agency he gutted earlier this year.” It’s no coincidence that the deal took place on the day Trump received the first FIFA Peace Prize.
Unlike Pact Americana, where transactional logic is at least clear—alliances conditional, guarantees negotiated—this moment offered neither firm security commitments nor apparent buy-in from the most affected parties. With fighting still ongoing on the ground and little visible progress for affected communities, the agreement risks serving less as a framework for peace than as a symbol within a broader story—one in which the idea of peacemaking might matter more than its actual results.
One unavoidable question, then, is this: what realistic options are available on the ground if the current Trump-era deal is completely ruled out? This is not a theoretical exercise. As things stand, U.S.-linked actors are already present in—or actively negotiating access to—the Congolese mining sector, especially around so-called critical minerals. In other words, the landscape where this agreement intervenes is not empty.
These actors include KoBold Metals, a U.S.-based exploration company that uses AI-driven technologies and has signed framework agreements with the Congolese government while pursuing lithium development at the disputed Manono site. There is also a U.S. consortium led by former special forces personnel, involving Orion Resource Partners and Virtus Minerals, reportedly negotiating to acquire copper and cobalt assets linked to Chemaf — efforts that are still at the negotiation stage rather than finalized transactions. Alongside these private entities, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, though not a mining company itself, has indicated strategic involvement by supporting joint ventures between Congo’s state miner, Gécamines, and Western commodity firms aimed at securing copper and cobalt supply chains.
What emerges is not a picture of external absence but a gradual, state-supported U.S. re-entry into Congo’s mineral sector through an economic programme, whether transparent or not, remains an open question. It also involves security interests and strategic competition with China. So, the key issue is not whether U.S. actors are involved—they already are—but on what terms, and with whose consent.
Acknowledging this reality does not mean romanticizing it. It involves recognizing that for communities living under armed-group control, engaged in illicit extraction, and facing displacement, the key ethical question is not whether they participate, but whether their involvement can be guided to reduce violence and exploitation. Should we not at least consider that the Democratic Republic of Congo could gain more influence through direct engagement with the state and accountable systems, rather than remain trapped in opaque networks controlled by unaccountable intermediaries? And despite its flaws, could state-led efforts help reduce illicit exploitation and armed dominance that have long thrived in Congo’s mineral sector?
This tension between urgent diplomacy and structural failure brings Africa’s own peace institutions into focus.
One must also consider whether this situation would have arisen at all if the African Union had consistently and resolutely implemented its own peace framework. Had the AU’s Master Roadmap of Practical Steps to Silencing the Guns in Africa by 2020 been effectively enforced, the trajectory might have been different. Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo might never have felt the need to travel to Washington.
In 2017, the African Union Assembly adopted the African Union Master Roadmap (AUMR), inspired by the 2013 AU 50th Anniversary Solemn Declaration, in which African leaders pledged to build a conflict-free continent and to end all wars in Africa by 2020. That commitment was based on addressing the root causes of conflict, combating impunity, preventing terrorism and transnational crime, strengthening peacekeeping and enforcement capacity, and promoting post-conflict reconstruction. It also highlighted disarmament and the protection of refugees and internally displaced persons.
The AU has been actively involved. In 2022, it appointed Angolan President João Lourenço to mediate between the DRC and Rwanda through the Luanda Process, while supporting the Southern African Mission in the DRC (SAMIDRC). As violence escalated and M23 expanded territorially, the AU Peace and Security Council met on January 28, 2025, warning of the risk of regional war and calling for disarmament, dialogue, and reconciliation. To coordinate competing initiatives, the AU Commission convened a Quadripartite Summit in June 2023 with the EAC, SADC, ECCAS, ICGLR, and the United Nations.
Yet, coherence has remained elusive. Poor implementation, overlapping mandates, and political hesitations have weakened these efforts — while the number of casualties among Congolese civilians continues to rise. Meanwhile, Congo’s resource-rich subsoil has been used as a bargaining tool in a conflict over what Jeanne-Marie Abanda accurately calls “minérais du sang” — literally, blood minerals.
If Africa’s own peace architecture—despite its moral clarity and institutional ambition—has faltered, it is reasonable to ask whether a foreign-brokered deal built on spectacle and transaction can succeed where sustained political will has failed. History warns against relying on easy optimism. Such initiatives often resemble white-horse interventions: brief, impressive, and externally supplied. Once withdrawn, those left behind find themselves exposed—peace dressed in borrowed garments, removed at the moment of greatest need.
Despite their failure in Congo, the African Union has resolved some, if imperfect, past conflicts across the continent. The Ethiopia–Tigray Peace Agreement, signed in Pretoria on November 2, 2022, ended the two-year civil war between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF through an AU-brokered Cessation of Hostilities (CoHA). It aimed to stop fighting, disarm Tigrayan forces, restore federal authority, reopen humanitarian access, and pursue justice and accountability. Brokered by the African Union with mediators Nigerian former President Olusegun Obasanjo, Kenya’s former President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Deputy President of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, it was hailed as an “African solution.” While guns largely fell silent and some services resumed, challenges persist, including slow disarmament, continued presence of Eritrean and Amhara forces, unresolved Western Tigray status, and ongoing humanitarian suffering, according to Reuters and the International Crisis Group. The contrast with externally mediated efforts elsewhere is instructive.
On the other hand, we cannot say the same about foreign-negotiated peace deals. The Quad Roadmap for Sudan, a diplomatic peace initiative led by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, aimed to end the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has so far shown little progress. Announced in September 2025, it proposed a three-month humanitarian truce, a permanent ceasefire, and a nine-month transition to civilian rule. Progress has stalled as both SAF and RSF reject compromise, continue to pursue military victory, and dismiss external mediation. Disagreements over Sudan’s political future, internal divisions within the Quad, weak enforcement mechanisms, and ongoing military escalation—particularly around El-Fasher—have undermined the roadmap’s effectiveness, allowing the conflict to persist. The problem, according to the Sudanese government, is that although the UAE claims to be a mediator, it plays a significant role in funding the war, which is why they question how the UAE can be both mediator of the conflict and the primary instigator of the fighting.
The question raised by Pax Trumpanica is not whether peace should be pursued, but how—and in whose name. The Washington agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo may still create opportunities, but it already reveals a common risk: peace reduced to a transaction, stability mistaken for healing, and symbolism elevated above substance. When peace is performed for cameras rather than genuinely built with communities, it becomes fragile, reversible, and easily withdrawn.
Africa’s experience shows that peace endures not when it is imported but when it is embedded—socially, politically, and economically—within the realities of those who live through the war. The uneven record of the African Union reveals both failure and potential: failure when political will collapses into mere words, but potential when institutions, even if imperfect, maintain accountability, regional ownership, and continuity. Conversely, foreign-brokered agreements that bypass African agency risk recreating the very conditions they aim to address.
If Pax Trumpanica is to mean more than a fleeting spectacle, it must pass a more challenging test: reducing violence on the ground, respecting local consent, and committing to justice beyond extraction and strategy. Otherwise, Africa will once again be left to manage the aftermath of a peace it did not craft—dressed in borrowed garments, exposed once those garments are reclaimed. Peace that heals is not proclaimed from afar; it is nurtured at home.