DRC conflict: Trump's first big challenge in Africa – Responsible Statecraft

Rwanda-backed rebels are wreaking havoc in what may escalate toward greater regional strife
Among the challenges facing newly appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the recent explosion in the long-simmering conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the rebel group known as M23 — which, according to UN experts, is backed by Rwanda.
Rubio spoke via phone on January 28 with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has consistently refused to acknowledge his country’s role in supporting the armed group. Rubio took a steady tone in his conversation with the Rwandan leader, saying that “the United States is deeply troubled by escalation of the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC,” and “urged an immediate ceasefire in the region, and for all parties to respect sovereign territorial integrity.”
Other than calling the conflict “a very serious problem” when responding to a question about it during a press conference held Thursday morning following the crash of a helicopter and airplane over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., President Trump has not publicly commented on the conflict.
France, a close U.S. ally, has taken a firmer stance against Rwanda’s role in the conflict. The country is preparing to present a resolution before the UN Security Council naming Rwanda, which has around 4,000 troops in the country, as the backer of the M23 rebel group, and blaming the Rwandan government for the recent escalation of tensions in eastern Congo.
As it relates to Rwanda’s support for M23, French Ambassador to the UN Nicolas de Rivière said “it's time to call a cat a cat,” and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said “France strongly condemns the offensive led by the M23, backed by the Rwandan armed forces.” Through a spokesperson, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also pointed the finger at Rwanda, and called “on the Rwanda Defence Forces to cease support to the M23 and withdraw from DRC territory.”
Unquestionably the quickest way to end this conflict is to pressure Rwanda to end its support for the M23 rebel group. The first step in doing so is to publicly acknowledge this support. The new U.S. administration should therefore follow France’s lead and publicly condemn Rwanda’s support for M23. Doing so would not be a change in U.S. policy, but would rather be a continuation of the policy of the previous administration.
In recent days, M23 rebels have made substantial headway in the North Kivu province in eastern DRC, and have captured the provincial capital of Goma.
Goma — a city of 2 million people — is a major center for the humanitarian sector, which has descended onto the city in recent years to support those fleeing conflict, many from M23 militiamen.
The fall of Goma comes just days after M23 rebels captured the city of Sake, which sits about 14 miles northwest of the provincial capital. Sake has also served as a safe haven for many years for civilians looking to escape rebel attacks.
In a dramatic blow to the government’s efforts to maintain control over North Kivu, Peter Cirimwami, who served as the military governor of North Kivu province beginning in September 2023, was killed by rebels on January 23. The governor went to the front lines as a sign of support of “les wazalendos,” a local militia fighting in support of the Congolese government.
The losses of both Sake and Goma are substantial. Sake is home to a base housing troops for the regional military mission, called the SADC Mission in the DRC (SAMIDRC), of which South Africa is the major player — about 2,900 of SAMIDRC’s troops are South African.
The sudden increase in violence in the country’s east has led large protests to sweep across DRC’s capital Kinshasa in recent days. Protestors have rioted in front of several embassies, including those of Rwanda, Belgium, France, and the United States. Many Congolese taking part in the protests accuse the international community of not putting enough pressure on Rwanda to stop backing M23.
This most recent aggravation in tensions comes just over a month after a near diplomatic breakthrough failed to materialize. Molly Phee, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Biden administration, said in an exit interview with AFP that the United States sought to broker a peace accord between Rwanda and the DRC during Biden’s trip to Angola in early December. To serve as an incentive, Biden’s team suggested expanding the Lobito Corridor — a rail and infrastructure project partially funded by the United States — into eastern DRC.
According to those familiar with the matter, the Biden administration’s offer was a nonstarter for Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who would have preferred the corridor to be expanded into his country instead, while also preferably having trade to and from Rwanda bypass Congo entirely.
A meeting scheduled to take place in mid-December in Angola between Kagame and DRC President Felix Tshisekedi to discuss this conflict was canceled at the last moment after Kagame conditioned any peace deal on the DRC separately meeting and negotiating with M23 rebels, which Tshisekedi refused to do. While the DRC has complained that Rwanda is backing M23 rebels, Kagame has leveled similar accusations against his interlocutor, accusing the DRC of supporting the rebel group Les Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which is fighting against the Rwandan government.
By supporting M23, Rwanda hopes to gain access to an immense abundance of critical resources in the area, including gold. It’s also seeking to use M23 to fight against armed groups it believes threaten its security, such as FDLR.
As M23 has closed in on Goma, armed clashes intensified. Since Friday, 13 South African soldiers have been killed, as well as three Malawians and one Uruguayan who were part of the UN mission.
South African Defense Minister Angie Motshekga has been in close communication with DRC officials during this latest set of attacks, and traveled to the country to strategize with DRC military and government personnel. Among those she met with include UN peacekeeping forces part of MONUSCO, which just last month was extended by the UN for another year.
Although South Africa’s military presence in the DRC is unpopular among the wider South African public, the country’s government has shown firm support for the DRC’s cause, with Motshekga telling a South African television network as she was departing Kinshasa that “peace has no price”.
The United States should be incentivized to end this war before it grows into a regional conflict, which would risk engaging major African and international powers in armed aggression against each other.
Economic integration is critical for a region whose infrastructure is below global standards and whose economies are largely disjointed. Similar to his predecessor, Trump’s team should begin by considering ways in which the Lobito Corridor can be used as an incentive for Rwanda to end its support for M23.
Conditioning the expansion of the rail and road network into Rwanda on Kagame ending all support for M23 and removing its troops from the DRC, could be a sufficiently strong enough carrot to incentivize peace talks.
Doing so is also beneficial for the United States beyond simply ending hostilities before they grow into a regional war. Rwanda has a heavy concentration of raw minerals, such as tin ore, tungsten, and gold. Bringing these resources into the global market — as the EU sought to do in 2024 through its own Memorandum of Understanding — is yet another reason for the Trump team to use Lobito as a bargaining chip to end this conflict.

The Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Tuesday that bars the deployment of Virginia’s National Guard into active combat in a conflict that Congress has not explicitly authorized.
“I understand that war is sometimes necessary, but I expect Congress to display an ounce of the courage they expect out of the men and women they send overseas to fight those wars by fulfilling their constitutional obligation to declare war,” Del. Nicholas Freitas (R-62), a veteran and a primary sponsor of the bill, told RS.
The Virginia Senate will vote on the measure before sending it to Governor Youngkin’s desk for consideration. Del. Freitas said he didn’t know whether the bill would pass in the Senate but that he and other supporters have “put it on the best possible footing with strong bipartisan, even unanimous support.”
"Today is an incredible victory for both National Guardsmen and our Constitution,” said retired Sgt. Dan McKnight, chairman of Bring Our Troops Home, a “group of veterans and civilians on a mission to end the Forever Wars & restore the U.S. Constitution.” “H.B. 2193 does not interfere with Title 32 deployments or overseas training missions. Its only requirement is that before the Virginia National Guard goes into combat, Congress has to do its job and vote. I'm incredibly proud to see my organization's bill receive such overwhelming support in the Old Dominion.”
There is a national push for similar legislation, commonly referred to as the Defend the Guard Act, to be passed by other state houses across the country. Hunter DeRensis, Communications Director at Bring Our Troops Home, told RS that “the bill will be introduced in 27 states this year.”
Kentucky State Rep. T.J. Roberts (R-66) introduced a version in January this year, which is now in committee. The Arizona State Senate will likely pass it for a third time in 2025, as the State House voted it down twice prior. A Defend the Guard bill passed the New Hampshire State House in 2024, but the State Senate decided to “quiet kill” the legislation by not voting on it at all. The State House introduced a new bill for the 2025 session. The Republican Party of Maine encoded Defend the Guard language into its state platform, and a bipartisan group of state representatives there introduced a new bill for the 2025 session.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth endorsed Defend the Guard legislation when it was presented in New Hampshire last year. “To me, it makes a lot of sense. I spent most of my career as a National Guardsman, deployed multiple times with the National Guard to foreign wars,” said Hegseth in 2024. “We got used to the idea that state National Guard are part of expeditionary forces, which is not traditionally the use of a National Guard.”
He continued: “This is New Hampshire saying we don’t trust how the federal government is going to use our troops, so we’re willing to commit them when the American people, through their elected branch in Congress, commits those troops to a foreign war, then you can. I love this idea.”
President Trump paused most foreign aid programs in January but is now asking Congress to approve $1 billion worth of bombs and demolition equipment to Israel.
The administration has been adding exceptions to its foreign aid pause since announcing it, but it seems Israel’s aid was never in jeopardy, according to diplomatic cables.
The American taxpayer will pay for the $1 billion sale of the weapons as part of the $3.8. billion military aid package sent to Israel each year. In total, from Oct. 2023 to Oct. 2024, Israel received a record-breaking $17.9 billion worth of weapons, and President Biden announced plans to send an $8 billion arms package to the nation in January, but it has not yet been fully approved by Congress.
This new arms package comes as President Trump is set to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday. Trump also lifted the pause on the sale of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel in late January.
The weapons and equipment included in the most recent sale include 1,000-pound “general purpose” bombs and Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozers, which have historically been used to raze houses and other buildings in the West Bank as collective punishment, including as part of an ongoing operation in Jenin.
Trump’s decision to continue large-scale arms sales to Israel is shadowed by a fragile cease-fire in Gaza, and by reports that raised the death count in Gaza to at least 62,000.
I almost fell off my chair listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly where he declared unipolarity an anomaly and treated a return to multipolarity essentially as a correction by the gravitational forces of geopolitics.
This is what he said:
“So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not — that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”
Rubio’s comments should be getting more attention.
Setting aside whether he truly believes this or is simply adjusting to President Trump's worldview, it is still very significant for the secretary of state to not only declare unipolarity over (Hillary Clinton said the world was multipolar already in 2010, but saying it and meaning it are two different things), but to also treat the return to multipolarity as a return to normalcy.
It’s not clear how far Rubio has thought this through, and he makes no mention of ending primacy as a grand strategy. However, he speaks of centering U.S. interests in U.S. foreign policy and that the U.S. cannot be responsible for resolving every problem in the world.
But if one sees unipolarity as a historical accident and an anomaly, then it would be difficult to justify a grand strategy of primacy or liberal hegemony that, at its essence, seeks to either restore or prolong that anomaly.
Of course, the gap between what is thought, what is said, and what is done by the Trump administration may be quite sizable.
Either way, Rubio's interview here deserves more attention. Not only because it is refreshing but also because a serious grandstrategic conversation — free from dishonest accusations of isolationism or China-hugging — is long overdue.
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