When US President Donald Trump boasted that he had stopped the conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) — though fighting persists in the DR Congo, at appalling human cost — he made clear that his goals went beyond a long-sought Nobel Peace prize.
“They said to me: ‘Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.’ Which we’ll do,” the US president said.
Now he is following through. On Monday last week, he launched a new strategic reserve plan, “Project Vault,” worth almost US$12 billion. Two days later, US Vice President J.D. Vance hosted a summit seeking to create a trade zone for critical minerals.
The US — and others — are trying to counter the dominance of Beijing, which was far quicker to grasp the strategic importance of such resources. Key to its plan is a deal touted as a way to bring the DR Congo’s wealth and create incentives for peace. Few on the ground are convinced. The deal does nothing to help the DR Congo build processing capacity and requires it to freeze its tax and regulatory regimes for a decade. The EU likes to portray itself as taking higher ground, but in December last year, the parliament and council agreed to weaken key due diligence rules.
The incredible resources of the DR Congo have been violently plundered over centuries for the benefit of richer nations and a handful of individuals on the ground. Four-fifths of the population live below the poverty line. Extraction has meant exploitation and danger. The week before the Washington gathering, at least 200 artisanal miners were crushed to death or suffocated when a coltan mine in Rubaya in the eastern DR Congo collapsed. It became a tomb, one survivor said.
As the journalist Nicolas Niarchos writes in his new book, The Elements of Power, “tech profiteers, politicians, and battery-makers have made a trade-off: Cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere.”
Meeting climate goals would require many times the current production of materials such as lithium and cobalt. However, environmental despoliation, the eviction of communities and the exploitation of laborers, including children, are not the inevitable results of the necessary shift away from fossil fuels. The non-governmental organization Global Witness suggests that Trump’s mineral-hunger is better explained by their use in military technology. Tantalum, extracted from coltan, is essential to jet engines and missiles, as well as smartphones and laptops.
Just as growing conflict helps to drive demand, so demand is fueling conflict. Rubaya is part of the swathes of land seized by M23 rebels in the eastern DR Congo in the past few years, with mines there generating an estimated US$800,000 monthly, funding the insurgency. The group is backed by Rwanda (although Kigali denies it) and experts say Rwanda is selling far more coltan than it can produce, with smuggling across the border reaching unprecedented levels. The EU minerals deal with Kigali has been rightly criticized.
Natural resources are increasingly intertwined with security policies across the continent via Russian private military companies, the US promise of peace brokering and China’s infrastructure-for-resources model, the African Policy Research Institute said recently.
Its report suggests that resource demand could give African states leverage to negotiate more equitable partnerships that benefit their populations. However, that depends on institutional strength, regional coordination and transparency in deal-making — as well as determination not to compromise human rights, environmental standards or national sovereignty, it said. The DR Congo’s example is not encouraging.
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
China’s AI ecosystem has one defining difference from Silicon Valley: It is embrace of open source. While the US’ biggest companies race to build ever more powerful systems and insist only they can control them, Chinese labs have been giving the technology away for free. Open source — making a model available for anyone to use, download and build on — once seemed a niche, nerdy topic that no one besides developers cared about. However, when a new technology is driving trillions of dollars of investments and leading to immense concentrations of power, it offered an antidote. That is part of
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
RSS