America’s Rare Earth Reset Runs Through Democratic Republic of Congo
The December 2025 partnership agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened a window. Washington has 24 months to walk through it.
In April 2025, with a single notice from its Ministry of Commerce, Beijing froze the supply of seven rare earth elements that the modern American military and economy cannot operate without. American auto plants throttled production. Chinese magnet exports to Japan and South Korea collapsed by more than 90 percent within weeks. The F-35, the Tomahawk, the Virginia-class submarine — every modern weapons platform — runs on materials Beijing demonstrated it could choke off at will.
China formally suspended these controls in November 2025 as part of the Trump–Xi trade truce. The suspension is real but partial: heavy rare earth exports of dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium remain roughly half their pre-April-2025 levels. The truce expires in November 2026. The kill switch is paused, not dismantled.
The Pentagon’s July 2025 partnership with MP Materials — a $400 million equity investment, a $110-per-kilogram price floor on neodymium-praseodymium, and the first time the federal government has become a major shareholder in a critical minerals company — is the most aggressive U.S. industrial-policy intervention in a generation. It is also wildly insufficient. Mountain Pass produces light rare earths. America’s bottleneck is in the heavy ones, where Mountain Pass cannot help this decade. Those will come from Africa, or they will not come at all.
Among African producers, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not first among equals. It is structurally different from every other country, and U.S. critical minerals strategy succeeds or fails depending on how Washington plays its hand in Kinshasa.
The DRC holds approximately 55 percent of known global cobalt reserves and produces roughly 76 percent of the world’s cobalt. Its Katanga and Lualaba provinces contain more than 70 documented copper-cobalt deposits, including the largest high-grade copper resource on Earth. The 1,300-kilometer Lobito Atlantic Railway — the largest U.S. infrastructure commitment on the continent at $4 billion — terminates in the DRC’s mining belt. Without DRC cooperation, the Lobito Corridor is an Angolan rail upgrade with no strategic cargo.
China understood the assignment two decades ago. The 2008 Sicomines agreement — $3 billion in Chinese infrastructure for a 68 percent stake in a copper-cobalt joint venture entitled to 10 million tonnes of copper and 600,000 tonnes of cobalt over 25 years — built the resource-for-infrastructure playbook. Beijing has since extended that playbook across 15 of the DRC’s 17 to 19 major industrial cobalt mines and is buying into rare earth, lithium, and graphite projects from Zambia to Madagascar.
What changed in December 2025 is that the United States, for the first time, became a credible alternative. The U.S.–DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed on December 4, 2025, alongside the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity and a Regional Economic Integration Framework with Rwanda, secured preferential U.S. access to copper, cobalt, zinc, gold, and other strategic minerals. It is the most consequential American diplomatic instrument in central Africa in a generation.
It is also a framework, not an outcome. The next 24 months will determine whether the agreement becomes financed projects, signed offtake, and physical refining capacity — or one more communiqué.
Three moves matter most. First, broaden the Lobito Corridor’s mandate beyond copper and cobalt to rare earth concentrates and monazite ores; as scoped, the railway excludes half its potential cargo by design. Second, run the MP Materials playbook in Africa now: federal equity, guaranteed offtake, and a price floor, deployed jointly by the DFC, EXIM, and the Defense Department across a portfolio of non-Chinese African projects. Third — and most strategically decisive — finance heavy rare earth and cobalt midstream refining inside the DRC, not just at the U.S. Gulf Coast. The strategic battle is not in mining; it is in chemical separation. Without African midstream, ore will continue to ride a longer ship to Jiangxi regardless of who owns the mine.
None of these moves requires new legislation. The Defense Production Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Industrial Base Fund already authorize the financing. The Strategic Partnership Agreement provides the diplomatic foundation. What is required is a single senior White House principal with cross-agency budget authority and a 2030 tonnage target — accountable to the President and Congress for measurable non-Chinese supply.
China paused its rare-earth controls in November. It did not surrender them. The next shock will come, and when it does, America will discover whether the December 2025 Strategic Partnership Agreement was the inflection point that finally brought American capital and American refining capacity to central Africa — or whether Washington watched its window close while filing another set of memos. Lubumbashi is waiting.
Nariman Teymourian is the founder of Caspian-Africa and Copilot Mining, critical-minerals trading and development platforms focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sub-Saharan Africa. He writes on U.S. strategic minerals policy and Africa supply-chain security.