The decapitation of Venezuela’s government. Saber-rattling over the annexation of Greenland. The US and Israeli war of choice against Iran. The opening months of 2026 have seen a dramatic escalation in Donald Trump’s bellicose militarism. And if much separates the three crises, what they share is the US president’s quest for American control over strategic flows of raw materials, whether that’s China’s oil and gas partners in Caracas and Tehran, or the more distant prospect of Arctic mineral wealth.

Elsewhere the US resource offensive is playing out with far less bombast. Take the relatively quieter push to carve out an American sphere of influence in a country that once seemed peripheral to US designs: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A sprawling country in the heart of equatorial Africa, the DRC boasts considerable resource reserves, including copper, cobalt, and lithium. Metals like these are key for high technology applications such as microchips, electric vehicle batteries, and the most sophisticated weapons systems.

Already underway during Joe Biden’s administration, the US rapprochement with the DRC picked up speed with Trump’s return to the White House, when authorities in the capital, Kinshasa, purportedly approached the incoming US president to seek support in their protracted battle with breakaway militia groups in the eastern Kivu and Katanga regions. It was capped off this past December with the signing at the White House of a “strategic partnership” between the United States and the DRC.