Is Ending TWO Wars In ONE Week Worthy of Peace Prize Consideration?
Or is that rogue's gallery even a list Trump would WANT to be numbered in?
Some of us are old enough to remember when the Peace Prize meant something more than a rubber-stamp of a leftwing political persuasion.
We weren’t always giving out Nobel Peace Prize awards to Presidents who would drone strike their own citizens, or Veeps with a failed Presidential run for a film whose central ecological claims lost a major court battle. But four years after ignoring the Abraham Accords completely re-writing Middle Eastern political realities — with an end to hostilities from the former Yugoslavia thrown in for good measure — the Nobel Prize committee has an opportunity to repay their debt to history or expose their true nature as political zealots.
Sure, you’ve heard about the events in Iran — or as Trump calls it, the ‘twelve-day war’ — in which Iran’s nuclear arsenal went ka-blooie and hopes that a tentative ceasefire may blossom into something more enduring. That’s a pretty wild resolution to a long-standing conflict in its own right.
But have you heard about the OTHER war Trump’s team helped end this past week?
You can be sure the major media outlets weren’t exactly ‘trump’-eting it from the hilltops.
The other peace deal started — ironically — in the midst of Trump’s bold tariff talk. And it started as an appeal from a foreign head of state:
In a bold diplomatic move, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Felix Tshisekedi has reportedly proposed granting the United States and Europe access to the country’s vast mineral resources — on the condition that they intervene to end the ongoing conflict ravaging the nation.
Speaking on Sunday, Presidential Spokesperson Tina Salama urged the US to “directly buy critical minerals” from Kinshasa rather than sourcing “looted” and “smuggled” resources through Rwanda. She extended the same appeal to Europe and other buyers, emphasizing that the DRC is the “true owner” of these valuable commodities. — Mining, Feb 24, 2025
Ever the deal-maker, Trump and his team took DRC up on their offer.
There was no guarantee of success. This is a part of the world marred by decades of bloody conflict, beginning as an overflow of the Rwandan genocide. As the Council of Foreign relations describes it:
Since 1996, conflict in eastern DRC has led to approximately six million deaths. The First Congo War (1996–1997) began in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, during which ethnic Hutu extremists killed an estimated one million minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda (DRC’s neighbor to the east). During and following the genocide, nearly two million Hutu refugees crossed the Congolese border, mostly settling in refugee camps in the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces. A small subset of those Rwandans who entered DRC were Hutu extremists who began organizing militias within the Congo. Pressure intensified as Tutsi militias organized against the Hutu groups and as foreign powers began taking sides. —CFR
In case you missed it, that paragraph said SIX MILLION DEATHS since 1996. (When was the last time you heard college protesters incensed about those lives?) Even if that figure includes secondary causes of death like starvation or disease, it’s a dizzying statistic.
The conflict becomes even more complicated when you see alliances flip as political winds in one country or another change with the whims and interests of different factions and leaders. Even the interests of a given country can be fickle.
The only way out of this bloody forever war would be to get some outside help. That help was not long in coming. As of Wednesday of last week, the State Department gave a joint statement about the peace talks between DRC and Rwanda.
On June 18, 2025, technical teams from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda initialed the text of the Peace Agreement, witnessed by U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Allison Hooker, in preparation for the Ministerial signing of the Peace Agreement on June 27, 2025, to be witnessed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Building on the Declaration of Principles signed on April 25, 2025, the Agreement was developed over three days of constructive dialogue regarding political, security, and economic interests. The Agreement includes provisions on respect for territorial integrity and a prohibition of hostilities; disengagement, disarmament, and conditional integration of non-state armed groups; establishment of a Joint Security Coordination Mechanism that incorporates the CONOPS of October 31, 2024; facilitation of the return of refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as humanitarian access; and a regional economic integration framework.
As part of the ongoing coordination between the facilitation efforts of the United States of America and the State of Qatar, the State of Qatar participated in these discussions to ensure complementarity and alignment between both countries’ initiatives aimed at dialogue and peace in the region. Both the DRC and Rwanda expressed their appreciation for the valuable contributions and joint efforts of the United States and Qatar as partners in advancing a peaceful resolution. — State Department
The official signing is to take place on June 27th. Three days after the tentative Iran ceasefire.
If it holds up, Trump’s negotiation team will have succeeded where others failed, specifically because it was America doing the mediating:
If successful, the June 27 agreement could drive major change. It would represent the first durable truce between Kinshasa and Kigali since the 2022–present conflict reignited. It also signals deeper U.S. engagement in African affairs—tying economic deals to security and countering Chinese and Russian influence in the mineral sector.
Regional bodies such as the African Union, East African Community, and Southern African Development Community (SADC) had attempted to mediate earlier, but their efforts faltered—often due to a lack of political cohesion or withdrawal of troops. This US-backed agreement may reestablish regional confidence and promote joint peacekeeping operations. — Peace News
Somebody get the Nobel Prize committee on the phone so they can give themselves a chance to make the obvious choice before they reduce themselves to little more than a parody of everything they once were.