The Great Statesman* was at it again on Friday as President Trump welcomed the foreign ministers of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) to the Oval Office in a ceremony marking a new peace accord between the two nations.
In this case, I am a bit unsure how much of a role the U.S. actually played in the inking of the deal.
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In researching this, I read an informative article provided by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), which detailed past agreements and offered some grisly details of the three decades of fighting between the two countries. The BBC also attributes much of the negotiations between the nations as being brokered by Qatar.
It seems that both sides are looking to the U.S. — and President Trump — to help ensure the success of the agreement, which calls for the “disengagement, disarmament and conditional integration” of armed groups fighting in eastern DR Congo. The U.S. also gets some very Trumpian rights to mineral assets in the region as part of the deal.
“Today, the violence and destruction comes to an end, and the entire region begins a new chapter of hope and opportunity,” Trump said.
What I did learn for my personal research benefit is that the entirety of these press conferences/pact signings is available unedited on YouTube.
If you watch a typical TV news segment, you might get 20 to 60 seconds of video highlights followed by minute after minute of talking-head commentary, which would be left-leading on CNN and right- or middle-leaning on Fox, for example.
Then, I also discovered that European news sources are often better at providing background details, in this case as the BBC did.
- I have beeen critical in other articles on this site of Trump as being too quick for peace, if that’s possible, while sometimes ignoring the long-term implications of the actual deals being reached. In doing so, I have compared him to “peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who inked a peace deal with Adolph Hitler that was no better than the paper it was composed on.