As Congo, Rwanda, and Washington chase a fragile peace, Trump’s allies hail a new Camp David — and his critics see a mirage.
By 3 Narratives News | December 4, 2025
Just before noon in Washington, staffers wheeled out a new metal sign on the edge of the Mall. Where the U.S. Institute of Peace once stood as a quiet, nonpartisan monument to diplomacy, workmen now bolted on fresh letters: “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”
Inside, the presidents of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo were shuttled through security to finalize a deal meant to slow a three-decade conflict in eastern Congo — a war that has helped kill an estimated six million people since the 1990s and displaced millions more. The agreement, hammered out over months with U.S. mediators, is the centerpiece of what the White House now calls the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity.
Donald Trump walks into that room with a simple, repeated line about his foreign policy: he says he is the man who ends wars. “I ended seven wars,” he told the United Nations General Assembly this fall, folding an ever-shifting list of conflicts into a single, shiny number. His advisers went further this week: a White House spokeswoman claimed he has “ended eight wars in a year.”
Trump has cast his approach in four blunt words that he now uses from Gaza to Ukraine to Congo: “Stop the killing, and make a deal.” In a Truth Social post after a tense meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he wrote that “it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL! Enough blood has been shed,” adding that both Russia and Ukraine should “stop where they are” and “let both claim Victory.”:contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}
His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has embraced that story line. Speaking about Trump’s push on Ukraine, Rubio said that if a Trump–Putin summit truly ended the war, “everybody should celebrate that President Trump is a peacemaker,” even calling him “the only global leader right now that can make this happen.”
But outside the glass walls of Washington’s meeting rooms, the picture is far more complicated. In Gaza, the ceasefire Trump touts as “peace in the Middle East” is a first-phase truce whose next steps are uncertain. In Ukraine, his plan to “freeze” the war roughly along current front lines — leaving most of the occupied Donbas in Russian hands — has been described by critics as a blueprint for rewarding aggression.:contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8} And in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, his “war on narco-terrorists” has included airstrikes on small boats that U.N. experts say amount to extrajudicial executions.:contentReference[oaicite:9]{index=9}
So is this the story of a historic peacemaker in the making, or a carefully-managed myth built on partial deals and dangerous trade-offs?
What’s Actually Happening Today in Washington
The Congo–Rwanda deal being signed in Washington is billed as the capstone of a U.S. mediation effort that began in June, when foreign ministers from both countries agreed to a framework for de-escalation. The accord calls for Rwanda to withdraw the thousands of troops that U.N. investigators say have been operating in eastern Congo alongside the M23 rebel group, and for Congo to step up action against the FDLR, a militia with roots in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The stakes are immense. Since early 2025 alone, intensified fighting around Goma and Bukavu has killed an estimated 7,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and destroyed dozens of camps for the displaced. Over one million people have been uprooted by the M23 advance; gender-based violence has surged. Behind those numbers lie the cobalt and coltan reserves that power the world’s batteries and smartphones.
Today’s signing ceremony is meant to turn a ceasefire-and-economic package into something more enduring. The White House wants cameras to capture the moment: three presidents, an American flag backdrop, and in the middle the man who has spent months visibly marketing himself as the world’s indispensable deal-maker.
Below, we tell this story in three layers — the way Trump’s supporters see his peace offensive, the case assembled by his sharpest critics, and the “silent story” of the civilians whose lives hang between those two pictures.
Narrative 1: Trump, the “President of PEACE”
From the perspective of Trump’s admirers and political allies.
Inside Trump’s circle, the question is not whether he is a peacemaker — it is how history will rank him. Long before the Congo ceremony, he began testing a new title in speeches and social-media posts: “President of PEACE.” The phrase started as a boast, then evolved into the organizing idea of his foreign policy.
Supporters speak in the language of scoreboards. They replay his line at the United Nations this fall, when he told world leaders, “I ended seven wars,” portraying his first year back in office as a whirlwind tour of ceasefires and conflict-ending deals. A sympathetic Cabinet aide puts it this way: “Carter had one Camp David. Trump is trying to run Camp David on four continents at once.”
They begin that story in the Middle East. After two grinding years of war in Gaza and southern Israel, Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first phase of a U.S. peace plan: a ceasefire, a pullback of Israeli forces from much of Gaza, and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Even some Democrats in Congress called it “the first hopeful moment in a long time,” a rare bipartisan acknowledgment that, at least for now, American pressure had helped halt the bombing and rocket fire.
Then there is Ukraine. Trump’s team points to marathon sessions with Kyiv’s negotiators, a revised 19-point peace framework, and the creation of U.S.–Russian working groups, all framed around a single idea: freeze the front lines, stop the missiles, and let diplomats sort out borders later. When Rubio emerged from talks in Saudi Arabia and later in Washington, he offered the most quotable version of the case: if a Trump–Putin summit “seals the deal,” then “everybody should celebrate that President Trump is a peacemaker,” the only leader, he argued, who can force both Moscow and Kyiv to swallow hard compromises.
In this narrative, Congo is not an isolated case, but the African chapter of a larger story. After U.S. envoys brokered a preliminary accord in June, Trump leaned in personally, calling President Félix Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, inviting them to Washington, and dangling both security guarantees and infrastructure money to lock in the deal. Kigali’s foreign minister has already said he hopes the U.S.-brokered accord will “advance peace in eastern Congo,” despite ongoing skirmishes on the ground.
From Trump’s vantage point, this is exactly what American power is for: to press enemies into compromise, to trade sanctions relief and investment for ceasefires, and to use the threat of U.S. military force as a stick behind his blunt plea: “Stop fighting. Stop killing people.”:contentReference[oaicite:21]{index=21}
His allies draw a direct comparison to Jimmy Carter. Carter’s mediation at Camp David produced a single, towering achievement — a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that helped win him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “finding peaceful solutions to international conflicts.” But they argue that Trump is attempting something even more ambitious: not one historic treaty, but a cascade of multi-theater bargains — Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, the Caucasus, the Caribbean — in barely a year.
They point to the renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace as symbolic confirmation. When the White House insisted on calling it the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” ahead of the Congo signing, it was, in their telling, simply catching up to reality. A federal judge might question the legality of the move, and think-tank veterans might cringe, but Trump’s backers see the new sign as an early draft of how history will remember him.
The metrics they reach for are deliberately simple: wars tapered, hostages freed, guns falling silent. By that scoreboard, they say, Trump is already on track to become the most prolific peacemaker ever to sit in the Oval Office — and today’s handshake over Congo is just one more line in the record.
Narrative 2: The Peacemaker Myth
From the perspective of Trump’s critics and rule-of-law advocates.
For those who have spent years tracking the wars that Trump now claims to have “ended,” the Congo ceremony feels less like a coronation and more like a cautionary tale. They start with the numbers. At the U.N., Trump declared, “We settled seven wars or major conflicts — but wars — and this is No. 8,” folding ceasefires, stalemates, and long-frozen disputes into a narrative of clean victories. Fact-checkers have pointed out that several of those “wars” were not active wars at all, and others have since flared again.
Gaza is a prime example. The much-touted agreement there is, as one veteran negotiator put it, a phase-one ceasefire packaged as a comprehensive peace. It halts Israeli bombardment and promises the release of the remaining hostages, but leaves unresolved the deeper questions of Hamas disarmament, long-term security arrangements, and Palestinian political rights. In the words of one critic, it is “a desperately needed pause, not an answer.”
The Ukraine file raises even sharper alarms. When Trump suggested that the Donbas region “will have to be cut up,” effectively freezing the conflict with most of the occupied territory left under Russian control, he did so in the language of triage: “Let it be cut the way it is… stop at the battle line — go home, stop fighting, stop killing people.”:contentReference[oaicite:26]{index=26} To Ukrainian officials and many European diplomats, that sounded less like peacemaking and more like codifying a land-grab.
A leaked 28-point U.S. proposal — later slimmed to 19 — prompted one Republican lawmaker, Don Bacon, to call it a “surrender document,” accusing the White House of prioritizing rare-earth minerals and gas pipelines over Ukrainian sovereignty. European leaders have laid down what they call “red lines,” insisting that any ceasefire must not permanently legitimize Russia’s occupation or shut the door on Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership.:contentReference[oaicite:28]{index=28}
In this view, Trump’s oft-repeated phrase — “stop the killing, and make a deal” — hides the core question: stop the killing on whose terms? A ceasefire that locks in an invader’s gains, critics argue, may reduce violence in the short term while inviting future wars.
The Congo agreement carries similar concerns. The conflict in eastern DRC is not just a border dispute, but a dense web of militias, ethnic grievances, and competition over some of the world’s most valuable minerals. Rwanda’s backing of the M23 rebels — denied in Kigali, documented by U.N. experts — has coincided with mass displacement, massacres, and a spike in sexual violence used as a weapon of war.
Trump’s deal pushes Rwanda to pull back troops and M23 fighters, and nudges Congo to crack down on the FDLR and open more of its mining sector to Western investment. But rights groups warn that the accord risks becoming another elite bargain struck in a luxury hotel, while displaced families in Goma and Bukavu see few changes on the ground.
Critics also argue that Trump’s claim to moral high ground is undermined by his own use of force. In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, his administration has ordered a series of missile strikes on vessels it labels “narco-terrorist” boats. At least 83 people have been killed on 22 vessels since September; governments and families say many of the dead were civilians — fishers and transport crew caught in the wrong place.:contentReference[oaicite:32]{index=32}
U.N. human-rights experts have condemned those maritime strikes as “extrajudicial executions,” warning that “international law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.”:contentReference[oaicite:33]{index=33} A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that while Americans overwhelmingly support stopping drug boats, only 29% back “killing suspected drug traffickers abroad without judicial process.”:contentReference[oaicite:34]{index=34} For Trump’s critics, those numbers tell a simpler story: the same man who calls himself a peacemaker is also authorizing lethal force far from battlefields, without trial.
The New Yorker captured the tension in a recent profile, noting that while Trump brands himself as the “President of PEACE” abroad, at home he has used almost martial rhetoric against his domestic opponents, musing about “insurrection” in American cities and deploying federal forces as if they were occupation troops. That clash — between the quest for a Nobel ceremony and the language of civil war — is, for his critics, the essence of the myth: a leader who sells himself as a healer while stoking other kinds of conflict.
This narrative does not deny that some of these deals have saved lives, at least temporarily. It simply insists that the ledger be honest. A partial ceasefire is not the end of a war. A deal that cements conquest is not neutrality. And a man who orders drone strikes on untried suspects, critics say, cannot simply hang a plaque on a building and declare himself the greatest peacemaker in American history.
The Silent Story: Lives Between the Deals
The people living — or dying — inside the conflicts that now orbit Trump’s brand.
In the displacement camps outside Goma, the Washington ceremony feels very far away. Mothers there have spent the last year moving from hillside to hillside as M23 fighters advance, tearing up makeshift shelters and forcing families to walk again. Over a million people have been uprooted by the rebel campaign; more than seven million are displaced across Congo.
Since January, around 7,000 people have been killed in eastern DRC, the prime minister told the U.N. Human Rights Council — mass graves, unidentified bodies, farmers gunned down in their fields. In some villages, women now move only in groups, knowing that sexual violence has risen by hundreds of percent in the places where armed groups roam.
For them, the question “Is Trump a peacemaker?” is oddly abstract. What matters is whether the shelling stops tonight — whether the checkpoint on the road back to their village is manned by M23, Congolese troops, or no one at all.
In Kharkiv or Mykolaiv, families still crowd into basements when the air-raid sirens howl. Ukrainian officials count drone strikes on power plants, schools, apartment blocks — infrastructure that sustains ordinary life, not just military targets.:contentReference[oaicite:39]{index=39} When Trump says that both sides should “stop where they are” and let each claim victory, some Ukrainians hear a kind of mercy. Others hear a quiet erasure of the fact that it was Russia that crossed their border.
In Gaza, a mother who has lost two children to bombings may not care which American president finally pushed hard enough for a ceasefire — only that the bombing stopped. But she will care, deeply, about whether the “phase two” of that peace gives her family a future beyond rubble and blockades.
Even in the Caribbean, where U.S. missiles have torn apart small boats in the name of a war on cartels, the story sounds different on shore. In fishing towns along Venezuela’s coast or in Trinidadian ports, families describe fathers and sons who went out to sea and never came back, later labeled “narco-terrorists” by a government they have never met.:contentReference[oaicite:41]{index=41}
For these people, the line “stop the killing” is not a slogan on a teleprompter. It is the basic demand they would make of any leader, of any ideology: stop the shelling of our towns, stop the militias from marching through our villages, stop the drones over our roofs, stop the boats from exploding just beyond the horizon.
Whether history ultimately crowns Trump as America’s greatest peacemaker, or as a president who renamed an institute faster than he could remake the world, depends on what happens after the photo ops — in Rafah, in Kharkiv, in the hills of North Kivu.
The third narrative, the one we rarely hear in press conferences, is the simplest and hardest: Do the deals, in the end, let ordinary people live?
Key Takeaways
- Trump is presiding over a U.S.-brokered peace deal between Congo and Rwanda, framed as part of a broader push to “end wars” from Gaza to Ukraine.
- His supporters, echoed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, see him as a uniquely effective deal-maker who could surpass Jimmy Carter’s Camp David legacy.
- Critics argue that many of Trump’s claimed “ended wars” are fragile ceasefires or conflicts frozen on unjust terms, especially in Ukraine and Gaza.:contentReference[oaicite:44]{index=44}
- Trump’s maritime strikes on alleged drug boats and his domestic rhetoric undercut his peacemaker image for human-rights advocates.:contentReference[oaicite:45]{index=45}
- The people most affected — in eastern Congo, Ukraine, Gaza, and coastal Latin America — care less about titles and more about whether violence actually stops.
Questions This Article Answers
1. What is Donald Trump’s role in the new Congo–Rwanda peace deal? The Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity between Congo and Rwanda are the product of months of U.S. mediation, culminating in today’s signing in Washington with Trump hosting both presidents. The deal seeks troop withdrawals, curbs on rebel groups, and economic incentives tied to Congo’s mineral wealth, though fighting and displacement in eastern DRC continue. 2. Why do some allies call Trump the greatest peacemaker in U.S. history? Trump and his team claim he has “ended” or settled multiple wars in a short period, citing a Gaza ceasefire, a Ukraine peace framework, and now the Congo accord. Rubio has argued that if a Trump–Putin summit ends the war in Ukraine, “everybody should celebrate that President Trump is a peacemaker,” suggesting that his pace and scale of deals could rival or surpass historical figures like Jimmy Carter. 3. What are the main criticisms of Trump’s peace record? Critics say Trump inflates his achievements by counting fragile ceasefires and frozen conflicts as “ended wars,” especially in Ukraine and Gaza. They also argue that his willingness to accept territorial concessions by invaded states rewards aggression, and they point to U.S. maritime strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats, condemned by U.N. experts as extrajudicial killings, as evidence that his “peacemaker” image conflicts with the methods he authorizes.:contentReference[oaicite:48]{index=48} 4. How does Trump’s record compare with Jimmy Carter’s peace legacy? Carter is best known for brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel and later spent decades mediating conflicts through the Carter Center, work that earned him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s supporters argue that he is attempting a higher-volume version of that diplomacy, chasing multiple deals at once, while critics note that Carter’s achievements were built on durable treaties and a strong human-rights framework that Trump frequently downplays. 5. What does “stop the killing” mean for civilians living through these wars? For civilians in places like eastern Congo, Ukraine, Gaza, and coastal Latin America, “stop the killing” is not a slogan but a literal demand: end the shelling, shootings, and strikes that threaten their lives. Whether Trump’s deals — or those of any leader — truly make him a peacemaker in their eyes will depend less on speeches in Washington than on whether they can safely go home.:contentReference[oaicite:50]{index=50}
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