The rapid and humiliating defeat of poorly trained and disorganized Romanian mercenaries in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last January offers more than just another chapter in Congo’s troubled history. It provides a critical lens through which to understand a troubling reality: systems corrupted by external forces often cannot be reformed solely from within—a lesson Americans must urgently confront.

The Cold War Template: Foreign Capture of National Resources

Mobutu Sese Seko’s ascent to power represents the quintessential foreign-directed coup designed to secure resource extraction, a playbook America once deployed abroad but now faces at home:

Phase One: Villify Democratic Leadership

Just months after Congo gained independence from Belgium in June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister. His nationalist agenda and willingness to work with the Soviet Union to counter continued Belgian control over mineral-rich provinces triggered immediate Western intervention.

By September 1960, the CIA, in coordination with Belgian intelligence, backed Colonel Joseph Mobutu to stage his first coup, suspending parliament and neutralizing Lumumba. Declassified documents later revealed that the CIA had authorized Lumumba’s assassination, which occurred in January 1961 with Belgian complicity after he was transferred to the mineral-rich Katanga province.

The message was clear: nationalist leaders who threatened Western access to strategic minerals would not be tolerated. “They” even assassinated the UN Secretary General (1961) and the President of the United States (1963).

Phase Two: Install and Maintain Corrupt Puppet

After five years of political maneuvering and continued Western support, Mobutu surged in power again to stage a second, more decisive coup in November 1965. He was set to replace democratic leadership that had dared to suggest rights and regulations, things that threatened foreign power extraction of national resources.

Explicitly backed by foreign powers (US, Belgium, and France) Mobutu rapidly established what would become a 32-year dictatorship characterized by:

• Complete consolidation of power
• Elimination of opposition
• Direct foreign backing for explicit purposes of resource extraction
• Suspension of democratic institutions while maintaining their facade

What followed was decades of authoritarian rule that hollowed out democratic institutions while maintaining their outward appearance—a pattern now disturbingly visible in America’s democratic erosion.

Critical Lesson: Internal Reform Fails Under External Capture

For decades, Congolese citizens suffered under Mobutu’s kleptocratic regime with no internal path to democratic restoration. Despite extensive suffering, corruption, and human rights abuses, the Mobutu regime’s external backing made internal reform impossible. What should have happened—Mobutu hauled out for his illegal coup and Congo returned to democratic governance—was prevented by Cold War geopolitics.

Only external intervention—Rwanda-backed forces (led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila) in the First Congo War (1996-1997)—finally ended Mobutu’s reign. This was a dictator responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings, torture, and disappearances of political opponents, while embezzling an estimated $4-15 billion from his impoverished country. Despite these horrific crimes, witness accounts reveal his shocking disconnection from reality:

When Mobutu came through Pointe Noire, and although I had known Mobutu for a long time, it was still remarkable to see him at the airport in Pointe Noire and all the Congo… was out there just really cheering and obviously respecting this guy as someone who was a big man, and respected as a big man for all of his warts and faults. …He was not prepared to accept that after, whatever it was, 25 years, somehow the Zairian people wouldn’t stand up and defend him. He truly believed, and with some reason, that he had been a wonderful President for Zaire. He didn’t recognize that there was a very good argument that could be made he’d been a terrible President for Zaire.

This brutal dictator’s eventual fall through external intervention rather than internal resistance demonstrates a crucial truth: once powerful foreign interests have sufficiently undermined a nation’s power structures, internal democratic mechanisms alone rarely succeed in restoring sovereignty—especially when facing a regime willing to use extreme violence against its own citizens.

Modern Parallel: Rwanda-Backed M23 vs. Russian/Chinese Proxies

On January 28, 2025, the ’23 Mars’ (M23) rebels , backed by Rwanda, captured mineral-rich Goma, defeating so-called “Romeo” contractors funded by Russian oligarchs and Chinese investors through the DRC government. And to put the significance of the strategic rout in perspective, the M23 has less than 5,000 rebels rapidly defeating over 100,000 Congolese soldiers and their 10,000 foreign mercenaries. Seemingly entrenched systems can quickly collapse when so thoroughly corrupted, it just takes determined external intervention. Essentially the same thing we’ve been seeing in Ukraine with the colossal failure of Russia.

What makes the M23 wins particularly revealing is how they’re undoing the tactics seen elsewhere in the world. Congo’s disorganized deployment of poorly trained European personnel given an AK47 and flak vest but nothing else — “supermarket guards” according to The Guardian’s investigation — resembles the approach used by Russian PMCs in Mali and the Central African Republic for example. The idea was to deploy low-skilled militants desperate for rapid enrichment (yet low chances of survival) as a foreign intervention “force” to maintain remote strategic resource access while avoiding direct accountability.

Congolese leaders have a history of employing white mercenaries. They led infamous campaigns against rebels in the turbulent years after independence from Belgium in 1960. Former Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko also hired ex-Yugoslav mercenaries as his regime collapsed in the 1990s. In late 2022, with the M23 surrounding Goma, the DRC government hired two private-military firms. One, named Agemira, was made up of about 40 former French security personnel who provided intelligence and logistical support to the Congolese army.

The Historical Inversion: America Now Faces What It Once Inflicted

The disturbing parallel emerging today is that America itself is experiencing the same playbook it once deployed against nations like Congo:

• Democratic Erosion: Not through outright abolishment of institutions but through their hollowing out and redirection—maintaining the facade of democratic governance while relocating actual power.
• Resource Capture: Just as Congo’s minerals were extracted for foreign benefit, America’s wealth and resources are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, a dozen extreme right wing oligarchs.
• Puppet Leadership: The rise of leaders who serve external interests while masquerading as nationalists mirrors the Mobutu model.

This seems to be the immediate plan for America now under South African-born President Musk (raised on the lessons from Mobutu) and his assistant Trump. Already we see democratic erosion that operates not through outright abolishment of institutions but through their hollowing out and redirection. This maintains the facade of democratic governance while relocating actual power. The formal appearance of democratic institutions masks a reality where actual power has been redirected outside traditional channels of accountability, similar to how foreign powers historically achieved resource extraction in places like the DRC while maintaining the facade of sovereignty.

The Uncomfortable 2025 Question: Who Will Be America’s Rwanda?

History tells us clearly that systems cannot be reformed solely from within when control is sufficiently consolidated by external pressures. The collapse of Goma’s defenses and the flight of mercenaries to UN compounds demonstrate how quickly seemingly entrenched corrupt systems can fall when confronted by determined external intervention.

For Congolese citizens, Rwanda’s intervention—while complex and certainly not without its own problems—finally disrupted decades of foreign-backed corruption. In the American context, the question becomes increasingly urgent: Who will be the Rwanda in this picture, and how soon can they come to rescue Americans from a corrupt tyranny?

Those who would like me to expect that domestic guardrails and organizations can work their way out of a “DOGE” coup in America likely haven’t seen what I have studied up close and in person for so many decades: the how and why of countries around the world that required external military intervention to drive out authoritarian oligarchs and foreign oppressors, rather than achieving liberation solely through internal resistance.

In recent coverage of SpaceX’s string of failures, we’re seeing a pattern in space journalism that prioritizes harmful launch frequency over safety and environmental concerns. Much like tobacco companies always touted product launch figures while downplaying cancer risks, today’s space coverage celebrates catastrophic cadence while minimizing the increasingly awful consequences of an unsustainable approach to orbital privatization.

A recent glowy showy Ars Technica article exemplifies this problem, framing SpaceX’s horrible ongoing technical failures as mere “bumps” while emphasizing random market numbers as the only concern. Consider this excerpt:

For all of the problems described earlier, the company’s only operational payload loss was its own Starlink satellites in July 2024 due to a second stage issue. Before that, SpaceX had not lost a payload with the Falcon 9 in nearly a decade. So SpaceX has been delivering for its customers in a big way.

SpaceX has achieved a launch cadence with the Falcon 9 rocket that’s unmatched by any previous rocket—or even nation—in history. If the SPHEREx mission launches tonight, as anticipated, it would be the company’s 27th mission of this year. The rest of the world combined, including China and its growing space activity, will have a total of 19 orbital launch attempts.

This framing applies a 1930s industrial mindset to what is fundamentally a 21st-century environmental crisis in the making.

Yes, I said 1930s. Factory workers turned into slaves pushed beyond safety limits would surely improve market dominance, don’t you think? I mean workplace fatalities would just be a “bump”, a literal human being literally run over to keep launch rates up despite hidden costs, so therefore…

The journalist celebrates SpaceX for “flying circles around its competition” while only briefly acknowledging that means debris from their failures has crashed into Poland, created “fiery debris trails over the Bahamas,” and forced air traffic controllers to divert “dozens of commercial airline flights.”

More like flying in circles because it can’t fly straight. SpaceX is really smoking now! 9 out of 10 doctors say circles make you more popular with the ladies. And so forth.

Cigarettes as Space Marketing

SpaceX consistently failed to deliver on its most known, most high-profile promises. Mars missions originally slated for 2018 remain a failure every year for seven years now. This, despite public rocket programs successfully landing on Mars since 1976. For some reason certain 1930s-sounding space media continues to normalize horrible setbacks and long-term failures while celebrating instead a rapid “chain-smoking” instant gratitication approach to launches.

What’s clearly missing from coverage?

1. Atmospheric Impact: Recent research indicates that high-frequency launches are damaging Earth’s atmosphere in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
2. Accelerating Debris Crisis: Starlink satellites are reportedly deteriorating faster than planned, creating a vicious cycle of more launches and more potential debris.
3. Resource Sustainability**: The current model of disposable satellites and rapid replacement represents a fundamentally unsustainable approach to space utilization.
4. Safety Concerns: Debris falling on populated areas shouldn’t be treated as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Beyond Marlboro Man Propaganda

SpaceX, led by a suburban South African who likes to cosplay as an American cowboy, positioned itself as the Marlboro Man of space. Projecting an image of lawless frontier expansion however didn’t escape reality, which involves significant risks to our shared environmental resources. Their high-profile objectives (Mars, lunar landings) remain embarrassingly unfulfilled, while their day-to-day operations clearly cause cumulative, long-term damage.

Indeed, the Marlboro Man died a horrible painful slow death, the price apparently of promoting lung cancer.

Lawson isn’t the only former face of Marlboro to die from smoking-related diseases. Wayne McLaren, who appeared in Marlboro print ads, died of lung cancer in 1992, and David McLean, who appeared in print and television spots, died of lung cancer in 1995.

The danger in current space journalism is that it inadvertently normalizes this model, treating harmful launch frequency as the only real metric of success much like cigarette companies once celebrated market share without questioning the actual evidence of impacts. Cancer was known to be the smoking problem by the 1950s, and yet at least 16 million Americans died from it after that point.

We need a new framework for evaluating progress in space that considers not just the quantity of launches but their safety record and list of harms. Otherwise, we risk applying ancient, self-defeating, industrial-era thinking to a problem that requires a much more sophisticated understanding of our relationship with orbital space and our atmosphere.

The Manhattan Project arguably killed more Americans due to radiation effects than the resulting bombs killed Japanese. That’s no way to run a war. And we know conclusively the Japanese didn’t even register the two bombs as impactful, relative to the previous months of conventional weapons. But that’s real history, as opposed to the 1930s-era industrial marketing and propaganda of faster, bigger, more!

When journalists celebrate SpaceX “launching 150 times a year and building two second stages a week” without adequately questioning the sanity of a chain smoking addiction model for lighting up another rocket, they become part of the problem – enablers of a potentially disastrous relationship with our orbital future that generations will mourn.

Looking back at tobacco coverage, historians and public health experts now criticize the “balanced” journalism that gave equal weight to industry product launch claims and health concerns for decades while real harm was done.

The “both sides” approach to tobacco reporting is now seen as a tragic mistake that delayed public understanding and regulatory action, potentially costing millions of lives.

When discussing potential large-scale environmental damage of SpaceX, the appearance of neutrality can itself become a form of bias; one that typically favors established commercial interests over longer-term far more valuable public goods.

Lesotho’s troubled political journey offers American scholars of coup risk a rich narrative of how democracies are captured through cycles of instability. The mountainous kingdom’s history reveals an interplay between militant ambition, constitutional weakness, and politics that almost guarantees a coup.

Lesotho’s government says it is shocked by US President Donald Trump saying that “nobody has ever heard of” the southern African nation. Trump, addressing the US Congress in his first speech since his return to the Oval Office, made the reference… “Eight million dollars to… the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from some US lawmakers.

Trump’s dismissive comment appears to be a slip of the tongue, an exposure of private backroom deals: Why would the President specifically highlight Lesotho in a congressional address only to immediately diminish its significance? This paradox—making something notable while claiming it’s unnoticed—reveals a lot.

For those familiar with patterns of democratic erosion and military intervention, Lesotho isn’t obscure at all, but rather a canonical case study of white supremacist meddling. For South Africans like Elon Musk, Lesotho carries deep personal and historical significance as a sanctuary for anti-apartheid activists during the regime he was born under and profited directly from.

Since independence in 1966 from British colonial occupation, Lesotho experienced a recurring pattern of constitutional authority being gradually eroded until military intervention occurred.

Tension and imbalance began immediately for the new state, when a King attempted to make monarchial powers great again, beyond the freshly written constitutional-monarchy framework. This fundamental disagreement about where authority in a democracy should ultimately rest – with elected officials or elitist monarchs/oligarchs – has haunted Lesotho ever since, much as America debates legislative versus an unaccountable unitary executive power.

Musk and DOGE try to slash government by cutting out those who answer to voters

The Lesotho watershed was 1970, when a Prime Minister facing electoral defeat simply refused to accept the results. He instead declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and placed the King under house arrest. This precedent has obvious harms: constitutional processes can be set aside when they became inconvenient to those in power.

Indeed, the refusal to accept electoral defeat created the dangerous template that would be followed repeatedly afterwards, including the 1998 crisis when opposition parties rejected election results despite the LCD winning 79 of 80 seats – claiming fraud without sufficient evidence.

Military intervention for state capture then necessarily became normalized in Lesotho’s political landscape. When a Major General finally overthrew the sixteen-long-years’ Prime Minister government in 1986, it marked how military involvement was the next level of crisis. The relationship between civilian leadership and military command was horribly strained, with the inherent power of military factions becoming sucked into political disputes rather than allowed to remain neutral.

The fragility of democracy was further complicated by geographic encirclement by South Africa. Lesotho is extraordinarily vulnerable to external pressures, such as during South Africa’s extreme violence to keep apartheid going (e.g. the failure of which allegedly prompted Elon Musk to abruptly flee in 1988 to America with big bags of apartheid money).

The 1982 Christmas spirit quickly dissipated. [The capitol city of Lesotho,] Maseru residents were in a state of shock and disbelief. The city centre took on a new shape: bullet holes marked the walls of houses, homes were ransacked, windows broken, frames charred, and smoke emanated from debris comprised of a mixture of built fabric and human remains. During the attack [by South African apartheid forces], some people were wrapped in blankets by SADF officials and set on fire. […] This was the period when South Africa was heavily engaged in an onslaught on the rest of the sub-continent and Lesotho was on the top of South Africa’s hit list.

Even Ronald Reagan “deplored” this “Operation Blanket“, named for how South African troops planned to burn political opponents to death (foreshadowing Elon Musk’s death-trap design of Tesla).

While Lesotho was on the right side of history, as it harbored refugees from an international tyranny of apartheid, the rise of South African democracy didn’t eliminate the power imbalances. South Africa, as well as Botswana, and Zimbabwe, repeatedly continued to intervene in Lesotho’s ongoing affairs, even militarily, on the premise of helping “situations” to stabilize.

Recently, Lesotho has experimented with coalition governments, which has created new vulnerabilities. A Prime Minister who faced a 2014 no-confidence vote, suspended parliament and later fled the country claiming a military coup attempt. The military’s confused leadership response – fractured into competing internal claims of command authority – reflected how appointments had been for political convenience and partisan rather than professional positions of best national interest.

For American scholars of coup risk, Lesotho demonstrates exactly how democratic institutions gradually hollow out from within. This goes beyond academic theory into a practical playbook of methods for democratic erosion, tested and refined by opportunistic elites across multiple countries. Elon Musk thus stands out, for obvious reasons.

The formal structures of democracy – elections, parliaments, courts – on the surface continue to exist, but their effectiveness is undermined by corrupted leaders who bypass them or ignore any outcomes.

What appears superficially to be a functioning democracy becomes increasingly vulnerable to undemocratic interventions when constitutional processes no longer provide legitimate paths to resolve political conflicts.

The Lesotho narrative warns that coups rarely emerge from nowhere, and we already know some of the where from. They typically follow democratic norms being eroded in the open, where constitutional processes are subverted, and military leadership is politicized.

Those studying coup risks recognize why a bureaucrat like Trump suddenly referenced Lesotho after his close collaboration with President Musk, whose oppressive role brings perspectives shaped by his South African apartheid upbringing of racist regional interventions and imposed constitutional crises.

It’s past time for Americans to examine these deep patterns of institutional decay that made military intervention highly probable – and sometimes even predictable – seeing them not as distant foreign problems but as warning signs increasingly visible in our own democracy’s stress points caused by a South African-led DOGE coup team.

The US Marshals Service has deputized members of Elon Musk’s private security detail, which means they will now have certain rights and protections of federal law enforcement agents.