There is a version of this story about missiles and oil prices.
That version is being told everywhere.
This is the other version. The one about a capital chain that was weeks away from closing, and that the Iran war just killed before a single check cleared.
The chain was elegant in its logic. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) sovereign wealth funds were positioning to inject hundreds of billions into American private equity firms and US corporations in 2026. Those vehicles, armed with preferential and US-security-backed access to the Strategic Asset Reserve, were the designated operators for SPA-protected DRC assets: the cobalt blocks, the Rubaya coltan, the Kisenge manganese, the Gécamines copper licences.
Gulf capital would fund the American operators who would develop the mines under US security guarantees. The money would move from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi into New York and Houston, and from there into Kinshasa, Lualaba and Goma. A clean, logical sequence.
Three parties, each with something to gain, each depending on the others to move first.
The Iran war just broke that sequence at its source.
“The money was never going to fly direct from Riyadh to Lualaba. It was going through New York and Houston first. That route is now closed.”
How the Pipeline Was Built
Start with the numbers. GCC sovereign wealth funds collectively managed close to six trillion dollars in assets as of 2025 and deployed 126 billion dollars in outward investments that year alone, accounting for 43 percent of all capital invested globally by state-owned investors.
A disproportionate share of that went to the United States. Mubadala alone deployed 29 billion dollars across 52 deals in 2024, with 57 percent flowing into US markets.
Following Trump’s May 2025 Gulf tour, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund committed to 600 billion dollars in US investments over four years. These were not portfolio adjustments. They were structural commitments embedded in multi-year fund partnerships with US general partners.
Those US general partners were the ones being positioned to deploy under the SPA. The EXIM advisory committee appointed on February 27 tells you exactly who: Bob Diamond’s Atlas Merchant Capital, V Shankar’s Dubai-based Gateway Partners, Orion Resource Partners, whose 1.2 billion dollar ADQ joint venture was launched specifically to deploy into critical minerals. Bechtel and Wabtec for the Lobito rail concession. GE Vernova for the DRC mining belt’s power deficit, estimated at between 780 and 1,300 megawatts. Every one of these actors builds capital structures that require Gulf anchor investors.
The GCC money was not a bonus in the architecture. It was the balance sheet depth that made the math work at all.
The SPA, signed on December 4, 2025, created the legal and security framework that finally made Congolese cobalt, copper, coltan, and lithium safe for Western capital. Kinshasa delivered the Strategic Asset Reserve list in January 2026, including blockbuster sites like Rubaya, giving US investors preferential access, tax breaks, and American-backed protection.
The plan was brilliant on paper. Gulf capital would fund some American operators who would develop the mines under US security guarantees. Win-win-win. Until February 28.
The War Broke the First Link
Operation Epic Fury has already burned through staggering quantities of munitions, batteries, electronics, and rare-earth systems. The Pentagon is screaming for replenishment. The federal deficit is exploding. Global risk premiums have gone vertical. Oil shocks are hammering every balance sheet on Earth.
And the Gulf, America’s last remaining deep-pocketed allies, are doing what any rational investor does when war risk skyrockets. They froze everything.
By March 2, Dubai and Abu Dhabi had suspended stock exchange trading. By March 4, QatarEnergy had declared force majeure on LNG shipments after Ras Laffan was struck. By March 5, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar had opened internal reviews of their overseas investment portfolios, asking whether force majeure clauses could be invoked to exit commitments they could no longer afford to honor.
A Gulf government adviser told the FT the reviews covered everything: investment pledges, contracts with foreign firms, fund commitments, asset sales.
Everything. That word is the problem.
PIF’s 600 billion dollar US commitment is under review. Mubadala’s LP positions in the US infrastructure and private equity funds being marshalled toward the DRC are under review.
ADQ‘s 1.2 billion dollar joint minerals vehicle with Orion Resource Partners, which had the DRC explicitly in its deployment mandate, is halted. Most commitments to US private equity vehicles targeting the DRC Strategic Asset Reserve have been suspended indefinitely. Direct co-investment deals between GCC funds and American mining and technology majors for SPA-protected assets are on ice. Sovereign wealth pipelines into US firms structured around DRC upside have been pulled for strategic review.
Saudi officials made it clear in private channels: they were ready to fund American operators in Congo under the SPA umbrella, until the war made the entire planet too dangerous to touch.
The American Firms Are Caught in the Middle
This is the part that has not been written yet. The US private equity firms and infrastructure investors who were building DRC positioning under the SPA framework did not raise their capital in a vacuum. They raised it from limited partners. And a significant portion of those limited partners, particularly in the funds most exposed to critical minerals, African infrastructure, and emerging market extractives, are GCC institutions.
When a Gulf sovereign wealth fund freezes its LP commitments pending a war-driven portfolio review, the US general partner does not immediately have less money to deploy. But it has less certainty about follow-on capital, less appetite for illiquid long-horizon commitments in high-risk jurisdictions, and less room to make new investments in markets where the political story just got significantly more complicated.
The DRC, on the day Operation Epic Fury began, got more complicated. Not because of anything happening in Kinshasa. Because the LP base of the funds supposed to finance the SPA pipeline just watched its home states absorb Iranian missiles.
Fund managers do not deploy into new long-horizon DRC commitments when their anchor LPs are managing a war. That is not fear. That is fiduciary responsibility.
The Nightmare Scenario: SPA Framework Without Capital
Now the catastrophe is locked in. The SPA and the SAR exist on paper. Preferential US access is granted. Security clauses are activated. Chinese competition is theoretically being challenged. But the capital required to actually move isn’t available right away. American PE firms sit with empty war chests. US corporations cannot fund the development. The protected assets remain undeveloped, insecure, and ultimately useless.
China steps in with its own cash, offering Kinshasa easier terms and zero war-related risk premiums. Beijing was already at 72 percent of DRC cobalt and copper mining before the SPA was signed.
The framework is supposed to change that equation. Without the GCC capital that was supposed to fund some American operators inside the SAR, it does not.
The United States is left with a beautiful legal framework and no money to exploit it, at exactly the moment the Iran war is devouring every last dollar in the Treasury.
The Quiet Damage
Here is what will not be announced. No press release will say that a US private equity fund quietly pulled back from DRC due diligence because its Gulf LP is managing a war. No EXIM briefing will note that Gulf co-investment capacity, embedded in the capital architecture the February 27 committee was appointed to deploy, is now under force majeure review. No State Department spokesperson will connect the Hormuz closure to the SPA’s financing gap.
But it is happening. The capital that was supposed to validate the SPA’s financial promise to Kinshasa is freezing silently, one LP review at a time, one deferred deployment at a time, one postponed due diligence trip at a time.
And in Kinshasa, the parliamentary coalition that convenes on March 16 to ratify the SPA’s legal foundation is watching. Not for press releases. For wire transfers. For commitments that close. For evidence that the American framework they are being asked to ratify actually comes with capital behind it. That evidence is getting harder to produce.
The Single Question Washington Has Not Asked
If GCC capital, flowing through American firms and private equity to deploy in SPA-protected DRC assets, is frozen for 12 to 18 months, what exactly funds the SPA pipeline?
EXIM writes export credits. DFC provides development finance. Those tools are real and important.
But they are not LP capital. They cannot replace the institutional balance sheet depth that Gulf investors bring to the US funds positioned for DRC deployment. JBIC, Korean KEXIM, and European development finance institutions are the obvious alternatives, but activating them as substitutes takes months of relationship-building that has not started.
The Powering Africa Summit on March 19 and 20 will assemble EXIM, DFC, Energy Secretary Wright, and the DRC’s electricity regulator under one roof. Every presenter in that room needs to be able to answer the capital substitution question. Right now, none of them can.
The Iran conflict is not just the first major threat to the SPA. It is the second, because it has single-handedly strangled the flow of GCC capital through US private equity into SPA-protected DRC assets, before a single new mine could be financed.
The SPA is supposed to be America’s minerals insurance policy for the next decade. The Iran war cancelled the insurance and burned the premium money that was supposed to pay for it.
The second front is not in Africa. It is the deathly silence coming from Gulf boardrooms where the checks used to be written. And when those checks stay unwritten, the SPA becomes nothing more than an expensive piece of paper, while America’s war machine and economic edge both run dry.