After 16 months of war, the scale of Sudan’s devastation, the human toll, and the geopolitical fallout are staggering. Sudan’s sovereignty has been dismantled; its state has collapsed. Genocidal violence abounds in multiple areas of the country. Islamist militia proliferate. There are reports of a bourgeoning Russian and Iranian presence in Sudan, on the western coast of the Red Sea, notably roughly across from the shores of Yemen, from which the Tehran-backed Houthis have already crippled shipping in one of the world’s most critical commercial waterways. The Sudanese people are suffering the largest hunger crisis by far in the world today and the most extreme even by the standards of Sudan’s tortured history—or of famines anywhere in the last 50 years, By October, twice as many Sudanese (2.5 million) are projected to have died from starvation in four months than the number of Cambodians who starved to death under four years of the Khmer Rouge.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) unquestionably bear primary responsibility for the carnage that has ensued since April 15, 2023. But that cannot be an alibi for the well-intentioned but counterproductive diplomatic efforts, including those of the United States that, at best, failed to prevent the war and at worst contributed to its outbreak. Contrary to the predictable finger-pointing, however, the question should not be who “lost Sudan” but rather how. A diplomatic and policy failure of the magnitude evident in Sudan never results from a singular mistake or the actions of one individual, but from a compounding series of miscalculations and missteps and a reluctance to change course in the face of facts.
Avoiding an honest assessment of this failure risks trapping U.S. engagement in Sudan in a cycle of what renowned American diplomat Thomas Pickering characterized as “Nordic Trac diplomacy,” i.e., the pretense of forward movement while one in fact remains stationary. By contrast, identifying the false premises that have underpinned U.S. diplomacy—inclusive of periods in which I personally played a role as an advisor to several U.S. special envoys for Sudan and, during the first two years of the Biden administration, as deputy special envoy for the Horn of Africa—may open avenues for more successful outcomes.
Three fallacies have contributed to the current crisis in Sudan: First, that power-sharing between civilian and military actors or exclusively between military actors is a basis for a stable political order. Second, that ceasefires end violence or that they are a prerequisite for doing so. Third, that political legitimacy is less important than coercive force. By clinging to these fallacies, U.S. policy has amounted to magical thinking about what can bring about the desired end goal of a civilian, representative government that reflects the will of — and is accountable to — the people of Sudan.
The Fallacy of Power-Sharing
When the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in 2005, it ended Africa’s longest civil war and laid the foundation for South Sudan’s independence in 2011. A key provision of the agreement was a power-sharing arrangement between the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in Khartoum and the SPLM in southern Sudan within a government of national unity for a period of six years balanced against a commitment to free and fair nationwide elections and a referendum among South Sudanese on South Sudan’s independence. Despite the horrific war that subsequently engulfed South Sudan in 2013 following its secession from Sudan in 2011, the CPA nonetheless ended the north-south conflict and delivered on the South Sudanese people’s legitimate right to self-determination.
Unfortunately, in the years to come, power-sharing became the perennial default formula to respond to other crises facing the country— from Darfur in the west to Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile in the south and in the country’s east—irrespective of the vastly different historical, geographic, and political circumstances of these conflicts. Agreements were signed but rarely implemented. Positions of minimal influence were accorded to opposition figures. Minor favors were distributed to juice patronage networks. In the face of continued instability, new talks were launched to broker a growing pile of power-sharing agreements—sometimes with the same individuals, sometimes with others. At least four (failed) agreements on Darfur alone were signed between 2006 and 2013. Repeated international attempts to facilitate power-sharing amongst South Sudanese since the outbreak of civil war in 2013 have similarly failed to produce a durable political settlement or end violent conflict there.
Then, following mass demonstrations in 2019, a transitional military council composed of generals from the SAF as well as RSF leader Lt Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti) removed long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir from power. Popular demonstrations and sit-ins continued against military rule and in support of a democratic transition. As a result of intensive diplomatic efforts to broker an off-ramp that would prevent civil war, the military junta and the umbrella organization of the civilian revolutionary protest movement, the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), signed a Constitutional Declaration in August of that year.
Many Sudanese rationally wanted to avoid the bloodshed that had followed earlier revolutions in Syria and Libya during the Arab Spring. As a result, negotiators characterized the Constitutional Declaration as a “soft-landing” that would avoid alienating the military and provoking a backlash while nonetheless setting the country on a pathway toward civilian rule and democracy. Western diplomats, including those representing the United States, had also advocated strongly for reaching once again for an off-the-shelf power-sharing formula as the “pragmatic” solution.
Accordingly, the Constitutional Declaration established a civilian transitional Cabinet that would administer the government while a Sovereignty Council of civilians and military leaders chaired by SAF Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al Burhan with Hemedti as vice chair would exercise sovereign power during a 39-month transitional period. A civilian leader was meant to assume the chairmanship of the Sovereignty Council after the first 21 months of the transition. The SAF and RSF seats outnumbered the civilians, and no provisions were made for dispute resolution. In addition, a Transitional Legislative Council (TLC) would be formed to adopt laws and a budget and oversee the Cabinet, among other responsibilities.
In a subsequent effort to quell outstanding conflicts in Darfur and other marginalized areas of the country, the RSF and FFC—with significant U.S. support and involvement and at the behest of civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok—then spearheaded an effort to broker the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA), signed in October 2020. By bringing the political and military leaders of several armed opposition groups as well as representatives of other political parties into the Cabinet, however, the JPA obliterated a core tenet of the Constitutional Declaration, namely that the Cabinet would be composed of technocrats rather than politicians or military leaders. It also “restarted” the clock on the length of the transitional period, without clarifying the timeline for passing the baton from a military to a civilian chair of the Sovereignty Council. And the negotiations for the JPA indefinitely stalled the formation of the TLC as the civilian and military parties found it too difficult to agree on its composition. Thus, a vital counterweight to the influence of the SAF and RSF, the sole vehicle for providing for popular representation in the transitional government, and the forum for building legitimacy around that transition was set aside in the interests of political expediency.
After months of warning signs, on Oct. 25, 2021, the SAF and RSF gave up the pretense of power sharing with civilians and perpetrated a coup with the support of several signatories of the JPA, arresting the prime minister and his Cabinet and imposing a state of emergency. An agreement reached on Nov. 21 that was immediately welcomed by the “Troika” contact group of the United States, the U.K., and Norway plus the European Union and Canada secured Hamdok’s release (though not that of the other Cabinet ministers) and theoretically created an opening for restoration of the pre-coup power-sharing arrangement. In practice, the agreement orphaned Hamdok from a popular constituency as it appeared that he had cut a deal to save himself rather than the revolution and entrenched the coup by making him directly beholden to the SAF and RSF’s effective control of the state. Hemorrhaging credibility and influence, Hamdok resigned six weeks later.
In the days following his resignation and with the unequivocal backing of the United States, the United Nations (later in cooperation with the African Union and the sub-regional body, IGAD) initiated a consultative process among Sudanese stakeholders, held behind closed doors. Meanwhile, the SAF and RSF leadership contended that Sudan’s problems derived from disunity among civilians and rejected any mediation. They were also consistently unwilling to take any tangible steps to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to cede authority to civilians, despite an announcement by Burhan on July 4, 2022, that the SAF would hand power to a government of “national competencies” if civilians could agree on one.
In an effort to bring more diplomatic leverage to the process, the United States and Saudi Arabia facilitated negotiations between a subset of civilian representatives, the SAF, and RSF to reach an agreement that could be legitimized post-facto through the U.N. process. This effort culminated in a “draft political framework” in December 2022, laying out the contours of yet another power-sharing arrangement. Predictably, rather than planting the seeds for a stable political order, the draft political framework amounted to a reorganization of the power-sharing formula and further energized the quest for sole domination between the SAF and RSF, neither of which was truly prepared to share power with civilians or, as ultimately became clear, even with each other.
Ostensibly building on the “framework agreement,” a series of workshops were held to resolve outstanding issues, including security sector reform. Optimistic claims by U.S. officials that all issues but one—i.e. security sector reform—had been resolved obscured the fact that the structure of the security sector, the relationship between the leadership of the SAF and the RSF, and the relationship between that “sector” (the SAF and RSF) and any erstwhile civilian government were the fundamental challenges to any successful transition. The straw that then broke the camel’s back was a proposal put forth by the United States that would have subordinated the RSF to the SAF and would have required Hemedti to accept a diminution of the authority accorded to him in the December “framework agreement” concluded just four months earlier (and endorsed by the United States). Despite each side mobilizing forces in and around Khartoum as this was being negotiated, Western diplomats were seemingly caught off guard when war exploded on April 15, 2023.
As Hamdok acknowledged publicly two weeks after the outbreak of war, he had been a global evangelist for “the Sudanese model” (i.e., power sharing between military and civilians) but that “this issue would need to be revisited in the context of emerging coups.” Eighteen years of various failed power-sharing agreements—four different peace agreements for Darfur and Eastern Sudan, the 2019 Constitutional Declaration, the 2020 JPA, the Nov. 21, 2021 agreement, and the 2022 draft political framework—should in fact have been sufficient to condemn that model to the dustbin of history long before April 2023.
The Fallacy of Ceasefires
In spite of dozens of attempts by the U.S. and others to broker ceasefires for Sudan’s various conflicts since the mid-1990s, the Nuba Mountains Ceasefire of 2002 is the only successful example of one that preceded a political bargain. And yet a ceasefire has become step 1 in the “paint by numbers” approach to mediation in Sudan, followed by step 2 (power sharing) and step 3 (token disarmament and demobilization).
Like the CPA, the Nuba Mountains Ceasefire occurred in a specific context that has not and likely cannot be replicated. It was narrowly focused geographically. Violations could be monitored with relative ease by a small team. And, beyond silencing the guns, its most important purpose was not a permanent end to hostilities. Rather, it set out to end hostilities for a set time in a specific area in order to test the willingness of the NCP and SPLM to pursue further, more detailed political negotiations with seriousness of purpose. Fighting continued in other parts of the country in parallel with these negotiations.
Other ceasefire agreements may have opened opportunities for a measure of progress. For example, the 2004 N’djamena humanitarian ceasefire did not stop violence against civilians in Darfur, but it did allow for the deployment of an African peacekeeping force that created a sufficient enabling environment for a significant humanitarian response. But no ceasefire agreement in Sudan other than the permanent ceasefire agreement in the CPA—which was the last issue to be negotiated after a political formula had been reached–has durably ended any fighting. Nor have ceasefires previously proven to be prerequisites for humanitarian access.
Yet in the aftermath of the outbreak of the war, U.S. diplomacy centered almost exclusively on brokering a nationwide ceasefire, an approach that has persisted to the present day. Between April 15 and May 10, 2023 alone, U.S. officials claimed credit for seven “short-term” ceasefires, and yet the fire never meaningfully ceased. The United States and Saudi Arabia devoted enormous effort to convening representatives of the SAF and RSF in Jeddah in early May 2023 for ceasefire talks. On May 11, the belligerents signed the “Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan,” which reaffirmed the parties’ obligations under international humanitarian law. Nine days later, the SAF and RSF signed an “Agreement on a Short-Term Ceasefire and Humanitarian Arrangements.” Both agreements were violated within days. And yet the “Jeddah process” remained the cornerstone of the U.S. diplomatic approach until a final attempt to revive talks there collapsed in May 2024. On July 23, the United States issued another public invitation to the SAF and RSF for talks in Switzerland for Aug. 14 to “reach a nationwide cessation of violence.” As of Aug. 12, U.S. efforts to persuade the SAF to participate seemed to have faltered, though the RSF reportedly had agreed to participate.
In fact, conflicts in Sudan have ended as a result either of the exhaustion of the belligerents or of a political bargain to which the parties were sufficiently committed that they chose to no longer pursue contestation violently (or both). In these cases, the “ceasefire” or security arrangements followed the political bargain rather than preceding it. Set against this experience as well as against lessons from conflicts as different as those in Libya, Yemen, and Colombia—where, for example, the parties continued to fight even as they were negotiating peace—it should not be surprising that efforts to “end the war” in Sudan since April 2023 through a ceasefire have proven unsuccessful.
The pursuit of hollow ceasefires has also had an opportunity cost: Instead of establishing a political formula that would guide governance, politics, and security sector reform as the center of diplomatic gravity and building an international and popular consensus around it, the multiple rounds of failed ceasefire talks, including those in Jeddah, have allowed the SAF and the RSF to define the rules of the game and cement their own centrality, further militarizing rather than demilitarizing Sudanese politics. It has also hamstrung efforts to mount an adequate humanitarian response at scale to save millions of lives, as senior U.S. officials have asserted that a “nationwide ceasefire” is necessary to deliver aid, contradicting past experience in Sudan and other conflict zones in which humanitarian access has been negotiated with the belligerents on the ground irrespective of a broader ceasefire agreement.
The Fallacy of Coercive Force
Since the 2019 revolution and under the pretense of pragmatism, the United States and its partners have consistently—if inadvertently—undermined efforts by Sudanese to build a consensus around a popularly legitimate government that would limit the influence of the SAF and RSF in the country’s governance and politics. Instead, the United States and its partners have myopically focused diplomatic engagement on “the guys with the guns.” A key case in point was the U.S. abetting an indefinite delay in the formation of the TLC in favor of the JPA, tacitly accepting the military’s antipathy toward the TLC and the stumbling of civilian actors over how it should be constituted. Other opportunities to construct a transparent, broadly credible forum for citizen consultation have similarly been missed or neglected.
Even more damaging was the U.S. reaction to the 2021 coup. In the initial hours, U.S. officials, including me, conveyed to Burhan and Hemedti four prerequisites for future diplomatic engagement with the United States versus isolation and opprobrium: 1) Release from detention of all of the members of the Cabinet and other political detainees, 2) Cancellation of the state of emergency, 3) Acceptance of the principle that the military cannot choose their civilian partners just as the civilians cannot choose their military partners, and 4) Restoration of the civilian Cabinet as a caretaker transitional government.
The logic of this approach was not to indefinitely sever contact with the SAF or RSF. Rather, in the wake of a total seizure of State institutions by the military and RSF, the aim was to rebalance the political environment for subsequent negotiations so that Sudanese civilians did not enter into a dialogue in a position of incurable weakness. In other words, the junta would be required to accept that its continued domination of the political arena would not be tolerated internationally.
Within 96 hours, however, the United States had balked, backing away from its own conditions without having received a response or any confidence-building steps from either Burhan or Hemedti. On Nov. 4, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Burhan, setting in motion an approach of unconditional engagement with the SAF and RSF that set the stage for the weakened Nov. 21, 2021, agreement, which ceded political primacy to the SAF and RSF.
Before and after April 15, 2023, Burhan and Hemedti have competed assiduously with each other and with civilians for international legitimacy, begging to be welcomed in regional capitals and relishing every meeting (and photo op) with senior officials and diplomats. The extent of Sudan’s devastation, however, calls into question the efficacy of the seemingly endless attempts at engagement and persuasion of these military actors, devoid of any tangible incentives or disincentives to induce them to change behavior, much less return to barracks and cede power.
And there has been an additional cost: Elevating the SAF and the RSF as the central players in Sudan’s future rather than marginalizing them has distorted the calculations of civilian leaders. In the wake of the coup, through the November 2021 agreement, Hamdok’s resignation, the U.N.-AU-IGAD process culminating in the 2022 draft political framework, and now the war, the failure by the United States to withhold legitimacy to level the political playing field has consistently relegated Sudan’s civilian leadership to seeking leverage by the only means left available to them: through alliances with either the SAF or the RSF.
The law of unintended consequences has thus gone into overdrive, cementing the belligerents’ stranglehold on the country’s future and fragmenting civilian stakeholders amidst mutual recriminations of who has most betrayed the revolution or the country. Instead of forcing the SAF and RSF to compromise and contend for legitimacy on the merits of their actions, it has forced civilian leaders to make compromises with the SAF and RSF in a desperate attempt to influence events, exacerbating and prolonging the crisis of legitimacy. And as neither the RSF nor the SAF has proven itself militarily strong enough to achieve total victory, they have each turned to an array of external partners including Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Libya, Russia, South Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as internal force multipliers (popular defense forces and Islamist militias).
Sudan’s war is one of weakness not of strength, resulting from a political vacuum that has been filled by those who have coercive force but no legitimacy. Meanwhile the international community, led by the United States, speaks of reinforcing legitimate civilian actors yet fails to decisively put its weight on their end of the scale and plays hide and seek with the very people most discredited among Sudanese as it futilely chases the SAF and RSF into negotiations to which neither are committed.
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the inimitable Charles Maurice de Talleyrand—foreign minister and counsellor, variously, to the ancien regime, the Directorate, and Napoleon Bonaparte throughout France’s tumultuous pre- and post-revolutionary period —mused on the importance of legitimacy in a series of letters to King Louis XVIII in preparation for the Congress of Vienna. Reflecting on the defeat of Napoleon, Talleyrand wrote, “[W]we showed that the principles of legitimacy must be held sacred in the interest of the people themselves, because legitimate Governments can alone be strong and durable, whereas illegitimate Governments, relying upon force only, fall to pieces the moment that support fails them, and then the people are delivered over to a succession of revolutions of which no one can foresee the end.” In a later letter, he added, “Few persons know how to appreciate the advantages of legitimacy, because they are all in the future; but everybody is at once struck by its abuses because they may occur at any moment and show themselves upon every occasion.” (“The Correspondence of Prince Talleyrand and Louis XVIII During the Congress of Vienna,” New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1881. Pp. 278 and 287.)
There are, of course, innumerable differences between France in the first quarter of the 19th century and Sudan in the 21st. Yet the laws of politics still apply: Even if under-appreciated, legitimacy matters, and effective diplomacy requires the foresight to account for it even if its advantages “are in the future.”
Diplomatic Accountability
When wrestling with wicked problems like Sudan, policymakers are understandably tempted to justify their choices by arguing that they selected the best available options among a set of worse alternatives. Those observing the impact of those decisions from outside are similarly quick to claim that the road not taken would have made all the difference. Both are plausible; neither can be proven retrospectively. However, the sheer scope of the catastrophe that is unfolding in Sudan suggests that other paths could hardly have been less effective and thus serious interrogation and self-reflection are necessary, if only to break the cycle of diplomatic amnesia.
Even as international attention has been dominated by Ukraine and Gaza, the collapse of the state in Sudan is an example of what awaits the United States and its partners elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East if it fails to hone an ability to respond to the changing geopolitical landscape with new diplomatic paradigms that are more fit for purpose rather than clinging to the failed approaches of the past. Evaluating the nature of U.S. diplomatic involvement before and since Sudan’s 2019 revolution could serve as a cautionary tale in a region where the very concept of the nation State is under duress, political legitimacy is increasingly contested, and the temptation to redraw international borders by force is stronger than at any time in the post-colonial era.
The United States does not have the luxury of inertia if it is to defend its vital interests in this context. The self-serving assertion among some Western diplomats that Sudan’s revolution was always going to be “messy” minimizes the consequences of the country’s breakdown and is a poor justification for ineffective diplomacy. Relevance and accountability are two sides of the same coin: No State, and certainly not one as powerful as the United States, can consider itself influential but unaccountable for the consequences of the use of that influence, irrespective of the actions of others.
A ceasefire without a political formula is like elections without a constitution. Instead of predicating its diplomacy on the chimera that a nationwide ceasefire is possible, that the SAF represents a legitimate government, or that the SAF and the RSF are the answer to the problems they have created, the United States could strive to build an international consensus around a set of political principles that would set the guardrails within which the belligerents’ ambitions would be constrained. This is necessary because neither the SAF nor the RSF can obtain a monopoly on the use of violence, nor can either secure the consent of the Sudanese people to hold political power. Such a set of principles — including that neither the SAF generals nor Hemedti can hold positions in a future transitional government — would likely need to be imposed on the warring parties in order to change their calculus that continued violence can achieve their respective aims. In this way, conditions conducive to ultimately negotiating an end to the violence might be more likely to be achieved.
The CPA would not have been possible in 2005 without the NCP having previously accepted in 2002 that South Sudanese had a right to self-determination. Similarly, the negotiations to end apartheid would not have been possible without the ruling National Party accepting the principle of majority rule and thus conceding its own monopoly over the political system. Neither were easily achieved, but they were achieved nonetheless. U.S. diplomatic interests would be well-served by having the ambition to change the rules of the game in Sudan rather than continuing to play a losing hand.