Sudan: Clash of the Generals

Last year, after a brief trip to Sudan, Anne Applebaum declared in The Atlantic that the country’s conflict was a war about nothing. Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who ruled Sudan for thirty years, was deposed in 2019 after a popular uprising. Power was then shared between civilian technocrats and military commanders, until the generals dispensed with their counterparts in an October 2021 coup, before turning on each other. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese army, heads one belligerent coalition, backed by a panoply of regional powers. His challenger is Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who runs the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia that once fought for Bashir and now contests control of the state, armed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since the war began in April 2023, over 13 million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands have died. To explain all this, Applebaum turned not to Sudan’s complicated political history, but to America’s absence: ‘the most nihilistic conflict on earth’ is what ensues when the US abandons its post as global policeman, and Africans are left to their own devices.

Granted, US diplomacy has been feckless. As Biden left office, his administration acknowledged that a genocide had occurred in Darfur, but otherwise did little. Trump barely seemed to know where Sudan was until Mohammed bin Salman visited him in November 2025. Saudi Arabia has thrown its weight behind the Sudanese army amid growing regional tensions with the UAE. Sudan is one front in this rivalry, and Riyadh hoped the US would help. Instead, Washington sanctioned the Islamist brigades backing Burhan and then, in September 2026, pushed to extend the UN arms embargo, previously restricted to the RSF heartland of Darfur, to the entire country, threatening the army’s supply lines. Neither the arms embargo nor the sanctions have yet had much effect on the battlefield, because the US studiously avoids indicting the belligerents’ regional supporters.

Fecklessness is a political choice. The US has not abandoned Sudan, but enabled the war by drawing a protective cordon around its allies in the Gulf. While it has sprinkled symbolic sanctions on both sides, none has been imposed on the UAE. Abu Dhabi officially denies backing the RSF, but there is extensive evidence that it has provided the militia with weapons, drones and Colombian mercenaries. The US would rather parrot the UAE’s talking points than take action. Speaking to the BBC in September 2026, Massad Boulos, Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, said Emirati officials had told him that ‘there might be some traders or whatever that are doing these sorts of supplies, providing supplies to both sides.’ America’s allies march in lockstep. Though British-made military equipment sold to the UAE has turned up on the killing fields of Darfur, London has pressured African diplomats not to criticise Abu Dhabi as it eyes a lucrative defence pact.

The Gulf matters to the US. There is the tin-pot dynastic graft — Saudi Arabia giving $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s investment fund and an Emirati prince buying up half of the Trump family’s crypto bank — but more substantively, the region is central to the American project of a new Middle East, centred on Israeli dominance. The UAE and Saudi Arabia sit on Gaza’s ‘Board of Peace’, and have recently inked defence deals with Washington. As one American diplomat told me in 2024, the US needs the Gulf ‘standing against Iran, and with Israel’. For Foggy Bottom, the dead in Darfur don’t matter: Sudan’s charnel houses are a negligible price to pay for the genocide in Gaza.

In Applebaum’s account, the war in Sudan is what happens when the world looks away. This rehashes the liberal bromides of the 1990s, when ‘never again’ was intoned over Rwanda, and the world’s salvation was predicated on the American public’s attention. In truth, Washington sees all too well what is happening in Sudan. The violence scarring the country is not unprecedented, but rather the latest episode in a long history of military elites benefiting from the Sudanese people’s immiseration. What makes the current war distinctive is the deep involvement of regional powers, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, whose patronage leaves both belligerents uninterested in peace talks.

Such flagrant support for the warring parties in Sudan is not the result of the end of American geopolitical dominance, but rather of its continued existence. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are sub-imperial powers that sustain American empire while using it to advance their own frequently divergent projects. America’s reliance on the UAE affords Abu Dhabi leeway to pursue its objectives in Sudan, while its security is guaranteed by the al-Dhafra airbase. Though the value of American protection came into question during the assault on Iran, Emirati dependence on the US war machine is absolute. One could tell a similar story for Saudi Arabia.

For all their differences, the two countries see Sudan alike. The uprising against Bashir threatened the Gulf monarchies, for whom Sudan was a frontier to exploit. Both have bought up vast tracts of farmland, and dominate the finance and mining sectors. Democratic accountability imperilled their extraction of resources. In the aftermath of the revolution, the UAE and Saudi Arabia backed the military. Their patron in Washington concurred. With Abu Dhabi’s help, the US steered Sudan into the Abraham Accords, sidelined the revolutionary forces opposed to normalising relations with Israel, and imposed neoliberal reforms, while kowtowing to the military. Hostility to Sudanese democracy united all three countries.

When the war began, the UAE backed the RSF, hoping for a quick victory. Western diplomats often tell me Emirati support for the militia is irrational. The UAE, they claim, would be better served by a united Sudan that could guarantee it access to the Red Sea than by a militia marooned in the west of the country, far from its ports. But this ignores how much Abu Dhabi has profited from Sudan’s destruction. The RSF has seized herds and funnelled them across the front line to Port Sudan: livestock exports to the Gulf have never been higher. Gold from RSF-controlled mines ends up in Dubai.

The war in Sudan has helped create a flexible Emirati logistical empire, built on networks — and American companies — established during the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Colombian mercenaries pass from Abu Dhabi to Bossaso in Puntland and Kufra in Libya before arriving in Darfur. Surveying Sudan’s devastation, Abu Dhabi can count its winnings: a mercenary army on its books, already deployed in Yemen; ports on the Gulf of Aden; raw materials flowing out of the Horn of Africa; and clients among regional governments and sundry rebel groups. The UAE still uses US logistical chains forged during the war on terror, and has joined with Tel Aviv in branding the Sudanese army ‘terrorists’ (Burhan has repaid the compliment to the RSF). While some announce the demise of the liberal rules-based order, it would be more accurate to say that Sudan has exposed its stark realities.