Just over five years ago, on October 25, 2021, Sudanese Armed Forces General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Rapid Support Forces leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, overthrew Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s civilian-led transitional government, established after a popular revolution. Tensions between the two generals later escalated, plunging Sudan into war in April 2023, with remnants of the former Islamist regime playing a major role in fueling the conflict. That war has become the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe. It is also a casualty of something bigger: the retreat of the order that was supposed to catch countries like mine when they fall.
Sudan was not always forgotten. For three decades, it was a rare bipartisan cause in Washington.
The institutions built to stop wars like Sudan’s are paralyzed, and a single capital can now decide whether they function at all. In November 2024, Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution sponsored by the United Kingdom, which asked only for the protection of civilians; the other 14 members voted yes. The arms embargo that could choke the war has been stuck ever since, though few dispute that foreign weapons keep it burning. The African Union has fared no better: When its Peace and Security Council met on Sudan last February, the argument was not about silencing the guns but about which side deserves to be called legitimate.
Sudan was not always forgotten. For three decades, it was a rare bipartisan cause in Washington. Democrats and Republicans crossed the aisle on the civil war in the South, the Darfur genocide, and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist dictatorship. Today’s war shares roots and horrors from those wars. What changed is not Sudan but the West, where foreign policy has become another front in a domestic culture war, and distant conflicts are read for what they say about Western politics, not for what they do to the people living through them.
Out of that fracture has come what some call the red-green alliance, a coalition of the far left and political Islamism whose positions on Sudan grow out of Western arguments, not Sudanese realities. It strips the war of its roots, six decades of military rule and state capture by a narrow military-Islamist elite that ruled by force, and recasts it as a pure proxy war in a global contest. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said in February that more than a dozen countries are fueling the war, yet this camp singles out a few that fit its map of the region. And rather than condemn two warring parties cut from the same cloth, it shields one, staying silent even on the chemical weapons use the U.S. government confirmed. Even well-known human rights organizations now seem to see with one eye.
To cover these biases, it borrows slogans with no purchase in Sudan. “Anti-imperialism” does not fit Burhan and his fellow generals. “Sovereignty” is invoked as if it were a license to bomb citizens, rather than a duty to protect them. “Sudanese solutions” is chanted for the very officers who, with foreign backing, overthrew the solution Sudanese chose in the December 2018 revolution. Half-truths are the worst kind of lie—worst of all for those who claim to speak for human rights.
The cost to Sudan is plain: This posture has lengthened the war and deepened the tragedy. No celebrity has gone viral demanding the two simplest things—stop the war and let aid in—because the attention is elsewhere. And the danger does not stop at Sudan’s borders. Sudan is the global Muslim Brotherhood’s prize: the one country it ruled for 30 years, and where it now has a chance to rule again behind a military front. Some Western leftists treat opposition to the Brotherhood as hostility to Islam, as if they were more Muslim than Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, which have all outlawed it. An Islamist restoration in Khartoum would mean a terrorist haven on the Red Sea, a wider regional war, and a bridgehead for Iran and the West’s other adversaries. We have seen this film before: The last time Sudan’s Islamists had a state, it ended with terrorism in Manhattan.
[The Trump administration] named the Brotherhood’s role plainly, designating the Sudanese Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization.
Which brings me to an inconvenient truth for Washington’s partisans: Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s broader agenda, his administration’s approach to Sudan is right, and in a normal world it would command bipartisan support. It made Sudan a priority, in its rhetoric and in the shuttle diplomacy of its envoy, Massad Boulos. It built the Quad with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, produced a road map it is still pushing despite every obstacle, and coordinated it with the multilateral Quintet. This road map was clear on Islamist factions, and excluded Islamists from the peace process, acknowledging the threats posed. It made a humanitarian truce the priority, drafted the agreement, and pressed for it. It sided clearly with a democratic future for Sudan and held the international line against legitimizing the 2021 coup, even as other Western governments drifted toward blessing it without any clear moral justification, revealing where their democratic values stop. It named the Brotherhood’s role plainly, designating the Sudanese Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. It confirmed the army’s use of chemical weapons while also sanctioning their rivals for their atrocities. And it tabled the most ambitious attempt in years to cut the war’s foreign supply lines: a Security Council resolution extending the arms embargo to all of Sudan and every party in it, drones included. Strangely, this record draws more skepticism from parts of the West than from Sudanese.
Sudan does not need the West to agree about Trump. It needs the West to agree about Sudan, as it once did. A ceasefire, open aid corridors, an end to foreign arms, and a return to the civilian transition the Sudanese chose are not partisan demands. This is the least a decent world owes 50 million people. The Trump administration has set the right course. It should not have to walk it alone.
