On September 12, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States announced a joint road map for ending Sudan’s devastating two-and-a-half-year civil war. The announcement, on its own terms, was a breakthrough. Soon after its outbreak in Khartoum in April 2023, the conflict entangled a variety of regional actors. Egypt and a number of other nearby states have supported General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the government now based in Port Sudan; the UAE—and, increasingly, other countries that depend on Abu Dhabi, such as Chad—has backed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who had been Burhan’s deputy in Sudan’s previous military junta.
The sponsors of the plan, known collectively as the Quad, are thus Arab powers that have a great deal of sway in Sudan (including Saudi Arabia, which has mostly sought to remain neutral) and the United States. Brokering such an agreement among these outside countries had long proved elusive, and it took months of high-level U.S.-led negotiations to reach agreement on a joint road map. The plan called for a three-month humanitarian truce between the two warring factions. This would be followed by a permanent cease-fire and a political process led by the Sudanese to choose a new civilian-led government.
After years of vicious fighting, hope surged that there might finally be a way to end a catastrophe that has killed up to 150,000, displaced a quarter of the country’s population of 50 million, and left innumerable Sudanese without essential services. Yet the plan already appears to be stalling. The fighting in Sudan has continued to rage, and the SAF has publicly rejected the proposal. Bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into closer alignment was a necessary first step, but a chasm still separates the warring sides. It also remains unclear whether the new U.S. administration is prepared for the difficult long-term engagement that would be needed to bring the plan to fruition.
Indeed, amid a wider U.S. retreat from the region and the rise of ambitious middle powers nearby, the larger story is that the United States no longer possesses the clout it once had to underwrite mediation processes in many parts of Africa, necessitating unwieldy formats such as the Quad. Among outside actors, Washington had by far the greatest influence over the Horn of Africa in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Although it overreached badly in some of its interventions, it gave peacemaking a center of gravity.
But over the past 15 years, the United States’ influence has diminished. At the same time, rising regional powers have spotted commercial and diplomatic openings and attempted to pull the Horn of Africa much closer, politically and economically, to the Middle East. This has won the region some needed investment, and some of these powers have proved agile mediators. But the Gulf’s sponsorship of warring parties has, on the whole, made conflicts much harder to resolve.
In this sense, the war in Sudan has become a harbinger of what more wars could look like in the future: messy and seemingly insoluble, drawing in ever more rival outside powers, each with its own irreconcilable interests. Once they start, these kinds of wars are very difficult to end, because no single actor has the authority to convene all the players or corral the other outside powers. They can be extremely destructive, given the advanced weaponry outsiders can now pour in. And the very competitive dynamic that inflames these conflicts in the first place often dooms them to continue as different countries back competing frameworks or jostle for the right to play peacemaker. Peace deals that do cross the finish line rarely accomplish more than to freeze a fractured status quo.
ANCHOR POINT
The Horn of Africa has long been vulnerable to the influence of broad geopolitical shifts. During the Cold War, the Horn was an epicenter of proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union; as the Cold War drew to a close, the region experienced political convulsions: regime change in Ethiopia, state collapse in Somalia, and civil wars in Sudan. But although the post–Cold War era started with a shock, it stabilized somewhat as the United States became the dominant source of outside influence. Using plentiful sticks and carrots as well as diplomatic muscle at the regional level, Washington came to play an outsize role in attempting to stabilize the volatile Horn.
Its record was very checkered: in the years since the United States greenlighted a 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, an Islamist insurgency has taken over swaths of the country. Beginning in the 1990s in Sudan, the United States helped back a southern-based insurgency to put pressure on the Islamist government in Khartoum, resulting in South Sudan’s secession. The new nation quickly slipped into civil war, and northern Sudan struggled economically. More generally, the United States’ liberalizing agenda did little to bolster weak states’ governance.
Still, the United States’ relative hegemony and consistent engagement helped shore up basic interstate stability and centralize peacemaking efforts. Although border disputes between Horn states festered, few local leaders risked the censure that would come with efforts to outright annex neighboring territory. When border wars or major civil wars broke out, the United States steered attempts toward diplomatic resolutions, often by backing multilateral efforts. U.S. officials, for instance, threw their support behind the Algiers agreement (crafted by the UN and the Organization of African Unity) that Ethiopia and Eritrea signed in 2000. The crisis in Darfur in the early years of the twentieth century drew the attention both of U.S. leaders and the American public, and Washington pressured Sudanese negotiators to accept the 2005 Kenyan-led peace process that ended Sudan’s previous civil war and closely coordinated with the African Union’s oversight of the partition of Sudan and South Sudan. In 2012, U.S. pressure was key in stopping a short-lived invasion of Sudan by South Sudan, which risked becoming a new interstate war.
European countries largely followed the United States’ lead in Sudan, and regional powers mostly did not challenge U.S.-backed diplomatic processes. When a proposed multilateral peace effort did not have U.S. backing (such as the African Union’s 2011 attempt to mediate in Libya before the fall of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime), it rarely gained traction.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
But in the past decade, the United States’ ability to shape the international approach to Sudan has steadily declined. As the United States repeatedly tried to turn its focus toward China and remained intractably entangled in Middle Eastern disputes, the stability of the Horn slid down Washington’s priority list—a “nice to have,” but not essential. U.S. President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Princeton Lyman, ran a large office with more than 20 staff members, including some detailed from the Defense and Treasury Departments, and reported directly to the White House—a far cry from the resources afforded to more recent U.S. special envoys to the region, who lack teams and report to the State Department’s Africa bureau.
And where the United States mostly saw problems and headaches to solve, some regional middle powers saw fresh opportunities. The United States had sent foreign aid managed by its own bureaucracies, but the Gulf powers and Turkey began to offer the Horn direct investment. In 2006, the Emirates-based logistics giant Dubai Ports World won a 30-year contract to operate Djibouti’s main port, launching a wider effort by Abu Dhabi to control ports across eastern Africa. Its infrastructure investments then expanded inland to include mineral deals, energy projects, and trade corridors in a variety of countries. Turkey, for its part, also put resources into new commercial and security partnerships across the Horn of Africa, especially in countries with territory that had once been linked to the Ottoman Empire.
A scramble for influence in the Horn intensified following the 2011 Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia and the UAE blamed Qatar and Turkey for backing the popular uprising. Each country’s effort to diminish Qatar’s power involved trying to box it out of the Horn and pressure states in that region to choose sides. They also ramped up their commercial investments. According to an April 2024 World Economic Forum memo, over the past decade, the UAE has poured $59 billion into Africa, making it the continent’s fourth largest foreign direct investor (nearly catching up with China, the EU, and the United States), while Saudi Arabia has invested $26 billion; many of these investments are concentrated in the Horn. And as Gulf powers began to question the longevity of U.S. security commitments in the Middle East, some worked to more intentionally build influence across the Red Sea that could protect their interests.
A feedback loop emerged. Waning U.S. engagement with the Horn and other parts of Africa widened the space for middle powers’ own interventions, and middle powers’ growing influence then diminished the United States’ return on its diplomatic investments, hastening its strategic retreat. These middle powers infused foreign direct investment into the Horn and sometimes sought to help resolve conflicts. Qatar, for instance, recently helped mediate a de-escalation between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and last year, Turkey calmed tensions between Ethiopia and Somalia. But inevitably, different efforts also competed or sometimes worked at cross-purposes, driving instability.
CENTER SPREAD
Sudan has become the epicenter of this middle-power contest. Its rich agricultural land along the Nile and its strategic location at the juncture of the African and Arab worlds—connecting central Africa to the Red Sea and eastern Africa—make it hugely important to nearby powers’ economies and security. In 2018, the disastrous three-decade reign of Sudan’s Islamist dictator, Omar al-Bashir, ran out of steam when a revolt begun by Sudanese youth ousted him. A fledgling civilian government was established, which Washington had every interest in helping succeed.
This was a historic chance for Sudan. After Burhan and Hemedti, the military leaders, imposed a junta in the wake of Bashir’s downfall, the United States as well as some European and African countries made some effort to back the civilian leaders and protesters in the street. They helped broker a power-sharing deal between the junta and civilian politicians that included an eventual transition to full civilian rule.
But the region’s changing power dynamic favored the generals, who had close ties with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And the United States (as well as Europe) failed to seize the moment to back Sudan’s civilian transition: for instance, Washington failed to lift its Bashir-era financial restrictions on Khartoum until December 2020, weakening the civilian administration in its infancy. In 2021, Burhan and Hemedti ousted the short-lived transitional government in a coup.
After war broke out two years later between Burhan’s SAF and Hemedti’s RSF, Egypt immediately increased its public and covert support for the SAF. And the SAF won new support, including from Turkey (which, like the UAE, seeks to control a Red Sea port in Sudan), as well as Algeria, Iran, and Qatar. These countries all recognized Burhan’s regime as Sudan’s legitimate government.
The UAE continues to deny that it is arming and funding the RSF. But African, Arab, U.S., and European officials widely believe that the UAE is behind the massive logistical operation that has kept the RSF supplied. The group’s main supply route currently runs through Libyan territory controlled by the powerful general and politician Khalifa Haftar, a close UAE ally. Although the UAE has numerous interests in Sudan (including gold), it is easy to overstate the degree to which its involvement in the conflict constitutes a resource grab. Its efforts appear driven by a much broader desire to project power through economic might, including across northern, central, and eastern Africa—and an apparent refusal to create a precedent by abandoning a bellicose proxy. The UAE has also publicly taken issue with Burhan’s tactical wartime alliance with former Bashir officials, given Abu Dhabi’s aversion to Islamist ideology.
Officially, Saudi Arabia has remained neutral in the Sudanese conflict. But it has boosted its diplomatic and economic support to the SAF, including by closely advising its leadership and arguing its case in international forums. Eastern Sudan sits just across the Red Sea from Jeddah, Mecca, and many huge development projects further north on Saudi Arabia’s coast. Riyadh fears that if the Sudanese state collapses entirely, its adversaries could gain a foothold there and instability could spill into the Red Sea, driving insecurity, trafficking, and extremism and reducing its ability to capitalize on the Saudi coast’s potential as a logistics and tourism hub. It also worries about further spillover into Egypt, a key ally.
This tangle of outside influence reflects a continent-wide trend. In a 2024 report, the Peace Research Institute Oslo found that over the previous decade, the number of conflicts in Africa had doubled and that “civil conflicts have become increasingly internationalized.” The report went on: “One or more third-party governments are involved in the conflict through contributing or deploying combat personnel in support of the objective of either side.”
WAR WITHOUT PEACE
Even as it has expanded, the conflict is polarizing the region into two main blocs, pro-SAF and pro-RSF. Eritrea is now providing direct support to the SAF, while Djibouti provides rhetorical support. In May, Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh, in a rare media interview, accused the UAE of destabilizing the region. Eritrea’s reclusive president, Isaias Afwerki, followed suit. Meanwhile, Chad, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, eastern Libya, parts of Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda—all of which have key financial or security relationships with the UAE—are friendly with the RSF, although some (such as Ethiopia and South Sudan) have attempted to maintain neutrality.
This loose arrangement of blocs, however, does not make the conflict simpler to resolve. The tangle of regional interests has not only aggravated the war, enabling both the RSF and the SAF to continue fighting despite defeats, but has also rendered peacemaking all but impossible. The conflict could not be nipped in the bud because various powers competed to play mediator. And mediation efforts have lacked a center of gravity. In the first six months after the conflict broke out, U.S. and Saudi officials teamed up to try to broker peace between the RSF and the SAF. This process sidelined Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and two rounds of talks in Jeddah made little progress.
Heads of state from Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya almost succeeded in getting Burhan and Hemedti to sit down face to face in December 2023. But without the backing of key Arab countries, that initiative failed, as did a mediation effort by Egypt and the UAE in early 2024. An August 2024 U.S. effort to organize peace talks in Switzerland fizzled out after the SAF, facing insufficient collective pressure from its Arab allies to attend, refused to show up.
The second Trump administration has shifted tack and tried to focus on getting Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE aligned on how the war should end. This effort began in June and has been spearheaded by Massad Boulos, the U.S. special adviser for Africa and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law. But even after the mid-September announcement that an agreement had been reached, Burhan distanced himself from the proposal and the RSF ramped up its military offensives.
Peacemaking has not only become more complex in Sudan; it has also necessarily become less ambitious. The greater the number of interests that require accommodation, the smaller the area of overlap between all of their demands. Comprehensive peace deals (such as the 2005 agreement that ended Sudan’s prior civil war) have been replaced by cease-fires that do little more than freeze a status quo, because that is all that everyone can agree on.
TEAM OF RIVALS?
As peacemaking—and even the achievement of a cease-fire—struggles in Sudan, its devastating war continues to escalate. Newer and larger weapons are still pouring into the country, including advanced drones and counterdrone technologies. In May, for instance, after the SAF recaptured Khartoum, the RSF launched long-range drone strikes on Port Sudan, which sits just across the Red Sea from Jeddah—a dramatic expansion of the war’s ambit. The war has already collapsed Khartoum and expelled its professional, educated, and creative classes into the diaspora. No outside power alone has the sway to force the belligerents to the table. Even if an effort by the Trump administration to mediate makes more headway, it will rely on regional powers’ decision to choose peace over war.
And the war’s relentless trajectory suggests that regional competition could jump across Sudan’s borders. Ethiopia and Eritrea have maintained a fragile peace since a war between the two countries ended in 2000, but tension between them is steadily rising, provoking fears that a new interstate war will break out. A new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea could prove even more deadly than Sudan’s conflict and could easily merge with the war in Sudan, given the region’s existing polarization: Djibouti, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would likely side with Eritrea, while the UAE is Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s most important foreign ally.
No outside power alone has the sway to force Sudan’s belligerents to the table.The discourse about an emerging multipolar world often assumes that its main flash points will arise from competition between great powers—China and Russia, as well as the United States. The Sudanese case shows how unmanageable conflicts may emerge outside these countries’ core spheres of influence. In the Horn, numerous rising regional middle powers with different but overlapping interests and leverage are increasingly outmuscling China and Russia, whose interventions in the region are still limited.
In August, the RSF swore in its own parallel, Darfur-based Sudanese government. This move deepened the de facto partitioning of the country into two separate zones of administration, creating fresh barriers to any attempt to piece Sudan back together. The United States will still be indispensable to efforts to reverse such a de facto partition, not least because it remains the lone superpower interested in doing so.
Sudan’s disaster could become a bitter but valuable lesson on overreach for regional powers, prompting them to learn how to manage their competition, ideally without relying so heavily on the United States as a middleman. But the prospect of playing a smaller role must not be an excuse for the United States to walk away. Some in Washington argue that because influencing peacemaking in the Horn is harder than it used to be, the U.S. government should pull way back. But that will only encourage even more instability. Washington will need to learn to adapt and contribute to mediation processes in which it is one of various players, not the decider. Otherwise, catastrophic wars like Sudan’s could multiply.