Washington Is Becoming Irrelevant in Sudan. A Sanctions Strategy Could Change That.

The crisis in Sudan, now 15 months in the making, is worsening at an accelerating pace. More than half the population is in desperate need of humanitarian aid, while increased fighting has only worsened the toll on civilians, creating massive new numbers of internally displaced people already weakened by restrictions on food and medical aid. By the end of the year, some projections estimate that more than 2 million people could die from famine, dwarfing the number of battlefield deaths.

Against this backdrop, the prospects for a lull in fighting, let alone peace talks, appear increasingly remote. Sudan’s recalcitrant army leader, General Mohammed Fattah al-Burhan, rejects any suggestion of negotiating with his rival, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) general Mohammed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, who he believes to be both a bad faith negotiator but also aided by deep-pocketed and politically connected backers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The most prominent civilian leader, former prime minister Abdallah Hamdok, long associated with powerful UAE backers, has tried to assemble a civilian coalition that offers an alternative to military rule and war, but his more recent exculpation of the UAE for any responsibility in promoting war in Sudan is likely the final indignity to an already moribund political career.

Meanwhile, Washington’s peripatetic special envoy for Sudan, former congressman Tom Perriello, has been crisscrossing the region trying to cobble together a coalition of stakeholders to pressure the parties to, if not make peace, refrain from expanding the war front in ways that worsen the already dire situation for civilians. But he has been dealt a weak hand by a State Department seemingly content to see him flounder with little staff and high-level U.S. leadership more interested in advancing hard geopolitical interests in Ukraine and Gaza than saving lives in Sudan, a country at best on the periphery of U.S. national security concerns.

Congress has remained involved, though only marginally effective, making genocide declarations and calling for a more robust diplomatic effort from the Biden team, including a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Sudan’s implosion and better utilization of the tools available to leverage what is left of U.S. power and influence in the region.

Congressional leaders have rightly pointed out that at moments of crisis, there is a formula for developing and managing a U.S. government response that begins by clearly identifying the United States’ near and long-term interests and tasking the intelligence community to assess various scenarios from worst case to most likely. But most important is the effort to take inventory of the variety of tools and points of leverage the United States has for advancing its interests. Such a process necessarily entails judging potential costs and tradeoffs and adjudicating where interests compete, as they almost always do.

This overall process is managed by the National Security Council staff and is approved by a Deputies Committee or National Security Council Principals Committee. Ultimately, if a decision is taken, for example, to pressure the UAE over its military support to General Hemedti’s RSF, it’s the deputies and principals who must decide it, with full understanding and after weighing the potential trade-offs to other U.S. interests. 

Such processes can be arduous, time consuming, and surface substantial differences in approach and priority across a host of regional and functional divides within the U.S. national security apparatus. That was the case more than a decade ago when the Obama administration launched a highly publicized strategy review to determine how best to achieve the seemingly competing objectives of pressuring Sudan’s government to end the genocide in Darfur while incentivizing that same regime to implement the final stages of the country’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ultimately paved the way for South Sudan’s independence. As painful as that process was, it produced a strategy that served as a roadmap for multiple U.S. Envoys to successfully advance both our interests and our values.

Sadly, there is no outward suggestion that such a process is taking place today. Recently, an unnamed, former Biden administration official told the Financial Times, “in Africa, [the UAE is] both investing in positive ways and acting in destabilizing ways at the same time,” the kind of equivocation in the face of ongoing genocide and the dissolution of the third-largest country in Africa that suggests both a betrayal of U.S. values and its strategic interests on the altar of political expediency. Fortunately, not all current officials feel this way.

Washington’s UN ambassador, Linda Thomas Greenfield, along with Special Envoy Perriello, have repeatedly called out Abu Dhabi for their nefarious endgame in Sudan. That others openly note the UAE’s important contributions to a potential peacekeeping mission inside Gaza while also contributing to eventual reconstruction efforts there only further underscores the demand for a strategic planning process to arbitrate between these conflicting values and interests.

Absent a process to adjudicate these policy differences, Biden‘s national security team should, at a minimum, better empower its Sudan policy with the necessary tools to make a difference, if not at least be taken seriously. If it doesn’t, Washington’s dwindling leverage is sure to evaporate entirely, leaving it on the sidelines as Sudan’s neighbors and regional states decide the country’s fate with no input from Washington. Already, a host of mediation processes led separately by the United Nations, African Union, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have had little to no substantive input from the United States.

The quickest and most effective way of adding muscle to the United States’ diplomatic engagement would be to develop a proper sanctions strategy that is both calibrated to facts on the ground and reflective of how sanctions have been used in Sudan in the past to drive outcomes.

Since the start of the war in Sudan, U.S. sanctions have been ad hoc and episodic at best, seemingly intended to punish individual criminal acts, like with the recent targeting of mid-level RSF commanders, but remaining largely divorced from driving toward any stated strategic objectives. Indeed, five separate rounds of U.S. sanctions since the start of the war have barely registered with either of the parties, save for the targeting of Hemedti’s brother Abdulrahim Dagalo. Instead, this “steady drumbeat” approach appears more intended to only signal that “Washington remains engaged” rather than to deliver the message that “Washington is serious.” U.S. Treasury officials, who are responsible for the design and implementation of sanctions, are fond of saying that “the ultimate objective of sanctions is behavioral change.” Sadly, U.S. sanctions look neither serious nor engaged and have not brought about the intended behavioral change from the warring sides.

One reason for this anemic approach to sanctions has purportedly been the administration’s “near obsession” with reconvening a peace process in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to one European diplomat, and the fear that sanctioning the most senior leaders of either the Sudanese Armed Forces or the RSF would deter them from attending and quash the only firm objective Washington has.

But leaving aside the high and growing unlikeliness of peace talks ever reconvening in Jeddah, with one senior Sudanese official saying that “going to Jeddah will only happen over our dead bodies,” the history of sanctions in Sudan shows that they have in fact brought recalcitrant actors to the table when they have been resistant and opened new channels of dialogue when none existed. Indeed, sanctioning General Hemedti or General Burhan could well open new direct communications channels to them where none currently exist and increase Washington’s leverage over a situation where it has allowed itself to become sidelined. Central to that is viewing sanctions as a motivator for future steps and not a punishment for past transgressions. Rather than threatening their imposition, we should be negotiating their removal—then we will see how quickly the sides are prepared to come to the negotiating table.

A 2009 report to Congress by the Treasury Department entitled “Effectiveness of U.S. Economic Sanctions with Respect to Sudan” provides an important historical lens that illustrates this approach. The report details how in response to ongoing genocide in Darfur, the Treasury implemented sanctions against three high-level Sudanese leaders and 31 Sudanese companies in May 2007, focusing on the changes those sanctions, announced by the president himself, made in the bilateral relationship and in the Sudanese’s own behavior.

As the report noted,

"A week after the May 2007 designations, the Sudanese National Assembly convened a special session to discuss these latest sanctions and issued a parliamentary decree denouncing them . . . Two weeks later, in June 2007, President Bashir announced that Sudan would agree to a deployment of a joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur, after a lengthy period of resisting this step."

It also noted the following:

"According to senior U.S. officials, high-level GOS [Government of Sudan] representatives have repeatedly expressed strong concern in meetings over the impacts of U.S. sanctions . . . In a noteworthy example, at a 2007 meeting with U.S. officials, a cabinet member in the Sudanese government [traveled to Washington to complain] that U.S. sanctions were causing daily harm to Sudan."

The report went on to conclude that

"In the past year, economic sanctions have assumed a more prominent role in the bilateral dialogue between the United States and the GOS. For example, during the most recent negotiations in the spring of 2008 on bilateral relations, the GOS delegation presented a timeframe for the lifting of sanctions as well a list of “urgent measures” that the GOS wants the U.S. government to undertake. All of these urgent measures related to U.S. economic sanctions, placing sanctions at the center of the talks . . . the GOS’s pointed objections to sanctions indicates the meaningful burden that sanctions continue to impose . . . This report concludes that U.S. sanctions against Sudan have applied constructive pressure that has affected key Sudanese officials’ decision-making calculi."

Before sanctions, Sudan was resistant to any bilateral engagement with the United States. After sanctions, it sought out those engagements because they allowed it to plead its case for sanctions removal. Along the way, Washington was able to press its case for advancing its interests in Darfur. The same can be true again. But Washington’s strategy cannot be couched in the same nuanced and ad hoc manner that current U.S. sanctions have been.

To be effective, they need to be nested in an overall strategic approach—one that is announced by the president or cabinet officials in a way that demonstrates a renewed commitment to leading an international response to end the war—and be tied to specific asks within the context of a strategic roadmap, specifically attendance at peace talks and the lifting of blocks to humanitarian access. Only when those asks are sufficiently met should sanctions be removed. 

Sudan is home to the largest humanitarian crisis, the largest food security crisis, and the largest displacement crisis in the world today. And it could soon present a strategic crisis for Washington as the centrifugal forces of ethnic violence, political instability, and terror gripping the country radiate outward from the collapsing Sudanese state. Only a month into his mandate, Special Envoy Perriello remarked that the Sudan crisis was “barreling towards a point of no return.” Now is the time for the Biden administration to mount a serious response.

Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.