Trump has pledged to help end the fighting in Sudan. Will it be enough?
By Jennifer Hansler, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump has pledged to use the “influence of the presidency to bring an immediate halt” to the two-year-old war in Sudan that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates has displaced nearly 12 million people.
It’s a significant development for a crisis that has shown little sign of abating, with some experts expressing cautious optimism that the US president’s intervention could help stop the fighting. However, they warn that a long-term end to the brutal conflict will not be easily reached.
Trump, who has touted himself as a peacemaker, said last week that it was “not on (his) charts to be involved” in ending the war. However, after a personal request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Trump said he would engage on the issue.
“I thought it was just something that was crazy and out of control. But I just see how important that is to you and to a lot of your friends in the room, Sudan, and we’re going to start working on Sudan,” he said at an event alongside the Saudi leader in Washington, DC last Wednesday.
The war has been raging for more than two years between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It has claimed tens of thousands of lives and given rise to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Both sides have been accused by the US of war crimes; the Biden administration declared that the RSF committed genocide.
The US has been working for years alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt as part of what’s known as “the Quad” to try to broker an end to the fighting and establish a path to a democratic transition in Sudan. The efforts by the Trump administration have been led by Special Envoy Massad Boulos, a Trump ally and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law.
But to date, the White House has stayed out of the negotiations, which changed with Trump’s direct commitment last week and has created some optimism among experts.
“I think there’s a whole bunch of very needed and necessary short-term objectives that Trump can help to bring about,” said Cameron Hudson, an Africa analyst and former director for African Affairs on the National Security Council. “There’s no question, and I think he’s uniquely positioned to do it.”
Still, a week after his commitment, it is unclear how specifically the president plans to personally use his influence. Diplomatic efforts continue to stall; Sudan’s top general rejected the latest ceasefire proposal this weekend and accused the mediators of bias.
“There is no sense that there’s a shift in Washington. There’s no sense that now there’s going to be a strategy,” said Kholood Khair, the director of the Khartoum-founded think tank Confluence Advisory. “It’s incredibly unlikely” that there is movement on a truce before the end of the year, Khair told CNN.
Questions of pressure
The conflict has been heavily fueled by outside support. There have been calls for the US to increase the pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which has been widely accused, including by US lawmakers and a UN panel of experts, of supplying weapons to the RSF. The UAE has denied this.
“Sudan has become, really, the theater of war for a lot of the US allies in the region,” Khair said.
There are questions about whether Trump himself is prepared to exert pressure on allies, particularly the UAE.
Khair noted that the administration “has interests with Abu Dhabi specifically related to Israel,” as the UAE is a member of the Abraham Accords. She argued that the accords, which Trump touts as a keystone foreign policy achievement, is “a far higher priority” to the US president than Sudan.
The Trump family also has business ties to the UAE, Khair noted. The Trump Organization is making millions from licensing agreements and cryptocurrency deals with government backed businesses in the country, Forbes reported last month.
The US has not publicly pressured the UAE, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio said recently that “something needs to be done to cut off the weapons and the support the RSF is getting.”
“I can just tell you at the highest levels of our government, that case is being made and that pressure is being applied to the relevant parties,” Rubio said in mid-November. He has spoken twice in two weeks with his Emirati counterpart.
Still, some experts told CNN that Trump is more likely to have sway over the outside actors than the warring parties themselves as the US has little leverage over the RSF or SAF.
The Trump administration is “well positioned to mediate among the outside powers, because all of those powers are their friends. It’s Turkey, it’s Egypt, it’s Qatar. It’s Saudi. It’s UAE,” Hudson said.
“Trump is made for that moment,” he added. “He’s made for the moment of striking an elite deal among big men. What he’s not made for is rolling up his sleeves and getting involved in the nitty gritty of Sudanese politics.”
Jeffrey Feltman, a former US special envoy for the Horn of Africa, said that Trump’s comments were “promising” and “encouraging.”
“I’m persuaded that the Quad countries will only take Sudan seriously… if they believe the President finds this important,” he told CNN. “There has to be a serious reduction in violence, and I don’t see where the US has the leverage to do that, meaning we have to use our leverage on those that do.”
However, Manal Taha, a security and peace process expert from Sudan, told CNN that a ceasefire between the two warring generals “is not going to stop the war and the suffering on the ground.”
The war has become tribal and ethnic, and there have been so many atrocities, the “generational trauma has to be addressed,” she said.
The-CNN-Wire
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