With no end in sight to the war or its threats, the international debate on Sudan has been is increasing aim criticism of the failure of the West to take action and its lack of interest in doing so. This answer is certainly valid: No Western government considers Sudan a priority right now, despite the estimated death toll of more than 120,000 since 2023, including 60,000 since. October 2025 only in El Fasher. It also, however, hides the painful truth that the Western powers’ options in Sudan are very few. Not only is there little will to act; there is also little ability to do anything.
This is not just a scary thing for the people of Sudan. It is also indicative of the failure of analysis and, more seriously, the poor condition of diplomats in many countries. The popular high-profile, direct diplomatic tools—mediation, sanctions, diplomatic pressure and/or condemnation—have no effect on these particular parties, in this case. The remaining options are difficult; difficult; danger; and, at a time when the diplomatic corps is so painfully stretched, perhaps completely out of reach.
With no end in sight to the war or its threats, the international debate on Sudan has been is increasing aim criticism of the failure of the West to take action and its lack of interest in doing so. This answer is certainly valid: No Western government considers Sudan a priority right now, despite the estimated death toll of more than 120,000 since 2023, including 60,000 since. October 2025 only in El Fasher. It also, however, hides the bitter truth that the Western powers’ options in Sudan are very limited. Not only is there little will to act; there is also little ability to do anything.
This is not just a scary thing for the people of Sudan. It is also indicative of the failure of analysis and, more seriously, the poor condition of diplomats in many countries. The popular high-profile, direct diplomatic tools—mediation, sanctions, diplomatic pressure and/or condemnation—have no effect on these particular parties, in this case. The remaining options are difficult; difficult; danger; and, at a time when the diplomatic corps is so painfully stretched, perhaps completely out of reach.
The West has almost no direct influence on the two main decision-making fighters in Sudan, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”) of the Rapid Support Force (RSF). Until 2019, Burhan was a middle-level commander in the Sudanese army in South Sudan and Darfur. Hemeti led a group of people supported by the government janjaweed fighters, the official unit of the Border Guard, and finally the RSF. Burhan seized power in 2019, and Hemeti served as his deputy until the RSF attacked SAF positions in April 2023. These men see themselves locked in a winner-takes-all fight to the death for power, and have little interest in making any concessions that could deny them the slightest advantage.
At least for the time being, none are particularly concerned with Sudan’s national interests or international influence. Both spent much of their young lives as representatives of the Sudan National Congress Party government under Omar al-Bashir, a decades-long international community with severe economic sanctions. Neither Burhan (a former loyalist of the National Congress Party) nor Hemeti (an ethnic/religious extremist accused of genocide in the early 2000s) ever expected to be welcomed by the international community, or to have easy access to travel papers or international banking. Due to this situation, there is nothing that the West can offer or even threaten to register as a priority.
There is one possible angle to leverage. Both fighters are very dependent various partners outside Sudan, which opens up at least some possibility of indirect influence. They have neither broad public support nor the ability to access full domestic production capacity, forcing them to look elsewhere for mercenaries, weapons, ammunition, fuel and other essential resources.
They also need sources of hard money to pay for these things, and agents who can transfer the money on their behalf. If both the SAF and the RSF could be cut off from their international ties, then their ability to continue fighting would be severely limited, and there might be more room for other Sudanese actors to assert themselves.
This, however, will be a very difficult task, which will require a detailed and accurate picture of the situation: who cooperates with whom to transfer what, and how. This would be a very serious move under the best of circumstances, and the current situation—replete with misinformation and disinformation, rumors and rumors presented as fact, unreliable journalism, and hidden transactions in faraway places and industrial-scale money laundering—is far from ideal. Handling this kind of task would require a significant investment of intelligence and – most importantly – diplomatic resources of a working level.
In fact, isolating the fighters would require the involvement of many actors in a coordinated diplomatic campaign. The The Wagner group and various actors in United Arab Emirates, LibyaChad, and Colombia they have given RSF great support; actors in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia have also been accused of supporting the RSF. Egypt and Saudi Arabia they have supported the SAF; Eritrea has positioned itself as an RSF partner, although the amount of practical assistance it has provided is unclear. Russia, Turkey and Iran both have provided weapons and equipment to the SAF and RSF.
Actors in South Africa, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman have all been accused of interfering in various ways with the fighters or both. The participation of South Sudan and the Central African Republic——connected in a network of transnational communities and governmental and non-governmental relations–is more complex than that of other actors. Trying to close one of these connections in isolation would be like trying to eat soup with a fork; without a detailed plan, efforts would produce nothing.
Complicating matters, a decisive victory by either fighter would surely prove the biggest disaster for Sudan and region. Burhan and Hemeti each have long and extensive histories of gross human rights abuses in Darfur and elsewhere; in any case, the two shared responsibility for the 2019 massacre in Khartoum that left hundreds of civilians dead, injured, and rape victims.
Lacking strong public support, a belligerent would inevitably move to consolidate his position following a military victory through repression and disempowerment of the public. Both, moreover, already have enemies and potential enemies in the region, many of whom have already made clear their intention to intervene to disrupt the victory or consolidation of the next regime. Therefore, efforts to separate them will require careful coordination, timing, and frequent adjustments to affect both in parallel.
Is this even possible? There are too many variables and unknowns to hazard a prediction without more information, but it would be a moral failure to dismiss it as impossible at this point. Whether the West is capable of doing it is a different question, and the hard truth is that the answer may be no.
Visible parts of diplomacy are the tip of the iceberg at the best of times. Each successful VIP diplomat oversees the work of scores or even hundreds of working-level diplomats who serve out of the public eye, especially those abroad. If VIPs steer the ship, the diplomatic forces at work – at home and abroad – are sails, rudder, maps and GPS.
The United States’ Cold War diplomatic corps, while deeply flawed in several respects, was an undisputed force. Career-level foreign service officers were expected to be active anywhere and everywhere, and were given the resources and political support to support them.
However, after the end of the Cold War, the Clinton administration quickly cut the budget of the State Department, which, in practice, fell sharply at the level of work, resulting in the removal of several thousand State Department employees and the closure of more than 20 diplomatic posts and 50 offices of the United States Agency for International Development. This began the process of eroding the working level diplomatic instruments which it continues largely uninterrupted today.
At the same time, successive US administrations continued to rapidly establish diplomatic analysis and decision-making at the VIP, VVIP, or even presidential level. This has increasingly created information and decision barriers that isolate key decision makers from working level bodies. It has also left much of the working level crippled by the absence of clear instructions, and over time, limited opportunities for hands-on experience and training. Frequent top-down turmoil within the State under Secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Rex Tillerson, and Marco Rubio, moreover, has greatly exacerbated these trends.
Other Western working-class diplomatic organizations, having long benefited from cooperation with their counterparts in the United States, moved to adapt to the changes in the United States. They faced their own funding constraints and the changing political environment, however; European states in particular found it necessary to devote significant diplomatic resources to maintaining stability within the EU. At the same time, increasing pressure on NATO, broader US/EU cooperation, the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and varying relations with China have pushed all of these diplomatic institutions and their partnerships to—or beyond—their limits.
Undoubtedly, it is the responsibility of the Western countries to eliminate every possibility that can end or reduce the disaster in Sudan. At the same time, political analysis must reject the insistence that there is always at least one possible non-threatening option, and that Western nations (or for that matter, non-Western “great powers”) are always capable of acting on it. Although it seems obvious, this is a surprisingly persistent and widespread error, resulting in part from the practices of donors and fund-raisers, but also from misconceptions about the power of “superpowers” that are rooted in collective political analysis.
The crisis in Sudan highlights the dire need for comprehensive reform of diplomatic institutions if they are to be fit for purpose. That must include not only oversight and zero tolerance for waste but also funding and resources commensurate with the size and scope of their responsibilities and activities, even if they are not open to the public. It must also include extensive restructuring of personnel, information flow, and authority to reflect the responsibilities of career-level executives—especially the foreign service—and allow them to do their jobs effectively.
In some cases, this may require rebuilding key aspects of these institutions from the ground up. This is not an easy option, but it is the best available if countries want effective diplomatic instruments to manage an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.
