Sudan's bloody war is immune to Trump's art of the deal

For over 500 days, the world watched as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) methodically strangled the last major army garrison in Darfur through siege, starvation, and indiscriminate bombardment. Now, with the RSF’s declaration of control over the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Sixth Infantry Division headquarters in El Fasher, that strategy has reached its grim conclusion.

The capture of the historic city is a significant military victory for the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, though it is victory that has left at least 1,500 civilians dead, including 100 patients in one hospital. It is one that formalizes the de facto partition of the country, with the RSF consolidating its control over all of Darfur, and governing from its newly established parallel government in Nyala, South Darfur.

The SAF-led state meanwhile, clings to the riverine center and the east from Port Sudan.

The Trump administration’s own envoy has now publicly voiced this fear, with the president’s senior adviser for Africa Massad Boulos warning against a "de facto situation on the ground similar to what we’ve witnessed in Libya.”

The fall of El Fasher came just a day after meetings of the so‑called “Quad,” a diplomatic forum which has brought together the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates in Washington. As those meetings were underway, indirect talks were convened in the U.S. capital between a Sudanese government delegation led by Sudan’s foreign minister, and an RSF delegation headed by Algoney Dagalo, the sanctioned paramilitary’s procurement chief and younger brother of its leader.

The Quad’s joint statement on September 12, which paved the way for these developments by proposing a three-month truce and a political process, was hailed as a breakthrough. In reality, it was a paper-thin consensus among states actively fueling opposite sides of the conflict; it was dismissed from the outset by Sudan’s army chief.

Into this quagmire has stepped the Trump administration, with Boulos at the helm. Fresh from brokering a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, the administration believes its deal-making playbook can be replicated in Sudan, but this is a profound misreading of the nature of the conflict and the tools available.

The Gaza war, for all its horror and complications, presented a more amenable set of circumstances. Significantly, there is near-total alignment between key regional players, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt sharing a common set of objectives, namely, the removal of Hamas, an end to military operations, and a stable “day after” scenario. This consensus enabled a diplomatic press on both sides, with Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt providing invaluable pressure on Hamas, while the U.S. exerted decisive leverage on Israel to accept the deal.

This facilitated the brokering of a clear quid pro quo — hostages for a pause in fighting. The immediate humanitarian catastrophe could thus be addressed in the interim, while the thorny questions of a final settlement were pushed to later phases.

Sudan presents the inverse of these conditions, with the primary differentiator being that the U.S is not a hegemon here, but a secondary player in a crowded field of ambitious middle powers. The conflict has become a theater for regional and international rivalries, drawing in the Arab members of the Quad, Iran, Turkey, and even Russia and Ukraine (the former as an arms supplier, the latter reportedly with special forces) all playing out within a collapsed state.

Given its lack of channels with the warring parties, the Trump administration’s response has been to apply an outside-in model, one it felt was validated by Egypt's energetic role in brokering the recent Gaza ceasefire. President Trump reportedly tasked Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to “lean on” al-Burhan of the SAF, entrusting him to deliver his ally to the Washington talks.

The model, however, begins to falter when the patron’s leverage over their client proves incomplete. It breaks down entirely under the weight of a more critical flaw: the active participation of mediators as arms suppliers to the belligerents, a reality the U.S. has so far been unwilling to counter with its own leverage.

This hypocrisy is especially glaring in the actions of the UAE. The ink was barely dry on the Quad’s September roadmap when UAE-supplied drones tightened the noose around El Fasher, enabling its eventual fall. Despite its public calls for an "immediate ceasefire" and a future built on "a civilian transition,” the provision of advanced weaponry and foreign fighters, including Colombian mercenaries reportedly hired through UAE-based firms, makes a mockery of the Quad’s own fifth principle, which provides that “an end to external military support is essential to ending the conflict.”

On the other side, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have tilted decisively toward the SAF. Their diplomatic backing has been reinforced by Egypt’s reported provision of arms and intelligence to the army. Hemedti himself accused Cairo of carrying out air strikes against RSF positions in central Sudan last year, on the back of army gains which saw the SAF re-take the capital, Khartoum, and surrounding states.

This external fragmentation is mirrored by an even more existential divide on the ground. Speaking in Atbara days after meeting with President Sisi, General al-Burhan delivered a fiery speech rejecting any imposed peace. He declared, "There will be no negotiation with any party," adding that the only acceptable process is one that "restores Sudan's dignity... and removes any future possibility of another rebellion." Al-Burhan clearly is not the pliant actor el-Sisi was supposed to deliver, rather he is the leader of a fragile wartime coalition that defines compromise as betrayal.

The army’s defiance is rooted in a framework that sees peace as surrender of the RSF. The SAF clings to the May 2023 Jeddah Declaration and its own political roadmap, which was submitted to the U.N., which presuppose the SAF as the guardian of the state and the RSF as a rebellious subordinate. This framework requires the RSF's complete surrender of its territorial gains as the price of admission to any political process, a non-negotiable for a force that has been in control of huge swathes of territory since the war erupted in April 2023.

Conversely, the RSF champions the principles of the 2024 Manama Agreement, the product of secret, high-level talks held in Bahrain between the deputies of the warring factions and facilitated by Egyptian and Emirati intelligence. The accord offers the RSF a pathway to political survival while allowing it to claim adherence to international legal norms, a claim it makes even as its forces perpetrate ethnic killings in El Fasher and after the Biden administration formally determined it committed genocide early this year.

The agreement demanded the handover of indicted war criminals to the International Criminal Court, a list that includes the deposed president Omar al-Bashir, who remains in SAF custody. It also called for the top-down reconstitution of the army and dismantling of the Islamist networks that have become indispensable to the army's military survival.

Predictably, the talks collapsed, with the army leadership disowning the agreement as its terms targeted Islamist hardliners who form the backbone of its war effort.

In such a polarized context, a successful mediation strategy requires more than just convening high-level meetings and issuing joint statements. It demands sustained engagement and requires a willingness to exert real pressure on external patrons, as well as a long-term commitment to supporting a genuinely inclusive political process.

The Trump administration, with its focus on quick wins and photo-ops, has so far shown little appetite for such an undertaking.