As Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), swept through Washington last week, the agenda was predictably packed with deals: a trillion-dollar investment pledge, access to advanced F-35 fighter jets, and coveted American AI technology dominated the headlines. Yet tucked within these transactions was a significant development for the civil war in Sudan.
Speaking at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum President Donald Trump said that Sudan “was not on my charts,” viewing the conflict as “just something that was crazy and out of control” until the Saudi leader pressed the issue. “His majesty would like me to do something very powerful having to do with Sudan,” Trump recounted, adding that MBS framed it as an opportunity for greatness.
The crown prince’s intervention highlights a crucial new reality that the path to peace, or continued war, in Sudan now runs even more directly through the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The fate of Sudan is being forged in the Gulf, and its future will be decided by which side has more sway in Trump’s White House.
The official peace process is, for all practical purposes, at a dead end. Trump's senior adviser for African affairs Massad Boulos’s proposal for a three-month humanitarian truce, designed as a first step in a roadmap laid out by the "Quad" (America, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt), has collided with the irreconcilable positions of the belligerents. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), having just secured a major victory in capturing the last army-controlled city in Darfur, nominally accepted the truce while continuing its offensive push.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), however, have dug in their heels. Their commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has been unequivocal, declaring there will be "no truce, no talks, or peace" until the RSF lays down its arms and that the current ceasefire proposal is “the worst yet” — alleging it was a plan to “nullify the existence of the armed forces” while leaving the RSF intact. The gap between the two sides is not one that can easily be bridged.
The grim turning point was the fall of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, to the RSF late last month after a brutal 18-month siege. The city’s capture was accompanied by horrifying reports of mass killings, systematic rape, and ethnically targeted atrocities that the UN’s human rights chief called a "the epicenter of human suffering in the world."
The RSF's battlefield successes are underwritten by significant foreign support, chiefly from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). UN experts and American lawmakers have accused the UAE of supplying the RSF with weapons, including advanced drones that have given it a decisive edge. Abu Dhabi officially denies this, but the reputational damage following the atrocities committed by the RSF in El Fasher has become undeniable. Estimates of the death toll in the city range from between 2,000 up to tens of thousands, while roughly 90,000 civilians have fled El Fasher since its takeover by the RSF according to U.N. Figures.
In an interesting admission, Anwar Gargash, a senior Emirati diplomatic envoy, recently conceded that the Gulf powers made a "critical mistake" by not opposing the 2021 coup that empowered both warring generals, and crushed the prospect of a “civilian government” which the UAE now calls for. While framed as a moment of sober reflection, the statement also serves as an attempt to distance Abu Dhabi from RSF’s gruesome actions and bolster its claim to neutrality in the conflict.
This diplomatic signaling is backed by an aggressive media campaign. Sky News Arabia, a joint venture partly controlled by the UAE’s vice president, dispatched a reporter into the besieged city of El Fasher, and the resulting coverage predictably downplayed humanitarian suffering while attempting to legitimize the paramilitary force. This on-the-ground narrative warfare complements a wider effort by Emirati influencers to shift blame onto the SAF and its Islamist allies for the atrocities committed in El Fasher, despite the army’s total withdrawal from the city when attacks on civilians took place. The calculation in Abu Dhabi appears to be that the fallout will be manageable, banking on its media machine and iron-clad ties with Trump to ride out the storm.
Yet this attempt at public repositioning is running up against hardening views in Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently signaled this growing impatience, stating recently that "something needs to be done to cut off the weapons and the support that the RSF is getting." At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing months earlier, he was even more explicit, naming the UAE directly and “other countries” of waging a “proxy war that is destabilizing the region."
Moreover, in a significant move last week, Senate Democrats, led by Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) , attempted to pass the 'Stand Up for Sudan Act,' which would have suspended all U.S. arms sales to the UAE until the White House could certify it was no longer arming the RSF. While the bill was blocked, it signals increasing, bipartisan congressional unease with Abu Dhabi's role in Sudan’s brutal war.
Indeed, the prolonged conflict has raised the specter of complete state collapse in Sudan, a risk accelerated by the fall of El Fasher. This victory has freed up RSF manpower and resources to press eastwards, threatening to reclaim central Sudan and Khartoum, from which the army expelled the group last year. This places the SAF (and the remnant state it represents) in existential peril, a worry now shared by a growing regional bloc, with Egypt and Turkey reportedly coordinating to bolster the SAF’s capacities.
Just after El Fasher’s fall, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty traveled to Port Sudan for urgent talks with army chief al-Burhan. In an interview conducted aboard his plane en route to Sudan’s wartime capital, Abdelatty framed Egypt’s intervention in clear national security terms, warning that the war risked a "division" that would be "extremely dangerous" not just for Sudan, but for Egypt itself. Abdelatty added that Sudan’s military “cannot be replaced by parallel entities,” a clear and forceful rejection of the RSF’s legitimacy.
For these regional powers, backing the army is a pragmatic calculation. The army-led government holds the country's U.N. seat and controls the last vestiges of state machinery necessary for providing public services and enabling the return of millions of displaced Sudanese, a process already underway, with the U.N. reporting that over a million people have returned to army-controlled Khartoum.
This prospect of a failed state on its doorstep deeply alarms Saudi Arabia, and is directly responsible for its recent and forceful diplomatic intervention. With less than 200 miles of the Red Sea separating them, Riyadh fears a failed Sudan would become a nexus for migrants, terrorism, and trafficking in arms and drugs like Captagon (for which production boomed after Sudan's civil war erupted), directly threatening its own security and the crown prince’s Vision 2030 goals. Against this backdrop, Saudi support for a central authority is a strategic imperative, and it has openly signaled its support for preserving Sudan's "legitimate institutions," a clear diplomatic endorsement of the national army over its paramilitary rival.
For now, the formal peace process, embodied by the Quad and led by a single American envoy with an impossibly vast portfolio, remains a sideshow. The real determinant of Sudan’s future will be shaped by the intensifying competition for influence with the White House between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
Mohammed bin Salman has made his move in Washington, the question now is how Mohammed bin Zayed will respond.
