Sudan suffers from a neglect and indifference that seems to reflect the new shape of global politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
August 13, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today’s WorldView<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Column by Ishaan Tharoor<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The superlatives in Sudan\u00a0<\/strong>remain stark<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong>The country is home to the world\u2019s worst hunger crisis, a man-made calamity brought on by more than two years of disastrous civil war and state collapse that has led to more than 150,000 deaths. It is home to the world\u2019s biggest displacement crisis, with more than 12 million people driven from their houses and neighborhoods. And it\u2019s home to the world\u2019s largest education crisis for children, with\u00a0as many as 17 million children<\/a>\u00a0out of school. The U.N.\u00a0projects<\/a>\u00a0that about 3.2 million children under 5 will suffer acute malnutrition in the next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A year ago, famine was declared in parts of the country, but that warning from the U.N. system did little to stem the hunger or focus international efforts on ending the conflict. At least 63 people, mostly women and children,\u00a0starved to death<\/a>\u00a0in the past week in the besieged city of El Fasher, the last major urban center in the sprawling Darfur region to not fall to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Local officials told reporters that number accounted only for those who made it to medical facilities in an area beset by battles and bombings. Aid has not entered the city for a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryone in El Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,\u201d Eric Perdison, the World Food Program\u2019s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, said in a statement last week<\/a>. \u201cPeople\u2019s coping mechanisms have been completely exhausted by over two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The RSF has renewed its offensive on the city after\u00a0losing its foothold in Khartoum<\/a>, the country\u2019s capital, to the rival Sudanese army. Its advances have driven tens of thousands from the nearby Zamzam displacement camp \u2014 itself the\u00a0target of attacks\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0massacres of civilians<\/a>. Such atrocities have played out across Sudan\u2019s vast expanse, but most intensely in Darfur, where prosecutors from the International Criminal Court say there\u2019s\u00a0plenty of evidence<\/a>\u00a0of war crimes. The region, which suffered a genocidal campaign by the RSF\u2019s precursor militia a generation ago, is largely in the group\u2019s control now. The territory held by the RSF has been indiscriminately bombed by the Sudanese military, while the RSF is accused of carrying out systematic rape and ethnic cleansing of nonethnic Arabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople are being deprived of water and food. Rape and sexual violence are being weaponized.<\/strong>\u00a0Abductions for ransom and to bolster the ranks of armed groups have become common practice,\u201d ICC deputy prosecutor\u00a0Nazhat Shameem Khan told the U.N. Security Council<\/a>\u00a0last month. \u201cWe have reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been and continue to be committed in Darfur.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the while, there\u2019s little hope of the war ending. Even as President Donald Trump casts himself as a global peacemaker, playing third-party presider over a series of truces and deals between various countries, the war in Sudan has barely received a mention from the White House. In one of its departing acts, the Biden administration declared that the RSF was committing genocide<\/a> in its rampages in Darfur. It also imposed sanctions<\/a> on both the country\u2019s rival leaders, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the RSF, and Gen. Abdel Fattah <\/strong>al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those largely symbolic acts did little to change the situation on the ground, as the war carried on. But Trump\u2019s decision to gut USAID, a crucial element of the international humanitarian system, led to vital clinics in Sudan shuttering<\/a> and the drying up of lifesaving assistance to some communities. The White House\u2019s cost-cutting in Washington may be measured in deaths in Sudan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A thicket of geopolitical interests run through the conflict, with outside powers ranging from Egypt and Turkey to Russia and the Gulf monarchies all involved in some way. Last week, Sudan\u2019s military\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0it shot down an Emirati plane carrying dozens of Colombian mercenaries aligned with the RSF. As they have done repeatedly amid\u00a0mounting allegations<\/a>\u00a0over its links to the RSF, UAE officials\u00a0rejected<\/a>\u00a0the charge as \u201cdeliberate propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The intractable nature of the war and the ubiquity of suffering is an indictment of a faltering international system. <\/strong>\u201cThe end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels,\u201d Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic\u2019s latest cover story<\/a>, reporting from a ramshackle camp for the displaced outside Khartoum. \u201cBut in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn\u2019t anything to replace it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reprising arguments trotted out by Israeli officials, French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy journeyed to Sudan to lecture Western leftists. \u201cHere, the death toll is at least three times that of Gaza,\u201d he wrote in the Wall Street Journal<\/a> this month. \u201cYet no one on American campuses, or among the Greta Thunbergs and other \u2018progressive\u2019 extreme leftists, cares. There are no protests. Radio silence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be sure, Western powers do not directly sponsor either of Sudan\u2019s warring parties, nor do they shield it from international censure at the United Nations \u2014 as the United States does in the case of Israel. But Sudan suffers from a neglect and indifference that seems to reflect the new shape of global politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Applebaum laid the crisis at the feet of U.S. decline. \u201cWe live in a very interesting, many people call it, new world order,\u201d Abdalla Hamdok, a former Sudanese prime minister, told her. \u201cThe world we got to know \u2014 the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post-Second World War consensus \u2014 is just no more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, a former Portuguese government minister and an outspoken commentator on global affairs, suggested the opposite. The war in Sudan, he argued on X<\/a>, reflects a global order that Trump may happily embrace, including the \u201ccomplete collusion between foreign policy and the military industrial complex,\u201d a disregard of the entreaties of humanitarian organizations and rights groups, and tolerance of human rights-abusing regimes that claim to be fighting Islamists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, he wrote, it \u201cshows what the American order looks like in all its main traits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n