not india related, for now and on the surface atleast
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/sudan/su ... hings-come
On September 12, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States announced a joint road map for ending Sudan’s devastating two-and-a-half-year civil war. The announcement, on its own terms, was a breakthrough. Soon after its outbreak in Khartoum in April 2023, the conflict entangled a variety of regional actors. Egypt and a number of other nearby states have supported General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the government now based in Port Sudan; the UAE—and, increasingly, other countries that depend on Abu Dhabi, such as Chad—has backed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who had been Burhan’s deputy in Sudan’s previous military junta.
The sponsors of the plan, known collectively as the Quad, are thus Arab powers that have a great deal of sway in Sudan (including Saudi Arabia, which has mostly sought to remain neutral) and the United States. Brokering such an agreement among these outside countries had long proved elusive, and it took months of high-level U.S.-led negotiations to reach agreement on a joint road map. The plan called for a three-month humanitarian truce between the two warring factions. This would be followed by a permanent cease-fire and a political process led by the Sudanese to choose a new civilian-led government.
not to be confused with the other quad, which is a totally important and vital setup in some other unnnamed part of the world
After years of vicious fighting, hope surged that there might finally be a way to end a catastrophe that has killed up to 150,000, displaced a quarter of the country’s population of 50 million, and left innumerable Sudanese without essential services. Yet the plan already appears to be stalling. The fighting in Sudan has continued to rage, and the SAF has publicly rejected the proposal. Bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into closer alignment was a necessary first step, but a chasm still separates the warring sides. It also remains unclear whether the new U.S. administration is prepared for the difficult long-term engagement that would be needed to bring the plan to fruition.
the number above is surely commensurate with however much attention is being paid to it on a global scale, this war has directed discussions about it everyday in all parts of life with constant focus on papers, and on the telly, xitter and other sm arenas have turned into virtual battlegrounds on ways and means to end this conflict with multiple hot takes by celebs, wannabe celebs, and realms of worshippers of both...or maybe that is some other, more important conflict(s), who can really say? some souls are chaff and only fit for reaping, others are accorded a more dignified, almost humanistic status, a subject clearly fit for discussion, the arbitrator of this though and of the global reckoning in general is the greatest faceless unknown of our times
But over the past 15 years, the United States’ influence has diminished. At the same time, rising regional powers have spotted commercial and diplomatic openings and attempted to pull the Horn of Africa much closer, politically and economically, to the Middle East. This has won the region some needed investment, and some of these powers have proved agile mediators. But the Gulf’s sponsorship of warring parties has, on the whole, made conflicts much harder to resolve.
In this sense, the war in Sudan has become a harbinger of what more wars could look like in the future: messy and seemingly insoluble, drawing in ever more rival outside powers, each with its own irreconcilable interests. Once they start, these kinds of wars are very difficult to end, because no single actor has the authority to convene all the players or corral the other outside powers. They can be extremely destructive, given the advanced weaponry outsiders can now pour in. And the very competitive dynamic that inflames these conflicts in the first place often dooms them to continue as different countries back competing frameworks or jostle for the right to play peacemaker. Peace deals that do cross the finish line rarely accomplish more than to freeze a fractured status quo.
Its record was very checkered: in the years since the United States greenlighted a 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, an Islamist insurgency has taken over swaths of the country. Beginning in the 1990s in Sudan, the United States helped back a southern-based insurgency to put pressure on the Islamist government in Khartoum, resulting in South Sudan’s secession. The new nation quickly slipped into civil war, and northern Sudan struggled economically. More generally, the United States’ liberalizing agenda did little to bolster weak states’ governance.
Still, the United States’ relative hegemony and consistent engagement helped shore up basic interstate stability and centralize peacemaking efforts. Although border disputes between Horn states festered, few local leaders risked the censure that would come with efforts to outright annex neighboring territory. When border wars or major civil wars broke out, the United States steered attempts toward diplomatic resolutions, often by backing multilateral efforts. U.S. officials, for instance, threw their support behind the Algiers agreement (crafted by the UN and the Organization of African Unity) that Ethiopia and Eritrea signed in 2000. The crisis in Darfur in the early years of the twentieth century drew the attention both of U.S. leaders and the American public, and Washington pressured Sudanese negotiators to accept the 2005 Kenyan-led peace process that ended Sudan’s previous civil war and closely coordinated with the African Union’s oversight of the partition of Sudan and South Sudan. In 2012, U.S. pressure was key in stopping a short-lived invasion of Sudan by South Sudan, which risked becoming a new interstate war.
A scramble for influence in the Horn intensified following the 2011 Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia and the UAE blamed Qatar and Turkey for backing the popular uprising. Each country’s effort to diminish Qatar’s power involved trying to box it out of the Horn and pressure states in that region to choose sides. They also ramped up their commercial investments. According to an April 2024 World Economic Forum memo, over the past decade, the UAE has poured $59 billion into Africa, making it the continent’s fourth largest foreign direct investor (nearly catching up with China, the EU, and the United States), while Saudi Arabia has invested $26 billion; many of these investments are concentrated in the Horn. And as Gulf powers began to question the longevity of U.S. security commitments in the Middle East, some worked to more intentionally build influence across the Red Sea that could protect their interests.
A feedback loop emerged. Waning U.S. engagement with the Horn and other parts of Africa widened the space for middle powers’ own interventions, and middle powers’ growing influence then diminished the United States’ return on its diplomatic investments, hastening its strategic retreat. These middle powers infused foreign direct investment into the Horn and sometimes sought to help resolve conflicts. Qatar, for instance, recently helped mediate a de-escalation between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and last year, Turkey calmed tensions between Ethiopia and Somalia. But inevitably, different efforts also competed or sometimes worked at cross-purposes, driving instability.
As peacemaking—and even the achievement of a cease-fire—struggles in Sudan, its devastating war continues to escalate. Newer and larger weapons are still pouring into the country, including advanced drones and counterdrone technologies. In May, for instance, after the SAF recaptured Khartoum, the RSF launched long-range drone strikes on Port Sudan, which sits just across the Red Sea from Jeddah—a dramatic expansion of the war’s ambit. The war has already collapsed Khartoum and expelled its professional, educated, and creative classes into the diaspora. No outside power alone has the sway to force the belligerents to the table. Even if an effort by the Trump administration to mediate makes more headway, it will rely on regional powers’ decision to choose peace over war.
The discourse about an emerging multipolar world often assumes that its main flash points will arise from competition between great powers—China and Russia, as well as the United States. The Sudanese case shows how unmanageable conflicts may emerge outside these countries’ core spheres of influence. In the Horn, numerous rising regional middle powers with different but overlapping interests and leverage are increasingly outmuscling China and Russia, whose interventions in the region are still limited.
In August, the RSF swore in its own parallel, Darfur-based Sudanese government. This move deepened the de facto partitioning of the country into two separate zones of administration, creating fresh barriers to any attempt to piece Sudan back together. The United States will still be indispensable to efforts to reverse such a de facto partition, not least because it remains the lone superpower interested in doing so.
Sudan’s disaster could become a bitter but valuable lesson on overreach for regional powers, prompting them to learn how to manage their competition, ideally without relying so heavily on the United States as a middleman. But the prospect of playing a smaller role must not be an excuse for the United States to walk away. Some in Washington argue that because influencing peacemaking in the Horn is harder than it used to be, the U.S. government should pull way back. But that will only encourage even more instability. Washington will need to learn to adapt and contribute to mediation processes in which it is one of various players, not the decider. Otherwise, catastrophic wars like Sudan’s could multiply.