Ben Rhodes, a former United States deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, famously called Washington’s foreign policy establishment “the Blob” to describe its entrenched ecosystem of think tanks, former officials, journalists and funders that perpetuate a narrow vision of power, global order and legitimate actors. This apparatus not only sustains conservative inertia but also defines the limits of what is considered possible in policy. In Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year conflict, these self-imposed boundaries are proving fatal.

A particularly insidious practice within the Blob is the invocation of moral and rhetorical equivalence, portraying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) as comparable adversaries. This ostensibly balanced US stance, evident in establishment analyses and diplomatic statements, represents not an impartial default but a deliberate political construct. By equating a criminalised, externally backed militia with a national army tasked with state duties, it sanitises RSF atrocities, recasting them as mere wartime exigencies rather than orchestrated campaigns of ethnic cleansing, urban sieges and terror.

Reports from Human Rights Watch on ethnic cleansing in West Darfur, civilian killings, rape and unlawful detentions in Gezira and Khartoum and United Nations fact-finding missions confirm the RSF’s deliberate targeting of civilians. Furthermore, a report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) monitor from late 2024 attributed roughly 77 percent of violent incidents against civilians to the RSF, underscoring this asymmetry, yet the Blob’s discourse frequently obscures it.

This notion has dominated US and international discourse on Sudan’s war since its outbreak when the then-US ambassador to Khartoum, John Godfrey, tweeted in the first month of the war a condemnation of RSF sexual violence but vaguely attributed it to unspecified “armed actors”. By refraining from explicitly identifying the perpetrators despite extensive documentation of the RSF’s responsibility for systematic rapes, gang rapes and sexual slavery, his wording essentially dispersed accountability across the warring parties and contributed to a climate of institutional impunity. RSF militiamen carry out their atrocities with confidence, knowing that responsibility will be blurred and its burden scattered across the parties.

What drives this equivalence? The Blob’s institutions often prioritise access over veracity. Framing the conflict........

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