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.

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.

Indeed, amid a wider U.S. retreat from the region and the rise of ambitious middle powers nearby, the larger story is that the United States no longer possesses the clout it once had to underwrite mediation processes in many parts of Africa, necessitating unwieldy formats such as the Quad. Among outside actors, Washington had by far the greatest influence over the Horn of Africa in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Although it overreached badly in some of its interventions, it gave peacemaking a center of gravity. 

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.

The Horn of Africa has long been vulnerable to the influence of broad geopolitical shifts. During the Cold War, the Horn was an epicenter of proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union; as the Cold War drew to a close, the region experienced political convulsions: regime change in Ethiopia, state collapse in Somalia, and civil wars in Sudan. But although the post–Cold War era started with a shock, it stabilized somewhat as the United States became the dominant source of outside influence. Using plentiful sticks and carrots as well as diplomatic muscle at the regional level, Washington came to play an outsize role in attempting to stabilize the volatile Horn.

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........

© Foreign Affairs