Sudan Peace Talks Founder As Millions Face Starvation

Happy Monday! After that RFK Jr.-planted-a-dead-bear-cub-in-Central-Park story emerged earlier this month, we didn’t think we could be surprised by any developments involving the political scion and deceased mammals.

But then his daughter goes and tells Town & Country about the time her dad raced to the shore with a chainsaw, decapitated a beached whale, and tied its head to the top of the family car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick Kennedy recalled. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted airstrikes across southern Lebanon over the weekend targeting Hezbollah—the Iranian-backed, Lebanese-based terrorist group—and destroying thousands of its rocket launchers. Israeli officials said the strikes, which involved more than 100 fighter jets, were launched after Israeli intelligence reports found Hezbollah was planning imminent strikes across northern and central Israel. The terror group still launched more than 150 projectiles into Israel on Sunday, most of which were destroyed by Israeli air defenses, per the IDF. “This morning, we identified Hezbollah preparations to attack Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “In consensus with the Defense Minister and the IDF Chief-of-Staff, we directed the IDF initiate action to eliminate the threat.” Hezbollah said the attack was the “first phase” of its response to an Israeli strike last month that killed a Hezbollah commander in Beirut. 
• German authorities arrested a 26-year-old man—a suspected member of the Islamic State terrorist group—after he confessed to carrying out a knife attack at a festival in Solingen, Germany, on Friday night that killed three people and left eight others critically wounded. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack , and German law enforcement officials say the detained suspect was a Syrian refugee living in refugee housing near the festival. 
• Ukraine and Russia exchanged captured soldiers on Saturday in a prisoner swap that involved 230 prisoners-of-war—115 captured soldiers on each side returning to their home countries. The prisoner exchange—the first between the two sides since Ukraine launched its incursion into Russian territory—was mediated by the United Arab Emirates.* “Another 115 of our defenders have returned home today,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted after the exchange was finalized. “We remember everyone. We are searching for them and making every effort to bring them all back.”
• The United Kingdom’s navy spotted three fires aboard a Greek-flagged and owned commercial oil vessel in the Red Sea on Friday, presumed to be caused by an attack Wednesday on the ship by the Houthis, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization based in Yemen. A French navy ship rescued all of the oil tanker’s 29 crew members, but the vessel itself continues to drift ablaze in the Red Sea. The E.U.’s military task force to defend against Houthi attacks on commercial ships—Operation Aspides—warned on Saturday that the drifting ship presents “a significant environmental threat due to the large volume of crude oil on board, which could lead to a severe ecological disaster with potentially devastating effects on the region’s biodiversity.”
• NASA announced on Saturday that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will return to Earth next month without its crew, leaving astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams at the International Space Station (ISS) until at least early 2025. Starliner had ferried Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in early June—for a planned stay of nine days—but thruster and helium leak issues the Boeing spacecraft experienced while docking prompted safety concerns and several delays. Now the two NASA astronauts will return in February 2025 on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. 
• Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign on Friday and endorsed former President Donald Trump. Kennedy said at a campaign event in Phoenix that he did not see a path to victory and was worried his continued presence in the race would aid Vice President Kamala Harris’ electoral chances. “My name will remain on the ballot in most states,” he said. “But in about 10 battleground states, where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me.” Kennedy, who later joined Trump at a rally in nearby Glendale, Arizona, was polling in the low single digits nationally when he dropped out.
• Several outlets reported on Friday that five U.S. Secret Service agents—four from its Pittsburgh office and one assigned to former President Donald Trump’s security team—were relieved of their operational responsibilities and reassigned to administrative, non-field duties following an investigation into last month’s assassination attempt on Trump’s life. The Secret Service did not confirm the reports, but said the agency does not comment on ongoing personnel matters. 
• Republican attorneys general from Texas and 15 other states sued the Biden administration on Friday for its decision to allow illegal immigrants who are spouses and children of U.S. citizens to apply for legal status without first leaving the United States, provided they have resided in the U.S. for at least 10 years. President Joe Biden first announced the program—administered by the Department of Homeland Security—in June, and began accepting applications early last week. The lawsuit, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, argued that the program is unconstitutional and would worsen the immigration crisis at the southern border. 
• The Justice Department—along with eight states’ attorneys general—filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, a software company that offers property management services in the real estate industry, alleging the company unlawfully decreased competition among landlords—subsequently driving up rent prices—and monopolized the property-pricing software market. “RealPage’s scheme not only distorts competition to the detriment of renters, but also allows it to reinforce its dominant position in the market for commercial revenue management software,” prosecutors wrote in the lawsuit.

‘At This Point, We Can’t Avert Famine’

When we last wrote to you about the Sudan civil war, the country was nearing a humanitarian catastrophe brought on by a man-made famine. Now, deep in the middle of both the rainy and lean seasons, officials and aid groups believe hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people will starve in the coming months. 

The United States held peace talks in Geneva that ended on Friday but made little apparent progress towards a ceasefire in the 16-month war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—a paramilitary group with roots in the Janjaweed militias responsible for genocide in Darfur 20 years ago—that has displaced more than 10 million people and returned the specter of famine to the Northeast African nation. 

The SAF allowed a key border crossing between the town of Adre in Chad and Sudan to reopen Tuesday for U.N. food aid deliveries after it had been closed for six months, but it’s unclear how much aid will be allowed through. The Adre crossing was closed again on Thursday, but the U.N. Secretary-General appeared to secure a commitment from the SAF on Sunday to reopen the border. Even if border crossings remain open, it may be too late to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who’ve faced famine conditions for months already. All the while, the conflict shows no signs of abating, fueled by outside countries providing weapons and support to both sides.

The SAF and the RSF—led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, respectively—have been in an open conflict since April 2023, with the SAF controlling much of northeastern Sudan and the coast and the RSF holding the southwest, including nearly all of Darfur. The war has featured sporadic battles and confrontations in pockets throughout the country rather than a stable frontline. There have been a handful of extended engagements, namely in the capital of Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman. But the RSF, the more mobile of the two forces, has repeatedly shifted the conflict zones, multiplying civilian displacement. More than 2 million refugees have fled the country since the war began. 

Reliable data on the death toll of the war is hard to come by. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Project (ACLED) recorded at least 18,000 people killed in the violence as of July, but it is almost certainly a dramatic undercount. A U.N. panel of experts concluded that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in a single ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by the RSF against the Masalit tribe last year in Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. Tom Perriello, the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan appointed in February, estimated in May that as many as 150,000 people have been killed in the conflict. 

But as brutal as the violence has been so far, widespread famine—the fault of both the SAF and the RSF—will likely kill far more people. The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, a U.N.-sanctioned process for assessing food insecurity, determined in a June report that 25 million people—more than half of the country—face high levels of acute hunger, 8.5 million are experiencing emergency conditions characterized by “very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality,” and 755,000 people are in catastrophic famine conditions with many already starving to death. 

“IPC experts do not give projections for mortality, but these findings point to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese children starving to death over the coming months,” Alex de Waal—executive director of the World Peace Foundation and one of the world’s leading famine scholars—wrote last month. He cited a May study from the Clingendael Institute, a research organization based in The Hague, that calculated likely deaths based on estimated food stocks in Sudan and the aggregate calorie needs of people in Sudan. Calorie shortfall projections can be fraught calculations, but the researchers concluded that 2.5 million people would be dead by the end of September. “Mortality is strongly linked not only to the severity of hunger, but also to its duration,” the report explained. “One cannot survive at emergency levels of food consumption for a long time.” 

The Adre crossing closing in February left only one point of the border to get food aid into Sudan from Chad: the Tine crossing 150 miles further north. But getting food from Tine to the most desperate parts of Darfur required traversing longer and more dangerous routes, further limiting the flow of aid. The Tine crossing also eventually closed due to the rainy season flooding roads. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) announced over the weekend that some aid trucks made it into Sudan through Tine for the first time in weeks. But the WFP also reported last week that trucks throughout Sudan carrying aid for about half a million people are “unable to move towards their final destinations due to flooded and impassable roads.”

The crossing closures and bogged-down aid convoys have left many communities without food for months, and it seems that hundreds of thousands of deaths may be effectively baked in at this point. Kate Almquist Knopf, a former assistant administrator for Africa and Sudan mission director at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in July that large-scale suffering is inevitable, even if aid began to flow into the country again. “At this point, we can’t avert famine,” she said. “We can mitigate the breadth and the scale of it, but only by surging humanitarian aid at a massive level to the populations most in need who are very hard to reach, and to whom aid is being obstructed.” Perriello lent some credence to the higher starvation estimates, telling reporters at the beginning of the latest round of talks, “We need to start pivoting to a different set of solutions if we are to prevent a couple of million people from starving.” 

Humanitarian efforts have also been hindered by a more straightforward problem: money. Food aid for Sudan has been consistently underfunded for months, and the U.N. has received just 38 percent—$1 billion—of the $2.7 billion of requested aid for Sudan. The WFP has been forced to cut food allotments for Sudanese refugees at camps in Chad. “We see people who are dying, and who we have access to, who we can’t do anything for,” said Mohamed Refaat, the country director with the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration. The U.S. has given the largest portion of assistance, including an additional $203 million in funding that was provided in July. 

Hunger and starvation are a feature of this conflict, not a bug, as both belligerents have adopted famine as a weapon of war. The RSF has looted food stores and farmlands in the areas they control, feeding their own fighters and leaving the same groups of people they’ve killed in campaigns of ethnic cleansing to starve. The SAF seems content with cutting off aid as a way to deprive the RSF of supplies regardless of civilian costs. 

The humanitarian tragedy has also helped insulate the SAF’s power as the internationally recognized governing authority of Sudan, even as much of the state has collapsed in the conflict. “The military has ensured its hold on power over the long term by using their own people essentially as human shields and bargaining chips against Western or international pressure on them to reform,” Cameron Hudson—a former chief of staff to successive special envoys to Sudan and a current senior associate of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies—told TMD. “We’re not having a single conversation about civilian rule and turning over power. The only thing that we are talking about is trying to gain humanitarian access into this country.” 

The SAF refused to join the latest round of talks in Geneva last week, arguing that the process legitimized the RSF by treating them as an equal party in the negotiations. The military also objected to the presence of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the Gulf country has provided significant arms and support to the RSF. “We will not co-exist with the rebels, and we will not forgive them,” SAF leader Gen. al-Burhan said Friday, adding that the military would “fight for 100 years” if necessary. 

Some former officials and lawmakers have criticized the U.S. for not exerting pressure on the belligerents to end the conflict and alleviate the humanitarian crisis. “We do not demonstrate any hard power with respect to Sudan,” Hudson argued. “We’re asking them to respect international humanitarian law because it’s the right thing to do. Like, what? No, you have to threaten these people with sanctions, with [International Criminal Court] indictments, with whatever you can threaten them with, because that’s what they respond to.” 

“We are speaking the language of Western advocacy movements,” he added. “We are not speaking the hard power language of Arab militaries.” 

Payton Knopf, a former deputy special envoy for the Horn of Africa in the Biden administration, described U.S.-Sudan policy as “magical thinking” in an essay published earlier this month. Knopf argued that the U.S. and the international community have deferred too much to both the SAF and the RSF in their attempts at conflict resolution and securing aid access. “The sheer scope of the catastrophe that is unfolding in Sudan suggests that other paths could hardly have been less effective,” he wrote. “U.S. diplomatic interests would be well-served by having the ambition to change the rules of the game in Sudan rather than continuing to play a losing hand.” 

The U.S. has yet to effectively engage the outside parties fueling the conflict, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told TMD. He argued that the successive rounds of peace talks have “done nothing to end the fighting in Sudan and has emboldened regional actors to increase their support to the warring factions in the country.” 

But it’s unclear whether the administration is willing to lean on our regional partners who are fanning the flames, particularly the UAE. “We have a much higher set of priorities with the UAE than Sudan,” said Hudson, citing the potential role of UAE peacekeepers in post-war Gaza and combating Russian money laundering in Dubai. “Unless and until we decide that we’re going to elevate Sudan on that priority list, and [the SAF and the RSF] can see it by the bilateral conversation that we have with the Emiratis, then they’re not going to take us seriously.” 

As the talks ended last week, Special Envoy Perriello tried to put a forward-looking gloss on the conflict: “We hope that this will be a source of momentum for much bigger steps and progress down the road.” But he also candidly acknowledged the depth of the crisis, saying, “The sad thing is, the crisis in Sudan is so severe that we could do four of these [negotiation rounds] and still be barely scratching the surface of what Sudanese people deserve.”

Worth Your Time

• Writing in Law & Liberty, John O. McGinnis argues that America truly is becoming more politically extreme. “The two-party structure in the United States does provide some checks on extremism, but political scientists have shown that both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from the center,” he wrote. “The trend toward extremes represents a melancholy decline for liberalism.” Why is this happening? “In my view, two phenomena provide the best explanations,” he wrote. “One paradoxically is decades of peace and prosperity. Voters feel they can indulge extreme beliefs because society and the world have been so relatively stable. … Second, the beliefs indulged are more extreme because they offer a comprehensive view of the world that offers a picture of good and evil more compelling than centrist compromises. The most famous epigram of the German-American political theorist Eric Voegelin was ‘Don’t immanentize the eschaton.’ Importing messianic sensibilities into politics is dangerous, because it suggests the possibility of utopian solutions here and now, eschewing the messy compromises and the prudent implementation of even novel ideas—a process that supports the stability of the political order.”
• In his latest Substack post, Noah Smith addresses the “ignore the economists” crowd that has cropped up in the wake of some of Kamala Harris’ recent proposals. “Even if you’re utterly dedicated to a certain political movement, it is important to have some understanding about how the world really works,” he wrote. “If your ideology tells you to build a dam, you need to consult civil engineers who will tell you if it’s actually feasible. If you don’t, you could end up with a lot of drowned citizens.” Of course, everyone has limits to the knowledge they possess—even the experts. “Economists don’t know everything, and they can often get things wrong—the fact that different economists disagree with each other on almost every issue is proof of their fallibility,” Smith writes. “An economy is inherently both harder to study and harder to control than a bridge or a jet engine or a particle accelerator—getting reproducible, dependable, broadly applicable results in social science will always be an uphill battle. But economists know a lot of facts about the economy, they have a lot of data and a lot of good statistical methods, and once in a while they even have a theory that consistently works.”

Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump, on Truth Social: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Vance Says Trump Would Veto A National Abortion Ban

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, on Saturday said Trump would veto a federal abortion ban if a bill were to be passed by Congress.

…

“I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it,” Vance argued.

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Babe Ruth’s Called-Shot Jersey, The ‘Mona Lisa,’ Fetches Record $24 Million

In the Zeitgeist 

The Lord of the Rings is returning to the big screen—and for the first time, in anime-style animation. The film, Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim—slated to hit theaters in December—is set 183 years before the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and includes narrative details and stories born from J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic novel, but which were excluded from the movie trilogy. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team reported on Vice President Kamala Harris’ pivot to the center in her DNC address, Jonah explored the tenets of American liberty and explained why the national government cannot be run like cities or college campuses, Nick weighed in on (🔒) what he labeled Harris’ “realignment convention,” Chris expounded on (🔒) why this year’s DNC could mark the beginning of the end for the party primary system, and Seth Adelson made the case for Sabbath fundamentalism in Dispatch Faith.
• On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on the slow and steep decline of major party conventions and picked a fight with Alexander Graham Bell; Michael spoke with Mustafa Akyol about his recent Dispatch Faith essay on Islam and the Enlightenment; and Luis, Mike, and Chris Scalia unpacked the third season (🔒) of FX’s The Bear on The Skiff. On today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Jamie is joined by Ben Dreyfuss—formerly of Mother Jones—to discuss his week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
• On the site over the weekend: Patrick T. Brown compared and contrasted two books exploring how Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Nick Ripatrazone recalled the “inspired film” On the Waterfront in honor of the picture’s 70th anniversary. 
• On the site today: James Patterson explains the differences between liberalism and postliberalism. 

Let Us Know 

Should the U.S. take stronger action to address the civil war and humanitarian crisis in Sudan?

Correction, August 26: The piece originally claimed, incorrectly, that the hostage exchange between Ukraine and Russia was the first since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.