Medium-term prospects for peace, let alone democracy, are poor. It’s bad news for the long-suffering Sudanese, but all the more reason why progressive forces internationally should deepen solidarity, in part through demystifying what lies behind this unfolding tragedy, writes Jeremy Cronin
In predicting what lies ahead for Africa with a re-installed Trump, it is important to insist he is not so much an anomaly (as presented by an often-bewildered mainstream liberal media). He is a symptom. Trump is their product, the outcome of decades of a failing neoliberal project. He is the symptomatic face of a new class war waged domestically and globally.
In Trump’s rallying call to Make America Great Again, again is an admission of imperial decline. However, any attempted return to unilateral US primacy within an increasingly multipolar world with a resurgent China, a losing proxy war in Ukraine, and several emerging middle powers will not succeed. The US remains a dominant reality, but the trajectory is downward. Trump’s reckless attempts to change that direction, even as they deepen grave dangers for humankind and our planet, will speed the decline.
Slashing the federal administration as Trump’s side-kick Elon Musk proposes, further weakening poor health and public education in the US, will inevitably mean falling further behind in the race against China to advance productivity and competitiveness. Tariff wars against all and sundry will raise the cost of living for the majority of American citizens themselves (including the 77 million who voted for Trump), deepening further contradictions between Trump’s popular base and his inner coterie of mega-billionaires.
This is the broad context within which to ask: What about Africa and Trump 2.0? There are far too many uncertainties and too wide a canvas to do justice to the question here. It might be more useful to touch briefly on at least one of the most burning issues of our time – Sudan.
But first some obvious generalities.
For better or worse (surely for better), Africa is unlikely to be a major focus of the Trump administration (he once dismissed Africa as a “shit-hole”). During his first presidential term, Trump cut developmental aid to Africa and the global South in general. He has committed to doing more of the same. Already paltry green funding to a continent most vulnerable to, and least responsible for climate change, will be cut further. Trump’s withdrawal (again) from the World Health Organisation will also have a negative impact on Africa, but with potential knock-on consequences for the world when the next predictable pandemic strikes.
Turning specifically to the largely forgotten war in Sudan. What impact will Trump 2.0, casting himself as a global peacemaker have? On the eve of his inauguration Trump succeeded in doing what Biden was singularly unwilling to do – telling Netanyahu in forceful terms the ongoing genocide in Gaza had to stop. The ceasefire agreement, however tenuous, has rightly been welcomed with the expectation it will lead to more permanent outcomes. In noting Trump’s role we should never lose sight, however, of his motivations. They have nothing to do with concern for the Palestinian cause. For Trump it is centrally about his signature but deferred Abraham Accords, and this is where Sudan enters the picture.
Hamas’s October 7 2023 breakout from Gaza and Netanyahu’s response shattered Trump 1.0’s Abraham Accords agenda which had been on the brink of consolidation at the time. Just days before, Netanyahu, map in hand, boasted to the UN about what was afoot – the building of a trade and energy logistics corridor connecting India, the Middle East and Europe with Israel as a lynch-pin. Palestine was simply erased from the map. The Accords are, in effect, a US-driven attempt to copy and counter China’s burgeoning, multiple belt and road initiatives (BRIs). But the US lacks the patience and the ability to work quietly and constructively behind the scenes – contrast this with China’s largely unheralded ability to end the Yemen conflict by brokering an Iranian/Saudi rapprochement built in part around mutually beneficial BRIs.
Trump will seek to revive the Accords agenda, and this relates directly to the devastating war in Sudan. It is a war that has turned Sudan into the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe by scale. Thirty percent of the population is displaced, tens of thousands have been killed, and there is wide-spread famine. Too often in the Western media, when Sudan is remembered at all, it is reductively presented as a “typical” case of African internecine ethnic rivalry in another “failed state”.
More reason to understand this humanitarian crisis in its regional and global context – and so, a brief background:
In 2019, after three decades of autocratic rule, and following a rolling, months-long democratic popular mobilisation, Omar al-Bashar was removed from power by his two key military strongmen -Sudanese army chief, General al-Burhan, and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) general Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. The RSF militia, essentially a mercenary force, had been used by Bashar to terrorise ethnic minorities and pastoralist communities in the provinces. The RSF also supplied mercenary forces to Saudi Arabia in its war against the Houthis in Yemen. The 2019 military coup obviously did not satisfy the popular democratic forces who sustained their mobilisation despite continued violent suppression.
The US stepped in and with the Saudis brokered a transitional civilian-military government which was meant to pave the way for a democratic transition to civilian rule. In October 2020 Trump proudly announced Sudan would be joining the UAE and Bahrain in normalising relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords. Behind it was a typical Trump transactional deal. The Sudanese interim government agreed to recognise Israel in exchange for being removed from the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism”.
But, typical of US regional involvements, there was more media hype and less patient attention to detail. A year later, while Biden was in office, this transitional government was overthrown in a coup jointly led, once more, by Burhan and Hemedti. The two coup leaders soon fell out and the current catastrophe engulfing Sudan ensued with the Sudanese Army and the RSF both guilty of grave war crimes.
This was never entirely a Sudanese affair. Competing regional powers, all of them US allies, and all of them fearful of a return to a popularly-driven democratic transition either at home or in Sudan, are arming, training and financing the warring parties. Erdogan’s Turkey with its grand ambitions of restoring the Ottoman empire, and a longstanding ally of Bashir, is currently supporting the Sudanese Army forces, as is Egypt. The UAE is the principal backer of the RSF, the latter controls gold mines in Sudan and the UAE is the major beneficiary.
An impatient and capricious Trump administration is unlikely to get embroiled in the detail. Just as Trump tells his European NATO allies that Ukraine is their problem, so he is likely to tell Turkey, Egypt, the Saudis and the UAE to sort out Sudan among themselves. But with Trump threatening even close NATO allies like Canada and Denmark, none of the rival regional powers in the Sudan conflict will trust that the US reliably has their back. They are unlikely to forego their own conflicting ambitions in the interests of a stable Sudan.
In short, medium-term prospects for peace, let alone democracy, are poor. It’s bad news for the long-suffering Sudanese, but all the more reason why progressive forces internationally should deepen solidarity, in part through demystifying what lies behind this unfolding tragedy.
Jeremy Cronin is a veteran South African Communist Party Central Committee and Politburo member, former SACP deputy general secretary, a former government deputy minister and former political prisoner. He is also a poet.
This article was first published in Liberation Journal. Read the journal here
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Photo: President Donald J. Trump, joined by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, acknowledge applause and wave to the crowd after delivering remarks at the Abraham Accords signing Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
