With no end in sight either to the war or its horrors, international discussion of Sudan has increasingly focused on criticism of the West’s failure to act and its apparent disinterest in doing so. This response is certainly valid: No Western government currently considers Sudan a priority, despite more than 120,000 estimated deaths since 2023, including as much as 60,000 since October 2025 in El Fasher alone. It also, however, obscures the painful truth that Western states’ options in Sudan are extremely limited. It is not just that there is little will to act; there is also little ability to do anything.

This is not just appalling for the Sudanese people. It’s also an indicator both of failures of analysis and, more critically, the parlous state of the diplomatic corps in many countries. The popular high-profile, relatively straightforward diplomatic tools—mediation, sanctions, diplomatic pressure and/or condemnation—have essentially no impact on these particular parties, in this particular case. The remaining options are difficult; complicated; risky; and, in a time when diplomatic corps are stretched painfully thin, possibly out of reach entirely.

With no end in sight either to the war or its horrors, international discussion of Sudan has increasingly focused on criticism of the West’s failure to act and its apparent disinterest in doing so. This response is certainly valid: No Western government currently considers Sudan a priority, despite more than 120,000 estimated deaths since 2023, including as much as 60,000 since October 2025 in El Fasher alone. It also, however, obscures the painful truth that Western states’ options in Sudan are extremely limited. It is not just that there is little will to act; there is also little ability to do anything.

This is not just appalling for the Sudanese people. It’s also an indicator both of failures of analysis and, more critically, the parlous state of the diplomatic corps in many countries. The popular high-profile, relatively straightforward diplomatic tools—mediation, sanctions, diplomatic pressure and/or condemnation—have essentially no impact on these particular parties, in this particular case. The remaining options are difficult; complicated; risky; and, in a time when diplomatic corps are stretched painfully thin, possibly out of reach entirely.

Western states have almost no direct leverage with the two primary combatant decision-makers in Sudan, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”) of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Until 2019, Burhan had been a midlevel commander in the Sudanese army in South Sudan and Darfur. Hemeti led a group of government-backed janjaweed fighters, an official Border Guards unit, and finally the RSF. Burhan seized power in 2019, and Hemeti served as his deputy until the RSF attacked SAF positions in April 2023. These men consider themselves locked in a winner-take-all fight to the death for power, and they have little interest making any concessions that might disadvantage them even a little.

At least for the time being, neither is particularly concerned with Sudan’s national interest or international influence. Both spent the majority of their adult lives as representatives of the Sudanese National Congress Party regime under Omar al-Bashir, a decades-long international pariah and subject of extensive economic sanctions. Neither Burhan (an apparently loyal former servant of the National Congress Party) nor Hemeti (an ethnic/religious extremist accused of genocide as far back as the early 2000s) has ever expected to be welcomed by the international community, or to have easy access to travel papers or international banking. Against this backdrop, nothing that the West can realistically offer or threaten even registers as a priority.

There is one potential angle of leverage. Both combatants rely heavily on various partners outside Sudan, which opens at least some possibility of indirect influence. They have neither broad public support nor access to intact domestic production capacity, forcing them to look elsewhere for mercenaries, arms, ammunition, fuel, and other critical resources.

They also need sources of hard currency to pay for these things, and agents who can move that money on their behalf. If both the SAF and the RSF could be isolated from their international connections, then their ability to continue fighting would be severely constrained, and there may be more room for other Sudanese actors to assert themselves.

This, however, would be a very difficult undertaking, one that would require an extremely detailed and accurate picture of the situation: who is partnering with whom to transfer what, and how. This would be a very heavy lift under the best of circumstances, and the current circumstances—awash in disinformation and misinformation, speculation and rumor presented as fact, unreliable journalism, and transactions hidden in remote locations and industrial-scale money laundries—are far from ideal. Tackling this kind of task would require a considerable investment of intelligence and—more importantly—working-level diplomatic resources.

Actually isolating the combatants would require engaging a wide swath of actors in a coordinated diplomatic campaign. The Wagner Group and various actors in the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Chad, and Colombia have provided the RSF with considerable support; actors in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia have also been accused of backing the RSF. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have supported the SAF; Eritrea has positioned itself as an RSF ally, though the amount of practical support it has provided is unclear. Russia, Turkey and Iran have all provided arms and supplies to both the SAF and RSF.

Actors in South Africa, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman have all been accused of intervening in a variety of ways with either or both combatants. South Sudanese and Central African Republican involvement—enmeshed in a web of transborder communities as well as governmental and nongovernmental relationships—are even more complex than those of the other players. Attempting to close any one of these connections in isolation would be like trying to eat soup with a fork; without a comprehensive plan, the effort would produce nothing.

Further complicating matters, a potentially decisive victory by either combatant would almost certainly prove an even greater disaster for Sudan and the region. Burhan and Hemeti each have lengthy and extensive personal histories of gross human rights abuses in Darfur and elsewhere; by all accounts, the two shared responsibility for the 2019 massacre in Khartoum that left hundreds of civilians dead, wounded, and victims of rape.

Lacking significant public support, either combatant would almost certainly move to consolidate his position following a military victory through violent public crackdowns and purges. Both, moreover, already have enemies and potential enemies in the region, many of whom have already made clear their willingness to intervene to complicate a victory or subsequent regime consolidation. As such, an effort to isolate them would require careful coordination, timing, and constant adjustment to impact both in parallel.

Is this even possible? There are far too many variables and unknowns to hazard a prediction without much more information, but it would be a genuine ethical failure to dismiss it as impossible at this point. Whether the West is capable of doing it is a separate question, and the hard truth is that the answer is could very well be no.

The visible parts of diplomacy are the tip of the iceberg at the best of times. Every successful VIP diplomat stands on the work of scores or even hundreds of working-level diplomats serving outside the public eye, particularly those stationed abroad. If VIPs are steering the ship, the working-level diplomatic corps—at home and abroad—are the sails, rudder, maps, and GPS.

The U.S. Cold War diplomatic corps, while deeply flawed in a number of respects, was an undisputed powerhouse. The working-level foreign service officers were expected to be active on the ground anywhere and everywhere, and they were provided with the resources and political support to back them up.

With the Cold War over, however, the Clinton administration quickly made significant cuts to the State Department budget that, in practice, fell heavily on the working level, resulting in the elimination of several thousand State Department staff and the closure of more than 20 diplomatic posts and 50 U.S. Agency for International Development offices. This began a process of eroding the working-level diplomatic corps that continues largely uninterrupted today.

At the same time, successive U.S. administrations steadily moved to centralize diplomatic analysis and decision making at the VIP, VVIP, or even presidential level. This has increasingly created information and decision bottlenecks that isolate the senior decision-makers from the working-level corps. It has also left much of the working level paralyzed in the absence of explicit orders, and over time, limited opportunities for hands-on experience and training. Repeated top-down upheavals within State under Secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Rex Tillerson, and Marco Rubio, moreover, have seriously exacerbated these dynamics.

Other Western working-level diplomatic corps, having long benefited from partnerships with each other and their counterparts in the United States, moved to adjust to American changes. They faced their own funding constraints and shifting political environments, however; European states in particular found it necessary to commit significant diplomatic resources to managing intra-EU stability. Meanwhile, increasing pressure on NATO, broader U.S./European cooperation, the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and diverging relationships with China have pushed all of these diplomatic corps and their partnerships to—or beyond—their limits.

It is without question incumbent on the West to exhaust every possibility that might end or mitigate the catastrophe in Sudan. At the same time, political analysis must reject the insistence that there is always at least one viable nonhorrible option, and that Western states (or for that matter, non-Western “great powers”) always have the capacity to act on it. Though seemingly obvious, this is a surprisingly persistent and pervasive error, stemming in part from donor and fundraising practices, but also from dysfunctional assumptions regarding “great power” capacity that are deeply embedded in common political analyses.

The tragedy in Sudan highlights the desperate need for deep reforms of diplomatic corps if they are to be fit for purpose. That must include not only oversight and intolerance for waste but also funding and resources appropriate to the size and scope of their responsibilities and operations, even when they are not obvious to the public. It must also include broad restructuring of personnel, information flow, and authority to reflect the role of the working-level corps—particularly the foreign service—and allow them to do their work effectively.

In some cases, this may require rebuilding significant elements of these institutions from the ground up. This is not an easy option, but by far the best available if countries want a diplomatic corps fit to manage an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.