Towards a New Liberal International Order
It is time for democratic countries to accept that the existing system is broken and that they must develop a new global security architecture.
I.
There’s a devastating civil war and vast humanitarian crisis unfolding in Sudan right now, and it barely makes the headlines. Since April 2023, a conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced more than ten million people. The UN has just declared a famine in western Sudan (in the Zamzam refugee camp), with the precipitating conditions “likely to persist during August–October 2024.” According to that report, Sudan faces the worst food crisis in its history, with 25.6 million people (half the population) suffering acute hunger. Heavy rainfall has damaged camps and other forms of shelter, increased the risk of disease (the Federal Ministry of Health declared a cholera outbreak in August), delayed aid deliveries, and even caused “widespread scorpion and snake infestations.”
Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, says aid organisations urgently need “safe and unimpeded humanitarian access, including across borders and battle lines.” Thousands of tonnes of aid are stuck due to poor road conditions—a situation exacerbated by the fighting. “Shifting lines of conflict and the peak of the rains and flooding season,” the UN reports, “are aggravating an already challenging humanitarian access situation, where aid agencies are having to constantly negotiate and secure new routes for aid convoys.”
The RSF is a descendant of the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide perpetrated between 2003 and 2005. In Darfur today, the RSF has launched a new campaign of ethnic cleansing; terrorising civilians and expelling non-Arabs from the areas under its control. While the RSF doesn’t yet control the city of el-Fasher in Darfur, it has a heavy presence in the surrounding areas (including near Zamzam), which is making it difficult for civilians to escape or receive desperately needed assistance. The RSF has attacked and stolen from aid convoys, while the SAF isn’t allowing sufficient aid into areas controlled by the RSF. This means most of Darfur faces a severe lack of food and other forms of basic assistance, on top of the violence being visited upon civilians in the region.
Opening up and guarding routes for aid convoys—as well as protecting civilians at camps like Zamzam and across the country—should be a job for a UN peacekeeping force, but it’s hard to imagine the US, Russia, and China working together on the Security Council to authorise one. There’s a conspicuous lack of political will to address the crisis in Sudan—Western democracies are looking the other way, while regional powers and others are exploiting the situation as it deteriorates. The UAE is arming the RSF, while Iran backs the SAF. Meanwhile, the Economist reports: “The White House has been wary of upsetting the UAE because it needs Emirati support on Gaza. Britain and the EU have largely ignored the war.” During his final speech at the UN General Assembly, US president Joe Biden spared a couple of paragraphs for the atrocities, famine, and displacement in Sudan. But he did not call for the deployment of peacekeepers and refused to hold the UAE accountable, preferring instead to obliquely warn that the “world needs to stop arming the generals.”
This indifference and inaction is striking, given the potential consequences of the conflict. Beyond the catastrophic human toll, the war could make Sudan a haven for terrorists and transnational criminals, create a refugee crisis in Europe, increase Iranian and Russian influence in the region, and cause instability around the Horn of Africa (which would have significant consequences for international shipping and the global economy). The Economist summarises why the war in Sudan is being overlooked:
It is … a disorderly war for disorderly times. America, distracted by China, Gaza and Ukraine, its influence diluted by rising middle powers, is almost irrelevant. International norms, laws and arms embargoes are widely flouted. Institutions such as the UN Security Council and the African Union (AU) are failing dismally. Sudan may be a harbinger of future conflicts in an anarchic, multipolar world.
Amid resurgent great-power conflict, international institutions such as the UN (particularly the Security Council) have become increasingly dysfunctional. If major democratic countries like the United States and its European allies fail to put crises like the civil war in Sudan on the global agenda, those crises tend to deteriorate until they’re so destabilising that they can no longer be ignored. In the meantime, other countries sweep into the vacuum. Sudan hasn’t just attracted opportunistic interventions from the UAE and Iran—Egypt has provided Turkish drones to the SAF, Eritrea is training SAF-aligned militias, and Russia has been involved in the conflict on both sides. Although the Wagner Group initially sent surface-to-air missiles to the RSF, Russia is now negotiating with the SAF to build a navy base near Port Sudan in exchange for “unrestricted qualitative military aid.”
This is the sort of exploitative and lawless international system that naturally emerges in the chaos of a multipolar world. Such a world would be dangerous enough if the largest European conflict since World War II wasn’t raging in Ukraine, or if the United States wasn’t on the verge of reelecting an isolationist authoritarian who wants to withdraw from NATO and surrender to Vladimir Putin before he even takes office. Or if China wasn’t ruled by the most powerful totalitarian ruler since Mao—a ruler who is fixated on conquering Taiwan and undermining the liberal-democratic world.
Institutions like the UN are not capable of meeting the challenges of multipolarity and revived great-power conflict. The dreams that seemed realisable at the end of the Cold War—such as what looked like an unstoppable global march toward liberal democracy—didn’t come true. The idea that governments could eventually agree on certain values such as universal human rights and the rule of law has so far proven to be a fantasy. There’s no such thing as a set of international laws universally accepted by all governments, and even if this were the case, there would be no way to enforce those laws outside the power of individual states.
