Three years in, Sudan’s civil war remains one of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises, killing an estimated 150,000 people and forcibly displacing more than 12 million more, according to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The conflict quickly escalated into a large-scale proxy war: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are backed financially and militarily by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Iran, while the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have transformed from a small militia into a potent military proxy of the United Arab Emirates.
In June 2026, both chambers of Congress moved competing bills to confront the war, the Senate’s PEACE in Sudan Act and the House’s U.S. Engagement in Sudanese Peace Act, each advancing out of committee within days of the other. The two measures diverge sharply on the one question that matters most: whether to act against the war’s foreign sponsors. This split highlights how, despite prior diplomatic attempts, the provision of humanitarian aid, and significant sanctions efforts and legislative attention, in practice, the United States remains largely a bystander, allowing several of its allies to fight one another in a conflict with devastating impacts for civilians.
The U.S. maintains strong military relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE, all of whom have grown in the last decade as exporters of military equipment. According to the State Department’s FY2025 arms transfers report, the U.S. supplied Saudi with air-to-air missiles amounting to $3.5 billion. The U.S. also extended military services to Egypt amounting to nearly $10 billion. The UAE has received over $2 billion in military deliveries since January 2025. While as recent as June 2026, the U.S. is pushing forward with a $700 million sale of jet engines to Turkey. This parallels Turkey’s growth in their production and exportation of arms, today supplying nearly 40 countries with military equipment, including the SAF. Like Turkey, the UAE has quickly expanded its military industry in the last decade, completely shifting from one of the world’s largest arms importers into a premier global defense manufacturer and exporter. This arms export competition between Turkey and the UAE is playing out in real time in Sudan. Moreover, despite sanctions barring the SAF and RSF from acquiring U.S. weapons, the arms race between Turkey and the UAE reveals an additional crack in the long-uncontested notion of U.S. military hegemony. The U.S. can’t simply end a war by restricting Sudan’s access to U.S. weapons because of an endless backline supply of weapons from other emerging military superpowers.
Failed interventions
The United States is not new to this conflict, and analyzing its record of failed intervention is significant for shaping future action. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak, Washington and Riyadh convened the warring parties in Jeddah, producing the Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan on May 11, 2023, followed by a week-long ceasefire that entered into force on May 22. Both collapsed almost immediately, and on May 31 the SAF suspended its participation, accusing the RSF of occupying hospitals and civilian areas.
When the talks resumed in late October 2023 with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union added as co-facilitators, the mediators deliberately narrowed their ambitions, stating explicitly that the negotiations “will not address issues of a political nature” and would focus only on humanitarian access and confidence-building measures. That round, too, was suspended in early December amid continued hostilities and a failure to implement even basic confidence-building measures.
The Jeddah Platform’s main flaw was that it confined itself to humanitarian access and ceasefire mechanics, expressly setting aside the political future of the country. It also treated the conflict as a simple power struggle between two Sudanese generals rather than a large-scale proxy contest sustained by foreign military aid. Subsequent efforts inherited the same weaknesses. A refreshed round in Geneva in August 2024, organized by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland with Egypt, the UAE, the African Union, and the United Nations as observers, failed because of SAF’s opposition to the UAE’s presence and subsequent boycotting.
The most serious attempt came in September 2025, when the Quad (made up by the U.S. and the three Arab powers closest to the war: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) issued a roadmap to peace starting with a three-month humanitarian truce, to be followed by a permanent ceasefire and a nine-month transition toward an independent, civilian-led government. This was the first time that external powers met on a common framework, forming the Joint Operational Committee in October 2025. However, a month later, Al-Burhan of the SAF again argued that the UAE’s inclusion rendered it biased in favor of the RSF, who only accepted the humanitarian truce portion of the agreement. By the time U.S. envoy Massad Boulos announced in February 2026 that the Quad had reached a peace document acceptable to both sides, aiming for a truce by March, the RSF had already seized El Fasher, the last major city under government control in Darfur, amid mass killings and ethnic cleansing which the U.S. has deemed to be an ongoing genocide perpetrated by the RSF. As of mid-2026, fighting has migrated to surrounding areas with no truce ever materializing.
Reading the room
Read side by side, the American-backed efforts to end this war reveal a pattern of absence of clear and binding enforcement, with neither a monitoring regime nor a penalty for violation, which led to commitments being broken within days and at no cost. The sharpest contrast, and the one that matters most for how Washington should proceed, lies in who was seated at the table. Convening al-Burhan and Hemedti while their foreign sponsors continued to ship arms, money, and drones into the country left the actual engine of the war untouched, and no amount of confidence-building at the table could outpace the resupply flowing to it. The Quad corrected precisely this, bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into a shared framework for the first time, and that convergence among the external powers closest to the war was a real achievement. But the insistence on including the UAE in peace negotiations demonstrates a clear contradiction. While Al-Burhan’s objection is opportunistic, welcoming his own backers Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it is unacceptable to treat the UAE, the RSF’s principal documented backer of a genocide, as a co-equal broker at the negotiation table.
The problem, then, is not that the sponsors are in the room. It is that Washington keeps mistaking their presence for their cooperation. Seating the UAE among the mediators conferred on it the standing of a peacemaker while requiring nothing of it, and its weapons continued to reach the RSF throughout. The instrument capable of changing that conduct lies outside the negotiating room, in the arms relationship the United States maintains with the UAE, and to a lesser extent, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The single variable that could break this pattern, real coercive pressure on the sponsors to stop arming their proxies, is the one Washington has consistently declined to apply in the past.
On June 9th, 2026, Senators Shaheen, Risch, Coons, and Cornyn introduced the PEACE in Sudan Act as a bipartisan measure intending to penalize parties pouring arms into the conflict. The bill also hoped to create semiannual reports on foreign governments arming the SAF and RSF, an assessment of whether any armed actor qualifies as a terrorist organization, an updated business-risk advisory, and an extension of the Special Envoy’s mandate from two years to five. At the June 17th Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Markup, Senator Chris Van Hollen offered an amendment barring U.S. military transfers to the UAE for as long as it continues supplying the RSF, but the committee voted it down fifteen to seven. Even Shaheen, the top Democratic lawmaker on the committee and a co-sponsor of the bill, likewise said she would “reluctantly oppose the amendment, even though I agree with everything [Senator Van Hollen] said,” in fear that this amendment would “kill the bill.”
What did pass in the committee, awaiting a full Senate floor vote, is entirely composed of discretionary and reversible tools. Its central sanctions provision, Section 8, authorizes the President to block property, freeze transactions, and deny visas to foreign persons who arm the belligerents, obstruct a ceasefire, traffic Sudanese gold, or commit atrocities, yet it does so permissively, leaving it all up to executive whim.
Beyond that, the bill directs the State Department to develop a comprehensive strategy for securing a ceasefire and a civilian-led political settlement, instructs U.S. representatives to oppose international financial institution lending to the government of Sudan, and bars non-humanitarian assistance to the country, though each of those last two restrictions carries a national-security waiver the President can invoke at his own discretion. What survived markup, then, is a framework that catalogs the war’s sponsors in exhaustive detail, equips the President to punish them if he chooses, and obligates him to punish no one.
In parallel, the House introduced a markedly stronger bill that had been waiting more than a year for the chance. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks’s U.S. Engagement in Sudanese Peace Act, was introduced in March 2025 in coordination with Representative Sara Jacobs, but then denied a markup for fifteen months. Where the PEACE in Sudan Act says the President “may” sanction those who arm the belligerents, Section 103 of the House bill says he “shall impose 6 or more” of its enumerated penalties on any foreign person identified as perpetrating atrocities or blocking humanitarian aid.
Critically, Section 206 of the House bill prohibits the sale, export, or transfer of major defense equipment to any country the President identifies as supporting the RSF or SAF, the same arms leverage the Senate rejected the following week. The House legislation even argues for American support for a United Nations, African Union, or multinational force to protect civilians and monitor a ceasefire, an option the Senate bill ruled out entirely. On June 9th, 2026, the House Foreign Affairs Committee adopted the bill by a vote of thirty-four to five, with broad bipartisan support. It now awaits a floor vote.
However, for either bill to become law, the House and Senate must converge on identical text, and unfortunately, the path of least resistance favors the weaker document from the Senate. A provision survives conference only if both chambers will accept it, which hands an effective veto to whichever side is most reluctant, and the Senate has already recorded its reluctance at fifteen to seven. The mandatory sanctions of Section 103 and the arms prohibition of Section 206, the provisions that give the House bill its force, are therefore the likeliest casualties of a negotiated text. The lopsided House vote is a genuine counterweight, evidence that binding measures can command bipartisan support, but Washington’s recent track record on Sudan suggests it usually settles for the lowest common denominator.
While these two bills are the most progress we have made since Jeddah, it also seems to be a way for Congress to act on Sudan without requiring anyone to spend the political capital that action would cost, and the markup showed how it works in practice: senators who agreed with Van Hollen on the merits voted his amendment down to protect a bill that asks nothing binding of anyone. The provisions that would sanction Sudan itself or bar the belligerents from U.S. weapons are the easiest to pass and the least useful, because the SAF and RSF never depended on American arms and the Sudanese state is not the party fueling the war. The provision that would reach the war’s actual engine, the arms relationship with the UAE, is the one the Senate stripped.
Process and pressure make praxis
The House arms prohibition, if a President chose to invoke it, is precisely the leverage this war has always required, and the tools these measures contain are worth having on the books. But a tool is only as good as the will to use it. The failures traced throughout this conflict share one cause: every American effort has offered the sponsors pressure without a process or a process without pressure, and the war has outlasted both. Ending it requires the two at once. It requires immediately conditioning the arms relationship with the UAE and other perpetrators, and then spending that leverage inside a negotiation that puts the political future of Sudan on the table rather than walling it off.
In practice, this would look like enacting Senator Van Hollen’s Stand Up for Sudan Act, suspending the sale and licensing of designated U.S. defense articles to the UAE until the President certifies that it is no longer providing material support to the RSF, and a reconciled bill should adopt the House’s mandatory arms prohibition on that model, replacing its open-ended national-security waiver with a certification standard.
The UAE has spent years seeking American F-35 fighters, fields U.S.-supplied F-16s and missile-defense systems, and depends on Washington for the precision munitions and sustainment that keep its air force capable. Each of those transfers is also a pressure point, because Congress already holds a veto over them and needs no new authority to use it. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 requires the executive branch to formally notify Congress before any major sale proceeds, and that notification opens a thirty-day window in which any senator can force a floor vote on a resolution to block it.
Whatever the U.S. requires of the UAE in exchange for lifting such a hold should be specific and verifiable, anchored to evidence the government already possesses, including the Treasury designations of UAE-based entities arming the RSF issued in January 2025, and confirmed through the United Nations Panel of Experts that the Senate bill itself invokes. The United States has more influence over the external backers of this war than any other power, because it arms most of them. Whether it will use that influence to stop a genocide is the question its Sudan policy has yet to answer.
Michael Ishak holds a B.A. in History from Columbia University. His work focuses on conflict, displacement, and human rights accountability in the Middle East and North Africa.
