America’s dead-end democracy promotion
Hugo Gurdon
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If ever a country was certain to foil American efforts to spread democracy, it was Sudan. The sub-Saharan nation has long stood out as a sinkhole even in a region not known, to put it mildly, for nurturing democracy.
As U.S. special operations forces rescued America’s 70-strong diplomatic corps from Khartoum a few days ago amid escalating civil war, Sudan’s parched eviscerate soil gaped at the vanity of State Department toil.
Long ago, when Saudi oil money was flowing in during the 1970s, it was hoped that Sudan would become the “breadbasket” of the Arab world. Instead, it became a basket case. I was there frequently then and into the ’80s and loved it. But it is impossible to deny that it didn’t work, and it seemed to promise that it never would. Now, once again, it is keeping its promise.
As Walter Russell Mead pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, there have been 17 coup attempts in Sudan since its independence from Britain in 1956. In one uprising during a time when I called Sudan home, my stepmother, herself an embassy staffer, was obliged to take shelter in a metal-doored storeroom in our apartment while an uninvited gunman used a balcony nearby as a sniper nest.
There was real danger then, as there is today, but in Sudan, there is always also an element of farce. After that long-ago coup failed, it was said that rebel tanks, rushing toward the presidential palace during the peak of the fighting, stopped on their way whenever the traffic lights turned red.
I was never completely sure this was a joke. It might have been true, for Sudan was a place where the default position was that anything could be delayed until another day. One of Khartoum’s commonest phrases translated as “Tomorrow, God willing,” which was the response to all questions about when a task could be expected to be completed.
The thought that prompts me to discuss Sudan, a place U.S. presidents might hear mentioned by an adviser once in a year at most, is not that President Joe Biden’s administration won’t rescue the 16,000 Americans stuck there — either tomorrow or at all.
What is so provoking about the American mission in Sudan, to promote democracy, is that it existed at all. Like everything else in Sudan, it could have waited until tomorrow. It was a cardinal statement of naivete to have expected anything but the turmoil we see now, with Sudan’s regular armed forces, having ruled the place for decades, battling against an irregular militia that grew out of the Janjaweed, notorious for its brutality during Sudan’s last civil war.
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Instead of frittering time and effort on the lost cause of democracy in Sudan, it would be far better to devote all spare American resources to securing democracy on the other side of the world, in Taiwan, where it is already established but under mounting threat from China.
If America tries to do good everywhere, it runs the danger of being insufficiently potent anywhere that really matters and can make a difference. Countering China is job No. 1. Trying to bring democracy to Sudan shouldn’t even be on the list.