The Nihilistic War In Sudan

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Speaker 2 This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies.

Speaker 2 Our guest, veteran journalist Ann Applebaum's new cover story in the Atlantic, is based on her recent trips to Sudan, the African nation that is again torn by conflict, this time between the country's army and a powerful paramilitary group.

Speaker 2 Her story is about the consequences of civil war and ethnic conflict fueled in part by foreign governments providing arms and money to chosen combatants. The effects are predictable and heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 Death, injury, starvation, and the displacement of millions of people.

Speaker 2 But Applebaum's story is also about what happens when the international community of nations, non-profits, and networks such as the United Nations, which which normally intervene to help in conflict zones, falls away or becomes ineffective.

Speaker 2 The Trump administration's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the President's skepticism of foreign aid are part of that story, but there are other factors as well.

Speaker 2 Applebaum's story is titled, This is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like.

Speaker 2 Applebaum has also written extensively on the war in Ukraine. We'll talk about the evolving role of the United States in that conflict and what lies ahead.

Speaker 2 Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a journalist whose distinguished career includes 15 years as a columnist for The Washington Post, where she also served on the editorial board.

Speaker 2 She's written several books. Her most recent, Autocracy Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, comes out in paperback later this month.

Speaker 2 Applebaum is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Our interview was recorded yesterday morning.

Speaker 2 Ann Applebaum, welcome back to Fresh Air. Tell us why you wanted to make these true reporting trips to Sedan.

Speaker 3 You know, after the U.S. election,

Speaker 3 I felt the need to write about the world from a different point of view. My feeling was that the second election of Donald Trump had solidified something.
It meant that the withdrawal of the U.S.

Speaker 3 from international institutions, the end of a certain kind of geopolitical world order was now certain. That we'd had a big shift.

Speaker 3 Trump wasn't an exception or his first term wasn't some kind of mistake, that we weren't going back to something previous.

Speaker 3 And I write a lot about the consequences of those changes inside the United States, of course, but also in Europe and Ukraine and Russia. And I wanted to look at it from a completely different angle.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 when we say end of the liberal world order, which is something that people do talk about in conference rooms in Washington or in Brussels, what does it mean for people who are not from Europe or America?

Speaker 3 What does it look like? And what does it look like from Sudan, which is a country that the United States actually used to be interested in and cared a lot about?

Speaker 3 Darfur was a cause that churches and synagogues in the United States used to follow and donate to and think about. There have been a lot of American diplomats, American charities have worked in Sudan.

Speaker 3 You know, what does the withdrawal of the United States look like from there? And so then that led me to think, okay, how do I get there? And that was a complicated process if you've never gone.

Speaker 3 I had to make contacts and find people who knew how to get me in and out. And

Speaker 3 I realized pretty quickly that I would have to make two trips.

Speaker 3 And I went once to the eastern part of the country, which is controlled by the Sudanese Armed Forces, and then once to the western part in Darfur.

Speaker 2 Right. This civil war erupted in 2023.

Speaker 2 Two principal military forces, the Sudanese Army and this paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces. And I gather you took two trips because you wanted to see,

Speaker 2 to approach the battlefront from each side, get their perspective on what this is all about, right?

Speaker 3 Yes, I mean you can't travel in Sudan completely by yourself. You have to be under the umbrella of somebody.

Speaker 3 And so I thought, all right, I'll go once under the umbrella with the help of people from the RSF, from the Rapid Support Forces, who, as I say, control the West and some other areas, and then I would go once from the other side.

Speaker 3 And I think that was an important thing to do because it's really when you see the story from both sides that you understand the depth of the damage and the scale of the disaster and also the difficulty of resolving it.

Speaker 2 When you were near Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, which was the scene of a lot of fighting, you know, you wrote that this paramilitary force, the rapid support forces, they were withdrawing from some areas as the Sudanese army was driving them out.

Speaker 2 And you wrote that after they would lose the battle and abandon an area, at night they would turn their artillery on those civilian neighborhoods.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we could hear them bombing civilian neighborhoods at night from where we were staying in Omdurman, which is outside of Khartoum. And then in the mornings we would see the results.

Speaker 3 We went to a hospital where we would see people who'd been affected by the shelling, you know, families who had been injured, children who were lying on beds.

Speaker 3 We could see damage done to houses, damage done to streets. It almost seemed as if the RSF were taking revenge on the Sudanese, that they were angry because they were losing.

Speaker 3 And even though it didn't help them militarily,

Speaker 3 they simply took out their anger on civilians. And a lot of this war feels like that.

Speaker 3 It feels that the civilians are victims of a kind of grudge match or sometimes just random violence and anger that's being expressed by the various fighting sides.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, it's striking because, you know, typically in a civil conflict, it's about winning hearts and minds, not just taking territory. This is certainly not a way to get popular support.

Speaker 2 Bombard these neighborhoods.

Speaker 3 No, neither side is that interested in popular support. They're interested in control of certain key assets, mostly gold mines, control of particular territories, putting their people in territories.

Speaker 3 That's why you have these example after example of ethnic cleansing, of people being chased out of neighborhoods or chased out of areas and replaced with other people.

Speaker 3 It's also why you have so much theft.

Speaker 3 Both armies, I think particularly the RSF, because it's a kind of mishmash of different kinds of people from different places, but both armies, when they go into neighborhoods, they will rob and kind of pillage houses, take furniture, take washing machines.

Speaker 3 It's also why you have so many examples and stories of rape.

Speaker 3 You know, women are repeatedly the victims of war crimes, of people going into neighborhoods or to villages or to houses and just committing acts of violence and also acts of sexual violence.

Speaker 2 So when you would talk to people who had

Speaker 2 been in these bombardments and seen their homes destroyed, suffered injuries, deaths. What were their options? What did they do? I mean, where did they go for help?

Speaker 3 So some people leave the country.

Speaker 3 When we were in Chad and we crossed the border from a town called Adre and Chad, there are quite a lot of people on the Chadian side, and there there are formal refugee camps, which go on for acres and acres of people living in tents.

Speaker 3 Some people live in the country. Some people move to other parts of Sudan, so there are always a lot of people on the move.

Speaker 3 At one point, we were at a kind of crossing point where people were coming from an RSF-occupied area to a Sudanese army-occupied area because they were of an ethnic group where they thought they would be better off in the, you know, in the latter.

Speaker 3 There are also, though, I should say, inside the country, and this is probably the most optimistic thing I found in Sudan, there's a movement known as the Emergency Response Rooms.

Speaker 3 And it's kind of an awkward name, but these are really volunteer groups who have done a lot of self-organizing, both raising money to get medical supplies and food to people, helping people move around the country, helping people find shelter and safety.

Speaker 3 You find them everywhere. We found them in Darfur.
We found them also in the Khartoum area. We found them in Port Sudan as well.

Speaker 3 Many of them are fairly idealistic people who were part of a previous era's revolutionary movement. They were trying to build a democracy or at least a more free rule of law based society in Sudan.

Speaker 3 And since the war broke out, they have tried to rebuild society in the one way that they can.

Speaker 3 And we ran into them, I mean, even in the camp where there was almost nothing, the one thing that there was was a member of one of the emergency response room movements.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they're called the mutual aid societies. And

Speaker 3 he was a guy there. He was doing his best to keep people organized.
He was helping make contact with outside groups who could get food to them. And so you find that as well.

Speaker 3 It's a very grassroots, ground-up movement, and it's not strong enough yet to push back against the military leaders, but it's there.

Speaker 2 You described visiting a refugee camp, and I put that in quotes of sorts, because it didn't have the typical infrastructure that a refugee camp would have. What was it like? What did you see?

Speaker 3 This was really a group of refugees, it's hard to call it a camp, who had moved to what had been a school.

Speaker 3 And they had brought with them their blankets or their clothes or small bags that they were carrying. And they'd set up in the school courtyard and in some of the classrooms.

Speaker 3 And that's where they were living. And it's hard to describe how desolate it is.
It was very, very hot. It was 100 degrees.
So we were there in the middle of the day.

Speaker 3 It was Ramadan, so some people were fasting. And so most people were lying on the ground, not moving, not doing anything.
And there was a sense of time being suspended.

Speaker 3 There was really no evidence of any UN, any international groups there. There was no US or European presence or even any other country presence.

Speaker 3 It was simply people who had gathered there for a sense of safety because their homes had been burned down or because there was fighting in the neighborhoods that they'd come from. And that feeling of

Speaker 3 desolation, people being really truly abandoned, is something I'd never seen before.

Speaker 2 What did they say about what they might do next? what they could expect.

Speaker 3 Well, in that particular place, people were hoping for the war to end.

Speaker 3 And when the war ended or when the battle moved on from their region or from their homes, they were hoping to go back. But honestly, you also meet a lot of people who just have no plans.

Speaker 3 I remember having a long conversation with a young woman who had been enrolled at university at the time the war had broken out a couple of years ago. And I asked her what she was going to do next.

Speaker 3 And she just shrugged. She said, well, there is no university now.

Speaker 3 And she was just making it from day to day and hoping to have enough food to continue, hoping to, I think she had siblings in the camp, she was trying to take care of them.

Speaker 3 You meet people who feel as if their future has been robbed from them.

Speaker 3 And for me, particularly heartbreaking are young people who had expected to have some kind of education or who had expected to have some kind of future, who'd been planning things or building things, and to have it suddenly dropped off or suddenly eliminated is truly horrifying.

Speaker 2 You know, you said that you took two trips here, one from entering Sudan from the west through the Darfur region, where this group, this paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, or the RSF, are kind of more dominant.

Speaker 2 And then you took a separate trip entering the country from the east, from the Red Sea,

Speaker 2 and then approached the capital Khartoum. And there you were in the territory controlled by the Sudanese army.

Speaker 2 You know, if you could distill this to its essence, what is the fight between these two groups about?

Speaker 3 The fight between these two groups is over power and money.

Speaker 3 It's about who controls how much territory, who controls the gold mines on the territory, who controls the trading routes, who has access to which weapons.

Speaker 3 In fact, I think one of the things that makes the Sudanese war hard for outsiders to understand and to feel empathy and sympathy

Speaker 3 for the combatants is that it's not really a war of ideas at all. It's very nihilistic, it's very transactional.

Speaker 3 It's really what the world looks like when everybody is nihilistic, when everybody is out for themselves and everybody is simply trying to conquer territory or steal or take money.

Speaker 3 I mean, it is a war for territory. I think the RSF is now trying to establish itself as some kind of government in the western part of the country

Speaker 3 that will give it some status. And I think they hope to stay in charge of some areas of the country.

Speaker 3 The Sudanese army, which considers itself to be the legitimate government of Sudan, wants to take that territory back. So

Speaker 3 there is that element as well. But there is also simply a lot of personal struggles.
There are a lot of local leaders who want control of their towns or cities or regions.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of people who want their particular ethnic group to be in control of a particular region or a particular city. In that sense, it's a very, it's almost a postmodern war.
I mean,

Speaker 3 it's a war between lots of different people about lots of different desires rather than being about a single ideology.

Speaker 2 You know, the country was ruled for many years by this dictator, Omar al-Bashir, but in 2018-2019, there was a movement of students, professionals, and activists calling for real reform, and they made some headway, didn't they?

Speaker 3 There was a period when the military were still very much in the background, but there was a civilian government and a civilian prime minister.

Speaker 3 And they were working with some international institutions and they were trying to create, I don't know, if not a democracy, then at least a state where there was some kind of justice and some kind of rule of law and where traditional kinds of violence that have plagued Sudan for a long time could be put to a rest.

Speaker 3 And it was a very idealistic moment. I met a lot of people who'd been involved with that democracy movement and who had really had high hopes for it.

Speaker 3 And it was destroyed by the military, who I think feared that the civilian government would take away their funding or take away their business interests.

Speaker 3 Of course, the army has a lot of economic interests in Sudan, as is common in that part of the world. And therefore, they took back power.

Speaker 3 And it's really from that moment, from the moment of the military coup, that you began to then have this deterioration within the army.

Speaker 3 And actually, what we're seeing now is really a struggle between different military forces who were, at one point, part of the same army.

Speaker 2 And do the remnants of that pro-democracy movement, the people who had these idealistic motives, do they support one side or the other?

Speaker 3 Some of them support one side and some support the other, unfortunately, for different reasons. Some are sympathetic with the Sudanese army, who they think is the legitimate government.

Speaker 3 Others think that the RSF, which comes from regions that were traditionally repressed by the central government, has more legitimacy.

Speaker 3 Mostly, though, I did meet quite a few people who'd been part of that movement, and mostly what they're doing now is volunteer work. They're trying to get food to people.

Speaker 3 They're trying to get medical equipment to people.

Speaker 3 I met one person in particular who I spent some time with in Omdurman outside of Khartoum, who was an activist who had been a revolutionary and described himself to me as a revolutionary and now has an organization that helps people fill prescriptions, which sounds like a small thing, but it's not.

Speaker 3 So people who have particularly chronic health problems come to him.

Speaker 3 He has a kind of place where he stands outside the hospital, and they come to him and he takes their phone numbers and he tries to raise money to help them.

Speaker 3 He's been involved in other kinds of activities as well. And those people remain the most dedicated and the most idealistic people that you meet in Sudan.
And I think they do a lot of good.

Speaker 2 You write that besides these two principal forces, the Army and the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, there is a bewildering array of smaller armies and militias fighting alongside or against one of the two.

Speaker 2 I'm sure these are far too numerous to name, but in general, who are they? What are they doing?

Speaker 3 So some of them are local leaders who have local support in a particular tribal area or a particular ethnic area. There are a few Islamic groups, some of whom are said to have direct links to Iran.

Speaker 3 There are also some groups who are allied to warlords who have particular economic interests.

Speaker 3 I remember that a lot of this war is about control of gold mines or other, as I said, other kinds of trade movements.

Speaker 3 Some of them are people who are well known and have been there for a long time, and some of them have sprung up recently.

Speaker 3 I mean, so when you have a situation where there's really no law and there's really no control and nobody is in charge of a lot of empty territory, then this is what happens: is people who have weapons and people who have some kind of following are simply able to take control.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, you're right that the chaos of this has enabled the spread of a third ruling idea that's neither statist nor democratic. It's what? Nihilistic?

Speaker 3 It's nihilistic, it's violent, it's rapacious, it's an idea that nothing means anything, and therefore I should just be able to steal as much as I can before I'm stopped.

Speaker 3 I talked to a lot of people who were in Khartoum at the time that it was overthrown by the RSF, and they had really horrible stories about seeing their neighborhoods wiped out and watching buildings knocked over with bombs.

Speaker 3 And it felt to them like it was all very pointless. Why are you destroying the city that had middle-class life, social structure, traditions, restaurants?

Speaker 3 And to watch it all wiped out for no reason was very hard for people to take. And I met people who'd lived in Khartoum, I met them in other parts of the country, and I met them outside of Sudan.

Speaker 3 And almost all of them talk about this moment as this experience of being overwhelmed by chaos.

Speaker 3 And I saw a lot of people who'd been through that exact same experience, the sense that everything I knew and all the structure and order that I I knew was wiped out overnight.

Speaker 2 So what is the scale of destruction in the country?

Speaker 3 The scale of destruction is vast. There are, by most estimates, some 14 million people who've been displaced in Sudan.
So they're either abroad or in refugee camps or somehow not at home.

Speaker 3 And that's more than Ukraine and Gaza combined. A large percentage of the country will go hungry at some point this year, and some hundreds of thousands of people are thought likely to star.

Speaker 3 There are people who even right now are being expelled from a part of Darfur where there's a lot of fighting, who are arriving on the other side of the border in Chad and find absolutely nothing.

Speaker 3 These empty camps that I saw inside the country are also springing up outside the country. So the violence and unrest that's in Sudan is also spreading into the region.
Malnutrition is everywhere.

Speaker 3 The after effects of violence are everywhere. There's malaria in the country.
There's cholera in the country. Diseases of poverty and of war on an unthinkable scale.

Speaker 3 And of course, this is all coming at a moment when the international aid community and the international medical community are at their lowest ebb in recent history.

Speaker 3 And so it's not just that there are people suffering in Sudan, it's that the scale of help for them is much lower than it would have been at any time in the last two, three decades.

Speaker 2 Anne Applebaum is our guest. Her new cover story in the Atlantic, based on her trips to war-torn Sudan, is this is what the end of the liberal world order looks like.

Speaker 2 Our conversation was recorded yesterday morning. She'll be back to talk more after this short break.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 There's been so much attention to the Trump administration's different attitude towards foreign aid and Elon Musk, you know, saying that he's put the U.S.

Speaker 2 Agency for International Development in the woodhipper. I found that your analysis of the other elements of the withdrawal of international assistance are really important.

Speaker 2 One of the things you noted was that the United States invasion of Iraq back in 2003 had the effect of undermining the credibility of the United Nations in much of the world, right?

Speaker 3 Yes, the U.S.

Speaker 3 war in Iraq partly because it was carried out under the umbrella of a UN resolution or the sort of fig leaf of a UN resolution, did have the effect of undermining a sense that the US was the backer of some kind of sense of international stability.

Speaker 3 Other countries, I mean, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has also undermined the idea that leading countries would play a role in maintaining stability and security in Europe, let alone in Africa.

Speaker 3 So there is a broader trend, and the trend has been

Speaker 3 against the language of the UN Charter, which is all about respecting borders and respecting dignity of people and human rights and all that. That has all been deteriorating for a long time.

Speaker 3 I mean, really, the current Trump administration is more the end result of that process, you know, that really began a decade ago and, of course, is now accelerating it and worsening it.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, you say the UN Security Council became contentious, then dysfunctional. That's because why Russia and China, their roles changed?

Speaker 3 There was a long period when the Russians and the Chinese wanted to be seen as somehow constructive powers working with the so-called West, you know, working with Europe and the United States to achieve joint goals.

Speaker 3 It was possible to have UN Security Council-mandated negotiators who would go places and play a neutral role. And that began to fall apart, partly because the Russians

Speaker 3 decided that they could achieve more by breaking rules.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think starting with the invasion of Georgia, really, in 2008, and then the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 established Russia as a revanchist power, one that doesn't respect borders and that it is interested in

Speaker 3 changing the rules. And then, as we've discussed, I mean, the U.S.
role in Iraq undermined that stability as well.

Speaker 3 And then I think the Chinese also now have an idea that we're in some kind of transition to a different kind of system and that in the next system they're going to be the leaders.

Speaker 3 And they're already seeking to change the language of the UN, for example, to downplay the use of human rights language and to promote instead an idea of sovereignty, which simply means that you're not allowed to criticize China.

Speaker 3 And they're not so bothered anymore by invasions and by other countries falling apart. And their role in Sudan, for example, is a very curious one.
I mean, they

Speaker 3 seem to be there around the edges, mostly looking for business deals. They have companies that are looking for ways that they can profit off the conflict.
So there isn't really anybody.

Speaker 3 the US is not interested right now. Europe is too weak.
The Russians are actually also seeking to profit from the conflict. They have interests

Speaker 3 on both sides. China is distant, and that's the, you know, those are the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
And none of them have any particular interest in ending this war.

Speaker 3 And that, again, is a, it's not the only reason why the war continues, but it's part of the backdrop. There simply isn't a meaningful or credible international process.

Speaker 3 There isn't anyone who can sit down and make,

Speaker 3 through persuasion or through any other means, make the leaders of the various factions negotiate with one another.

Speaker 2 Right, so the UN's effectiveness is greatly reduced. Did you see specific effects of the shutdown of the American U.S.
Agency for International Development or American aid in general?

Speaker 3 So I was there in the spring when these effects were just beginning, but I did talk to quite a few people about what the shutdown of USAID was going to mean.

Speaker 3 And I think one thing that you learn pretty quickly is that there are a lot of aid organizations that actually didn't know how much they were dependent on USAID, because USAID was about 40% of all international aid, but it was also a lot of logistics.

Speaker 3 So a lot of whether it was moving food around or whether it was contracts or distribution or keeping statistics or keeping track of how aid worked in different places, a lot of that was USAID or USAID funded.

Speaker 3 So there are a lot of organizations working in Sudan that suddenly found that they were blacked out of computer systems they'd had access to, or

Speaker 3 their trucking contract had been canceled unexpectedly. So you could already begin to see kind of pieces of the system not working.
I mean, I saw it at the very, very ground level in several places.

Speaker 3 I've talked a little bit about these Sudan mutual aid groups, the emergency response rooms, and a lot of them were getting their weekly, I mean, it's often just beans they give people.

Speaker 3 They make big pots of soup and they distribute them to people once a day or once every other day. And a lot of them had stopped receiving food.

Speaker 3 The food just wasn't coming because whatever USAID system or other charity who had knowingly or unknowingly been relying on USAID wasn't able to deliver anymore.

Speaker 3 So you could, you know, I could see, you know, soup kitchens basically that weren't able to feed people as often as they had a month earlier. That was something that was already clear.

Speaker 3 I also spoke to a doctor at a children's hospital, and this for me was really heartbreaking, who talked about these special nutritional supplements that are made often in the United States.

Speaker 3 There's one called Plumpy Nut that has been written about quite a bit, and it's made in Georgia, I think, and some other places.

Speaker 3 And he told me, you know, he wanted me to know that he wasn't wasting it. He'd heard this idea that Americans are cutting this aid because they think that people are wasting it.

Speaker 3 And he said to me very earnestly, you know, we're not wasting it. I'm using every little bit of it.
And I have some still in storage and I'm doling it out to people. And this is a man who is,

Speaker 3 I saw the ward where he has malnourished children, you know, tiny babies who

Speaker 3 have paper-thin arms, you know, and their mothers who are too exhausted to stand.

Speaker 3 And this is a man who's telling me that he's saving the USAID nutritional supplements that he's been given given and doling them out carefully. I mean, it was horrifyingly embarrassing.

Speaker 3 All I could feel was, you know, that this man should feel he has to justify what he's doing.

Speaker 3 This, you know, doctor, very young doctor, actually, it was truly shameful. So what you're beginning to see, as I say, is the pieces of the food system just beginning to fall apart.

Speaker 3 Because even though Sudan is supposed to be one of the places where aid is meant to be continuing, so the State Department has said that emergency aid and in this kind of place

Speaker 3 keep going. It's already in patches.
It's falling apart. It's not working the way it was.
And there will be people who starve and die because of Elon Musk's decision.

Speaker 2 Let me reintroduce you. We're going to take another break here.
We are speaking with Anne Applebaum.

Speaker 2 Her new cover story in the Atlantic, based on her trips to Sedan, is this is what the end of the liberal world order looks like. We'll talk more after this short break.
This is fresh air.

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Speaker 2 You know, you note that with the retrenchment of the international order and international aid, that Sudan is now the focus of what you call middle powers.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's not Russia and China, that others are active in Sudan. Who are they and why?

Speaker 3 Well, Russia is active, very active in Sudan, but you're right that the more important powers are regional powers. So the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Iran.

Speaker 3 All of them now have interests in Sudan, and that means that they are aligned with one side or the other. In some cases, they're supplying weapons to one side or the other.

Speaker 3 In some cases, they have business interests on one side or the other. You know, what happened in Sudan was that you created a kind of vacuum

Speaker 3 when the government disappeared, and into the vacuum, you now have all these foreign powers. And this is, by the way, not unlike what's happened in Libya

Speaker 3 or what was happening in Syria. Sudan isn't completely unique, but I do think that in Sudan it's more

Speaker 3 the numbers of countries involved and their clashing interests are somehow harsher and starker.

Speaker 3 I mean you actually have Saudi Arabia and UAE, which are normally pretty aligned on most things, are on opposite sides in Sudan.

Speaker 3 And you would think that between the two of them there would be some way of having a conversation and working it out, but that's not what's happened.

Speaker 3 So people have their contacts, they have their favorite groups or their favorite, you know, in some cases, their favorite commercial interests, and that is a big part of the explanation for why the war continues.

Speaker 2 And the result is that all of these groups and militias now have more high-powered weapons with which to kill each other and civilians?

Speaker 3 So this is another thing that really struck me about Sudan is that some of the conflicts there are very old in the way that some European conflicts are very old.

Speaker 3 You know, there are ethnic groups that have competed with one another for a long time.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's a famous age-old conflict in Darfur between nomadic and often Arabic-speaking peoples and so-called African, although of course they're all African, so that's not really the right term, but farmers who speak a different set of language, African languages.

Speaker 3 And this has been going on for a long time, and they have had periods when they're resolved and they intermarried, and then there have been periods of conflict.

Speaker 3 What you see happening there now is that this older conflict has now been exacerbated and kind of amplified by the very high-tech weapons that either side can now get from the outside.

Speaker 3 So they can get drones, the side that has the Sudanese Air Force, have airplanes, they have RPGs.

Speaker 3 I mean, they're able to commit much more violence and do much more damage than would have been the case traditionally. And of course, the weapons are coming from outside the country.

Speaker 3 And so it's the move of international weapons into that region that, you know, where you had disagreements, I would say, before,

Speaker 3 that has really created just a new scale of violence. I mean, there's been fighting in Darfur for a long time.
People who've followed the news from that part of the world know that.

Speaker 3 The difference now, as you say, is the amount of weaponry coming from around the world.

Speaker 2 One of the things you write about is that people there don't just regret the lack of international aid, but that in the old days, people from the United States and other countries would come and, as you said, knock heads and try and get people together and sit down and try and work out an arrangement, try and bring conflicts to an end.

Speaker 2 That's a big loss.

Speaker 3 I met a lot of people who were almost nostalgic for a kind of America that maybe did never really exist, but that they imagined could exist, you know, where senior Americans with close connections to the president would come and organize some kind of negotiation and both sides would sit down and agree.

Speaker 3 And people have it in their head, you know, they have images in their heads of Camp David or of the Dayton peace agreements, you know, things that Americans were able to negotiate in the past through their diplomatic skill and their range and their influence simply because they were Americans and they were from

Speaker 3 the rich country that had that kind of influence. And people would talk about that happening as if it could still happen.

Speaker 3 And of course, the sad thing for me traveling in Sudan and in the region and talking to people was the realization that it probably can't happen now.

Speaker 3 I know Donald Trump wants to be a peacemaker and he

Speaker 3 would like to be seen as somebody who can end conflicts, but to end a conflict in Sudan, you need a plan, you need connections, you need diplomats who have some experience.

Speaker 3 And of course, those people all exist. I mean,

Speaker 3 they're in the State Department, or in some cases, they've recently been fired from the State Department or from USAID, but you can't do it from Washington, you can't do it in an afternoon.

Speaker 3 And the patience and the time and the investment that it would take to end a conflict like the Sudanese conflict, I just don't see where it's going to come from right now.

Speaker 2 You know, you finish the story with a sobering assessment of what it means when the international community abandons a country like Sudan in such a crisis.

Speaker 2 I wonder if you wouldn't mind reading the last two paragraphs of this story.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'd be happy to read the last paragraph.

Speaker 3 On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children's book where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe.

Speaker 3 In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day.

Speaker 3 In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars served crushed tropical fruits.

Speaker 3 But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too.

Speaker 3 Violence, inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders, has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond.

Speaker 3 Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too.

Speaker 3 As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.

Speaker 2 Well, Ann Applebaum, thank you for sharing that. I want to talk about Ukraine a bit before we let you go.
But first, let's take another break here. Let me reintroduce you.

Speaker 2 We are speaking with Ann Applebaum. Her new cover story in the Atlantic, based on her trips to Sudan, is titled, This is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in just a moment. This is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 And Applebaum, you've also written about the war in Ukraine an awful lot, and you had a story about a month ago saying essentially the United States is switching sides in the war.

Speaker 2 And when I first saw the title, I thought you might have been referring to Donald Trump being more critical of Vladimir Putin than he has been historically. But you have a different take here.

Speaker 2 Tell us about this.

Speaker 3 So I wrote that story at the moment that the U.S. Defense Department had suspended weapons to Ukraine.
Maybe without the president's knowledge, that hasn't actually ever really been clear

Speaker 3 who took the decision to do that. And I also wrote it when there had been a recent report that has still not been reversed as far as I know, of how the U.S.
is de facto lifting sanctions.

Speaker 3 So, we talk a lot about sanctions, or Trump talks a lot about sanctions, but real sanctions that affect the Russian defense industry require constant changes.

Speaker 3 You know, the new companies that are being used to import material have to be identified and sanctioned, and so on. And the Trump administration had stopped doing that.
And I'm afraid that even now,

Speaker 3 Trump is using more

Speaker 3 you know, more aggressive language about Russia, and he's once again given a deadline. I think one of them comes up later this week about when he wants to see the war resolved.

Speaker 3 I remember he's talked about 20 days during the election campaign he talked about one day. Sometimes he talks about 50 days and then he's shortened it.

Speaker 3 None of that fills me with the sense that we have a clear idea of how to end the war, nor do we have a clear understanding that the war can only end. And

Speaker 3 I don't see any other solution. The war can only end when the Russians understand that they can't win.
So right now, the Russians still believe they can win.

Speaker 3 And by win, I mean they think they can take over all of Ukraine one way or the other. They can make it part of a Russian empire or sphere of influence.

Speaker 3 They can put their own government in charge of Ukraine. They still believe that.
And until the U.S.

Speaker 3 and its European and Democratic world allies are able to convince the Russians that they will stand by Ukraine, they will continue to aid Ukraine, that they will not zigzag or change their minds or freeze weapons and then unfreeze weapons until we've re-established that, then I think the war is going to continue.

Speaker 3 So, although, of course, I don't exclude surprises, and I know that Putin is in trouble in a lot of ways, his economy is in trouble, you know, he can't fight the war forever, and I don't exclude that he might at some point look for a way out, it doesn't feel to me yet that the Trump administration has really understood the nature of the war and the nature of the steadfastness, the kind of psychological resilience that the democratic world will have to show in order for Putin to be persuaded to end it.

Speaker 2 You know, one of the things you write is that the United States has been quietly lifting sanctions on Russia.

Speaker 2 The element of this I didn't realize is that it requires constant vigilance to make sanctions effective. You want to explain this?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so these aren't general sanctions, you know, on people.

Speaker 3 These are specific sanctions that are designed, for example, to prevent the Russians from getting a particular chemical they need to make explosives or to get components that they need to make tanks or to build machinery for their army.

Speaker 3 And the Biden administration had been very carefully tracking where those components were, how the Russians were getting access to them, and as they found new companies or new groups who were often Chinese, for example, who were being used to export forbidden materials into Russia, they would be sanctioned or the banks they were using would be sanctioned, as happened at one point.

Speaker 3 And that was a way of preventing material from getting into Russia. The Trump administration stopped doing that.

Speaker 3 And whether they stopped it because they don't care or because they didn't have the personnel and the people to do that kind of work anymore, I don't know.

Speaker 3 But the effect of it is that Russia has been able to rebuild its defense industry and, in particular, to get hold of the material it needs to make hundreds and thousands of drones that it's now using to attack Ukrainian cities, just for one example.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you also noted that the State Department is closing its Global Engagement Center. Do you want to explain what that is and why it matters?

Speaker 3 This is something I'm hoping to write more about. So the State Department is part of a bigger effort to shut down U.S.

Speaker 3 international broadcasting and groups that make anti-censorship technology that has been used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

Speaker 3 The State Department also shut down the Global Engagement Center.

Speaker 3 This was a small piece of the State Department that was mostly over the last few years exposing Russian and Chinese influence operations.

Speaker 3 So they identified a group of websites, for example, in Latin America and another project in Africa that were designed to look native but were really Russian.

Speaker 3 That's an example of the kind of thing they were doing. They have been completely shut down and all the people associated with it have either been fired or moved elsewhere in the State Department.

Speaker 3 And that simply means that this kind of work isn't being done anymore. And so these kinds of things add up.

Speaker 3 So again, cutting the funding of Radio Liberty, which broadcasts in Russian into Russian, or cutting funding for independent Russian media that the U.S. provided some money for in the past.

Speaker 3 All those things, you know, the Russians, of course, know that we've done that, they keep track of it, and they understand all of these things as being loosening the pressure on Putin.

Speaker 3 So giving him more breathing space, allowing him to spread propaganda and disinformation farther. And so all these things are part of a package.
I mean, we might not keep track of them.

Speaker 3 I don't even know that Trump personally knows that much about it.

Speaker 3 But over a very wide sphere, kind of economic and in information and in the military sphere as well, we've been withdrawing and ending pressure on Russia.

Speaker 3 And they see it, and they've understood this as a kind of green light. Okay, they can keep fighting because they're going to win.

Speaker 2 You know, this war is now, what, more than three years old. It was February of 22 when the invasion first happened.

Speaker 2 What is your sense of the resolve of the Ukrainian population and Vlodymir Zelensky's position?

Speaker 3 So I ask all Ukrainians I know and the ones that I see, I ask them this question every time we meet. And I am still being told that the you know, the army has no intention of not fighting.

Speaker 3 If anything, the drone battalions who are now the most important part of the war, this is really a drone war now, not an an artillery war. They're still innovating and

Speaker 3 working hard.

Speaker 3 I'm even told that Ukrainians, despite the bombardments of the cities, certainly nobody has any desire to be occupied by Russia, given what they've seen and what we know about life in occupied Ukraine.

Speaker 3 So it's not so much their resolve that worries me. I mean, I worry about lack of equipment or lack of soldiers or them having simply insufficient resources to continue fighting.

Speaker 3 I mean, that at some point could happen. It doesn't feel to me like it's happening right now.
I mean, we're already in August.

Speaker 3 We were told at the beginning of the summer there was going to be a major Russian offensive.

Speaker 3 Well, if there is one, they have taken some territory this summer, but nothing like anything that some people feared. So I'm not worried about that.

Speaker 3 I mean, but of course, the longer the war goes on, the more toll it takes on people's psyches, on the economy,

Speaker 3 on the environment of Ukraine, and all of that just means the rebuilding process will be that much longer.

Speaker 2 President Trump famously told Zelensky in the Oval Office, you know, you have no cards. Do you think Ukraine can win this war?

Speaker 3 I mean, of course I think Ukraine can win the war. And also the idea that Ukraine has no cards.
I mean, Ukraine has just reinvented drone warfare.

Speaker 3 You know, Ukraine has proven that a small country can stand up to a large one. You know, Ukraine

Speaker 3 has shown what kind of diplomacy a country that wasn't previously known for having even very good diplomats can achieve.

Speaker 3 So, you know, can Ukraine emerge as a sovereign, independent state that is eventually part of the European Union and maybe even someday NATO? Yes, I do think that's possible.

Speaker 2 Well, Ann Applebaum, thank you so much for speaking with us again.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Ann Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new cover story, based on her trips to Sudan, is, This is what the end of the liberal world order looks like.

Speaker 2 On tomorrow's show, the now classic Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run will have its 50th anniversary August 25th.

Speaker 2 It was a turning point for rock and roll and for Springsteen in his life and his songwriting. We'll talk with Peter Ames Carlin about his new book Tonight in Jungle Land, The Making of Born to Run.

Speaker 2 Carlin's also written a biography of Springsteen. I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

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