In a journalism career that has taken me to a dozen countries in Africa and the Middle East, UN House in Juba, South Sudan stands alone as the single most dispiriting place I have ever been. When I toured the compound in March 2014, the world’s newest state was only four months into its now over-four-year-old civil war, sparked the previous December when President Salva Kiir accused his rival and first Vice President Riek Machar of launching a coup attempt against him. Kiir comes from the Dinka ethnic group; Machar is a Nuer and soon became the leader of a very loose collection of rebel groups fighting the central government, and often one another. In those first days of the conflict, around 10,000 people fled to UN House, a United Nations base on the edge of Juba.
Thousands of internally displaced were crammed into a dusty rectangular field gridded with trap-covered wooden shacks and ringed with berms and watchtowers. The camp was unimaginably squalid, its inhabitants gripped by a palpable fear of the outside. A few times during my visit, residents offered to show me video of what they claimed were Dinka beating and burning Nuer back in Juba. At this point, Juba didn’t look or feel like much of a conflict zone, but to the camp’s residents the superficially tranquil capital was a place of mortal danger to which even the depredations of UN House were preferable. The camp encapsulated one of the biggest open questions about South Sudan. Which was the more accurate reflection of the country’s path: The desperation and violence suggested in the displacement camp, or the apparent stability of the city surrounding it?
The past four years have answered that question. South Sudan is one of the most violent and dysfunctional countries in the world, with around four million people displaced over the course of its civil war out of an estimated population of 13 million. On February 2, Reuters reported that the United States plans to impose an arms embargo on Kiir’s government, which is credibly accused of massacring civilians, squelching the free press, and abetting ethnic cleansing (if not genocide).
It was not always this way. When South Sudan won its independence from Sudan in July 2011, hopes ran high in Washington; South Sudan partly owed its existence to sustained U.S. pressure on Khartoum during Sudan’s 25-year-long civil war, and the two countries appeared to be natural allies. Kiir even endeared himself to his American counterparts with his trademark cowboy hat, an echo of a gift that President George W. Bush is believed to have given him during a White House visit in 2006.
The new U.S. sanctions are a chance to reflect on how and why things went so wrong. In South Sudan, the United States made a strategic and moral investment in allies whose true motives and interests were never fully understood or accounted for in U.S. policy. Like its partners in Kiir’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the United States pursued a just outcome with little sense of what could or should come next.
At this stage, the arms embargo should hardly surprise. The United States first began sanctioning South Sudanese officials in April 2014, and Washington has implicitly wielded the threat of an arms embargo—a longstanding demand of human rights advocates—ever since. And although the Trump Administration is often perceived as more willing to tolerate or embrace autocratic regimes, in Africa there has been no real evidence of a greater American appetite for the continent’s strongmen. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has consistently threatened to cut off U.S. support if Congolese President Joseph Kabila fails to hold new elections this year. The Trump Administration suspended an Obama-era decision to remove most sanctions on Sudan’s dictatorship, in the hopes of extracting additional reforms or concessions from the country’s nominally Islamist regime. Haley also delivered a stern message to Kiir during a visit to South Sudan in October of 2017—a warning that the South Sudanese President clearly ignored.
A stereotypically Trumpian foreign policy might have embraced a putatively U.S.-aligned regime, whatever its alleged crimes. Instead, the Trump Administration has opted for the now-consensus view that U.S. support for Kiir no longer has any compelling moral or strategic justification. Given Kiir’s reckless waste of American good will over the past seven years, it’s doubtful that a President Hillary Clinton would have reached any other conclusion.
South Sudan began life as one of the poorest countries on earth, beset with problems that its militia army-turned-government was grievously unprepared to address: disputed borders, ethnic and clan violence, general lawlessness, a total lack of infrastructure, and disputes with Khartoum over management of the countries’ shared oil infrastructure. In its northern neighbor, Juba had a powerful enemy and recent battlefield adversary that saw a clear advantage in the new country’s continued destabilization.
At the same time, Juba had a crucial asset that had helped similarly vulnerable states navigate decisive transitional periods. South Sudan may have lacked paved roads, inter-communal harmony, basic law and order, and a functioning government, but it did have the friendship and strategic buy-in of the United States of America. Americans on both the Right and Left had championed South Sudan’s cause over the previous 20 years, and the 2005 peace agreement that ended the Sudanese civil war and set the stage for Juba’s independence was the result of concerted American diplomacy and activism. American right-wingers supported the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army because they viewed Sudan’s civil war as the struggle of a subjugated Christian population against an Islamist oppressor. Meanwhile, human rights activists on the Left believed that southern independence could end one of the world’s longest and deadliest conflicts while achieving some kind of accountability for Khartoum’s decades of atrocities.
The strategic logic of southern independence was similarly appealing: For the United States, a stable South Sudan would remove the primary obstacle to repairing relations with Sudan, a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism and then-ally of Iran whose regime nevertheless clearly desired closer relations with Washington. Importantly, the South Sudanese struggle also had a romance to which Americans were perhaps uniquely susceptible. Like the United States, South Sudan was a country founded by rebels who believed they had a higher sense of justice on their side. As a visiting reporter, it was hard not to admire what the SPLM had accomplished just by casting off the northern yoke and overseeing the establishment of a Western-aligned independent state—and perilously easy to miss the reality that no real transformation had taken place yet, or ever would.
The American narrative about South Sudan imposed a coherency on the country that never existed in reality. The tendency to treat South Sudan as a unitary state, governed by normal statesmen who were vaguely comparable to the leaders of any other independent country, has skewed and hamstrung U.S. policy throughout the independence period. At the ground level, South Sudan never looked or felt like anything resembling a sovereign state. On my two trips to the country, the government was barely in evidence outside of Juba, while the capital crawled with UN peacekeepers, aid organizations, assorted foreign military types from both the public and private sectors, international bureaucrats, and various other outsiders working to prevent the new country’s collapse (or, in some cases, to exploit a slow-burning crisis).
In what’s still one of the most compelling analyses of South Sudan’s disaster, William Davison wrote in October 2016 that the country “remains a deeply troubled, terribly governed, untamed territory where a nascent battle for state power is violent and ethnic, reflecting decades of oppression, internal conflict and marginalisation.” Davison declared that ongoing negotiations to resolve the conflict held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia were a “blood-soaked circus” that foreign mediators, including Washington and its partners, were badly mishandling: “The international community has tried to even-handedly solve the war through formulaic conflict resolution that culminated in nothing more than a classic elite stitch up.” International negotiators focused on such pointless and inevitably self-defeating objectives as returning Riek Machar to the vice presidency—as if the country’s fate hinged on cosmetic rearrangement of its ruling clique, rather than factors which no treaty or battlefield agreement are really capable of solving.
Davison invited a key question, though: Is South Sudan so dysfunctional that the typical levers of statecraft, designed as they are to govern relations between and within sovereign political units, no longer really apply? True, the leaders of South Sudan are not statesmen comparable to the leaders of most other independent countries—but does that change how the United States should treat them? It is, and was, possible to see a naked U.S. strategic interest in giving Kiir maximal leeway. He is the legitimate president of South Sudan, and has been a U.S. partner for well over a decade. The logic in sticking with the last semblance of centralized government in a collapsing country was fairly strong for a while. But if supporting Kiir once seemed like a reasonable choice for the United States, that is clearly no longer the case. The arms embargo is the culmination of a long string of fairly mild U.S. sanctions against South Sudanese officials, a process whose incrementalism speaks to the extent of American patience with the country, along with a vain hope that things could improve. That hope is now largely gone.
There are a number of lessons for U.S. foreign policy in South Sudan’s ongoing collapse. South Sudan is a reminder that even for a country with the limitless resources and awesome coercive potential of the United States, allies aren’t always going to decide that their interests are best served by keeping Washington happy. This is especially true of Washington’s non-state partners, who seldom turn out to be the people they seem to be from afar.
The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is a perfect example of this mismatch between perception and reality. For the past four years, American observers have wondered why Kiir would choose permanent conflict and ethnic warfare over the supposed panacea of American friendship. The SPLM’s post-independence actions have often smacked of ingratitude, as in mid-2012 when the Juba government expelled Ted Dagne, a U.S. government researcher and advisor to Southern leaders who had drawn attention to the appalling extent of the SPLM leadership’s financial corruption.
But the explanation is simple: Kiir answers to an ethnic cadre within a militia movement, not to the U.S. State Department. The friendship of the United States is nice to have, but Kiir’s survival doesn’t strictly depend on pleasing Washington or other foreign friends and one-time true believers. The same cannot be said of such life-and-death matters as Kiir’s relationship with Dinkas in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), or his close ties with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, whose army intervened on the South Sudanese President’s behalf in the early days of the 2013 crisis and likely saved his regime from total collapse.
If the United States misread how badly Kiir needed or wanted its help, it also misunderstood the very nature of the South Sudanese president and the SPLM. Americans, myself included, had a tendency to view the SLPM as a Western-aligned movement with latent—or at least, potential—democratic instincts. This failure of analysis isn’t really that surprising: After all, the inner dynamics of the SPLM have proven incomprehensible even to the major players in the movement, many of whom have been purged or exiled. The optimistic view of the rebels-turned-government also accorded with American and Western assumptions about the basic desirability of stable, unitary state control—assumptions that not everyone shares.
Within the SPLM, interpersonal and inter-communal score-settling was always a higher priority than any kind of state-building project. The SPLM was never an engine of national consolidation, but a loose and fractious consortium of militias with dubious loyalty to one another. (Machar was one of several militia leaders who had defected from the SPLA during the civil war and then later returned to the movement). Kiir and the SPLM recognized that South Sudan was a meaninglessly abstract notion compared with the tangibility of Nuer or Dinka identities, the utility of pilfered state resources, or the security of controlling loyal armed factions or holding titular political power. Kiir, Machar, and the conflict’s constellation of other participants had freed themselves from the delusion of a coherent South Sudan long before anyone else did.
These days it is fashionable to argue that the partition of Sudan was a mistake, and to identify the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudanese government and the SPLA as the United States’ original sin in the country. I don’t believe this to be the case: The aim of the 2005 accord was to resolve the decades-long war between Khartoum and the southern rebels, and to reduce the potential of renewed conflict by turning any future dispute between the two into a more easily regulated interstate conflict. The CPA has achieved those narrow aims, at least so far. Meanwhile, the irresponsibility of the SPLM government shouldn’t obviate the South Sudanese people’s right to self-determination—a right that Khartoum itself eventually recognized after 38 total years of war, and a lopsided independence referendum vote which the CPA mandated. Moreover, it smacks of condescension to believe that any country’s freedom was an error.
Independence was the correct outcome, even if it has proven to be a disastrous one in the near-term. Such ironies are not uncommon in international affairs, and South Sudan is hardly the only recent reminder that there can be horrific consequences to doing the right thing. As with the United States’ 16 years of war in Afghanistan or the well-intentioned but ill-fated Middle East peace process, there’s also no telling what the costs of a less ambitious approach might have been.
Still, South Sudan’s current misery cautions that even major diplomatic breakthroughs should never be thought of as a cure-all. The 2005 CPA, and South Sudan’s independence, should have been understood as a transition point in an ongoing crisis, rather than its ending. South Sudan’s plight doesn’t mean that the United States should deal with all of its non-state allies with icy pragmatism, or give up on pushing ambitious and risky solutions to international conflicts. But the new arms embargo should also be a timely exhortation to humility, and skepticism about what even the best diplomacy can and can’t achieve.