Washington’s approach to Sudan’s civil war has shifted in character since the conflict began in April 2023. What started as an effort to broker humanitarian access and a negotiated ceasefires between the SAF and the RSF, has moved over the past several months, toward something closer to coercive diplomacy: pressure applied directly against the two commanders and the networks that sustain them, rather than an appeal to their willingness to negotiate. This shift reflects less a change in American objectives than a recognition, arriving perhaps a bit late, that persuasion alone was never going to move either general.

The clearest evidence of that recognition surfaced on September 15, when U.S. envoy Massad Boulos told The National that neither Burhan nor Dagalo had a political future governing Sudan. A week later, Reuters reported that Washington was withholding a visa for Burhan ahead of the UN General Assembly, with sources tying the decision to a proposed 90-day ceasefire that Sudan’s military leadership had not yet accepted. Neither the State Department nor Burhan’s office has confirmed that linkage publicly; however, instead of al Burhan, Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mohieddin Salem is expected to address the UN General Assembly (UNGA) instead of the army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

Mediation-oriented diplomacy assumes the parties can be brought to compromise through negotiation and incentive. Coercive diplomacy assumes they will not move unless refusal carries a price. The two are not mutually exclusive, and Washington appears to be running both simultaneously, using pressure to shape the terms under which any negotiation eventually happens. Whether that pressure is calibrated to actually alter Burhan’s or Dagalo’s calculations, though, is a separate question.

In April, the State Department called on both the SAF and RSF to accept an immediate three-month humanitarian truce with no preconditions attached. The proposal’s existence tells us little about whether either side has an interest in honoring it. A ceasefire, if implemented, reduces violence in the near term. Whether it does more than that is a separate question. Both Washington and Sudanese civilian coalitions have said publicly that neither belligerent should have a claim on shaping Sudan’s political future, on the premise that a truce is meant to open space for civilian-led negotiation rather than to ratify either general’s position.

Treating Burhan and Dagalo as a shared target of coercive diplomacy understates how differently the two camps are positioned. The National has reported that the RSF accepted the 90-day humanitarian truce while rejecting elements of the proposed withdrawal arrangements, whereas Burhan has vowed to continue fighting until the RSF is defeated outright. An analyst cited in that reporting also raised a structural point worth taking seriously: Burhan does not make decisions alone, given the armed groups, Islamist factions, and other political forces embedded in his camp. That raises a sharper question than whether pressure on Burhan works. It asks whether coercive diplomacy aimed at a nominal leader can move a broader military-political coalition at all, or whether it only shifts the coalition’s public posture while leaving its internal veto points untouched. Whether the RSF’s own command structure and external relationships pose the same problem is a separate question this piece does not have the evidence to answer, though there is no reason to assume the two camps respond to pressure in the same way or for the same reasons.

The clearest indication that Washington’s strategy extends beyond direct pressure on Burhan and Dagalo is its August 2026 proposal to expand the existing United Nations arms embargo from Darfur to the entire territory of Sudan. The proposal sought to include unmanned aerial vehicles and related technologies, targeting the broader infrastructure through which arms reach both belligerents.

Yet the initiative also exposed the limits of U.S. leverage: on September 11, the Security Council extended the existing Darfur sanctions regime for one month while negotiations over a nationwide embargo continued, amid opposition from Russia, China, and Sudan’s government. Even if Washington succeeds in raising the costs of weapons acquisition, the consequences for each military camp may differ according to its existing stockpiles, territorial control, external relationships, and ability to access alternative supply routes. A uniform measure does not necessarily produce uniform political effects.

The causal chain Washington seems to be betting on runs roughly as follows. Sanctions and arms restrictions raise costs for targeted actors and networks. Raised costs constrain access to resources and diplomatic standing. Constrained access eventually changes how belligerents weigh their options. Changed calculations create openings for negotiation. Each link in that chain is plausible. None of them is guaranteed, and the chain breaks entirely if the SAF or RSF can substitute alternative sources of finance, equipment, or logistical support for those that sanctions cut off.

Sudan’s war is not a contest of wills between Washington and two generals, and the coalition Washington operates through raises its own questions about whose priorities the mediation framework actually reflects. The Quad, comprising the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, already places American diplomacy inside a coalition rather than a bilateral channel, and Washington has referred separately to a broader Quintet grouping including the UN, EU, AU, IGAD, and the League of Arab States as a political track running alongside it. Treating the Quad and Quintet as a single mechanism obscures a real question: whether this externally led structure reflects African institutional priorities, or bypasses them, and whether that complicates or supports an African-led settlement in ways worth investigating on their own terms, separate from whatever judgment one reaches about U.S. sanctions or ceasefire diplomacy specifically. China and Russia maintain their own interests in Sudan’s political order, interests that may or may not run parallel to Washington’s, and the presence of foreign involvement does not by itself prove that any of these actors is sustaining the fighting; what it does mean is that American pressure operates in an environment where alternative sources of diplomatic or material support could blunt its effect, a claim that needs testing against specific transactions and statements rather than the general fact of foreign interest in Sudan.

There is also an African agency dimension that gets underweighted in most Western coverage of this file. The Quad’s structure, and Washington’s prominence within it, raises a fair question about how African Union priorities and neighboring states’ positions relate to a mediation framework largely designed outside the continent. Whether external leadership complicates or supports an African-led settlement is worth investigating on its own terms, separate from whatever judgment one reaches about U.S. sanctions or ceasefire diplomacy specifically.

Washington’s approach to Sudan has become more assertive, combining ceasefire diplomacy with pressure on military leaders and the networks sustaining the war. The expansion of coercive instruments does not by itself demonstrate effective leverage. Whether sanctions, diplomatic exclusion, and visa restrictions alter the calculations of the SAF and RSF depends on the material impact of those measures on specific recruitment, procurement, and financial networks, the credibility of the demands attached to them, and the availability of alternative sources of support that could offset their effect. It also depends on whether pressure aimed at Burhan and Dagalo individually can reach the broader coalitions each commander answers to, which is a different problem for each side. The central question, then, is not whether Washington can impose costs. It is whether those costs close the leverage gap enough to move Sudan beyond a temporary ceasefire toward a negotiated political settlement, and the evidence available in September 2026 does not yet answer that.

By Tsega’ab Amare, Researcher, Horn Review