On 24th October,2025, A UN agency reported that about 250, 000 civilians besieged by Sudan’s Rapid Support Force (RSF) alongside Sudanese Armed forces (SAF) in Darfur faced starvation.
7 Leaky Peace Deals Plus Gaza—But Where Is Sudan?
Donald Trump has claimed to have resolved a list of wars, to the point of even expecting a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Strangely, he has steered clear of the war in Sudan, which has international players, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia Support SAF, while the United Arab Emirates (UAE) supports RSF. The war has caused severe humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly listed wars he claims to have resolved, including Pakistan-India, Thailand-Cambodia, and Armenia-Azerbaijan, adding that some had persisted over three decades. He has even added the US/Israel-Iran war of June 2025, showing utter hypocrisy. Furthermore, he has included the Rwanda-DRC war, which he has described as particularly gruesome, a qualification he omitted from others, which may have entailed him justifying his intervention as being caused by its cruelty and not the mineral rights his country gained through it and the supposed peace deal. He stopped just short of stating the silent part out loud: that wars in this part of the world should be fanned, not resolved. He would proceed to name Serbia-Kosovo and Egypt-Ethiopia wars that never happened, showing desperation to act as if solving wars while ignoring existing ones. Trump’s made-up peace deal over Gaza, which was dramatized by a summit in Sham-El Sheik on October 13, 2025, has only resulted in Israel bombing Palestinians without any responsibility. Amidst Washington’s irresistible desire to act as a mediator of all wars, including those it is a party to, there is a need to investigate why Trump has largely ignored the devastating conflict in Sudan.
The current phase of the war in Sudan, culminating in violence, limited supply of food, and other basics causes over 61,000 deaths annually. In addition, UN agencies reported on 24th October, 2025, that 250,000 civilians besieged by RSF alongside SAF in Darfur faced starvation. By the 27th of the same month, reports emerged that RSF had overrun SAF’s base in El Fasher, its last position in Darfur, and that the fate of the 250,000 civilians sheltering around the base remained unknown as of writing. Still, Trump and Washington do not seem interested in resolving it, suggesting they can only resolve conflicts in some locations and not others.
Washington Administered Stable Core and Burning Periphery
The theory of Functioning Core and Non-Integrating Gap proposed by the US Pentagon’s theorist Thomas Barnett in his work, Pentagon’s New Map (2024), can help in understanding Trump’s actions. Barnett stated that the functioning core of the world’s economy is countries in North America, Europe, China, and South America, which have stable governments, raising living standards, and have a desire to maintain such status. These countries drive the world economy that Washington would like to control for its benefit, despite some of them producing more in raw materials and finished products than the US. Oppositely, Barnett, would describe countries in the non-integrating gap as those with chronic political instability, enduring conflicts, and poverty. These included countries in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, some parts of the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.
Trump wants to appear as if he is resolving wars that threaten the functioning core of the Global economy but is secretly promoting those that occur in the perceived periphery of the same to secure his country’s relevance. He and his predecessors have for decades tried to convince countries in the functioning core that they should not aspire for greater autonomy in global politics and governance but should accept US patronage. Washington’s need to maintain control over developed economies makes it curate wars and proxy conflicts in the functioning core, which it purports to resolve to create dependency. Meanwhile, it creates conflicts in non-integrating gaps to scare populations of the developed countries to subscribe to its ‘protection,’ for instance, through its Militaristic NATO. Also, Washington uses wars to pressure its advanced competitors by suggesting that it can cause such within their territory, a good example including when the late Senator John McCain, threatened that Russia and China could end up as countries destabilized by the Arab Spring.
Barnett cast the US as the leader of the world economy, assigning it the responsibility of ‘protecting’ it by militarily integrating those in the perceived periphery through wars, effectively giving the white man’s civilizing mission an overtly military dimension. The implications of his 2004 thought as a guide or reflection of the US military decision-making systems can be seen in the number of wars that Washington has led its Western allies into across countries in non-integrating gap afterwards. Noteworthy, these wars were marketed as being meant to defend the West’s way of life, meaning defending the tiered global economy created through Western colonialism. These wars have kept the targeted countries weak and open for plunder; Sudan has been targeted through sanctions and US attacks under false pretext since the late 1990s. Washington and Western Europe repeatedly claim that the targeted countries are weak due to inherent reasons while ignoring the deleterious role of European colonialism, and US military colonialism effected through direct wars and civil conflicts. To the West, the simmering wars in Sudan, like in DRC, or Somalia, give Western racial supremacists a justification for maintaining a tiered global economy in which developed countries can occasionally intervene in the Global South to steal resources.
Washington’s Illusion of Having Exclusive Rights to Resources and Development
Trump, through the ‘America First’ policy, views the US as having exclusive rights to development and to leading the core of the global economy to exploit the Global South. He, like his predecessors, would like to cast the Global South as dangerous and incapable of developing by letting the conflict in Sudan continue festering and threatening to start a similar one in Venezuela. This stand reflects Barnett’s perspective, as he stated that countries in the non-integrating gap had no desire for high standards of living. Such a statement conveniently left out the reality that these countries were ravaged by Western colonialism for centuries. It’s puzzling how Barnett did not know or why he ignored how currently poor and unstable regions had created functional and integrated economies with high standards of living before Western colonialism arrived. East Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent had created a thriving international trade in spices when Western Europe was decaying in the Black Death. While Western militarism, terrorism, and colonialism effected by the Portuguese, Britons, and Germans ravaged the Global South, these former empires have been retired into the trashcan of history. Washington should be under no illusion that it will remain as a dominant power propagating crises and benefiting from others forever.
Simon Chege Ndiritu is a political observer and research analyst from Africa
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