The United States Weighs Its Options on South Sudan

The story was wonderful and the future was full of promise: a triumph of good over evil, like those of which America is so fond. In 2011, a new state, South Sudan, was born, set up through intensive American diplomacy and billions of dollars of bilateral aid, ending one of the oldest wars in Africa. This dream scenario has turned into a catastrophe. And as is so often the case in these situations, American diplomatic personnel have been urgently evacuated by heavily armed Marines.

Faced with an imminent confrontation between President Salva Kiir’s army and deposed Vice President Riek Machar’s White Army in the streets of the capital, Juba, the United States decided to withdraw their final 20 diplomats still in the country on Jan. 3. America was resigned to leaving the leaders’ arms to do the talking and was powerless to enforce a ceasefire between the two rival ethnic groups, the Dinkas and the Nuers.

This snub is serious for Washington, which has already pulled 440 American nationals, government workers and civilians out of the country and plans to forward $49.8 million to manage the ongoing humanitarian crisis, while facing up to the growing specter of the atrocities by the civil population against each other. South Sudan is therefore largely an “American creation,” notes The New York Times’ Mark Landler: It was George W. Bush’s administration that mounted enough pressure to put an end to the civil war between Khartoum’s Muslim government in the North and the Christian insurgents in the South. It was his successor, Barack Obama, who oversaw the 2011 referendum, resulting in the birth of the state of South Sudan. What’s more, the current Secretary of State John Kerry was in the country during the elections as a senator. Two members of the president’s inner circle are also following the situation very closely: Susan Rice, national security adviser and Africa specialist, and Samantha Power, the American representative in the U.N. Security Council in New York, are working to increase its team of 7,600 UNMISS blue helmets, who have been totally overwhelmed by a wave of 200,000 refugees.*

A Downward Spiral

Despite these concentrated efforts, the options seem limited for the United States, caught off guard by the downward spiral of its fragile East African protégé and the authoritarian leanings of its local leaders. It has called the warring sides to open real peace talks in Ethiopia, where peace talks chaired by American special envoy Donald Booth had completely stalled. The White House has discontinued the training provided to the incipient national army and threatened to cut bilateral aid to “any group that seized power by force.” Riek Machar’s army must listen to this, as it has been focusing all its efforts on doing that. Susan Rice’s message just before Christmas was addressed to Machar, warning that “those who have committed acts of violence against civilians must be held accountable” in international justice courts.

Wary of the army intervening, the U.S. is hoping to be able to delegate this task to neighboring Ethiopia and Uganda, all the while putting pressure on the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who has great influence over Riek Machar and has his eye on Bentiu’s oil fields, which are already partly controlled by the rebelling forces. However, Washington has already sent out a warning: They must not make a peace agreement around an energy arrangement which the State Department deems amoral. “We have too much to lose; we’ve put too much into this,” said Tom McDonald, an ex-diplomat from the Clinton era. “We can’t allow the carnage to go on.”

*Editor’s note: While accurately translated, Samantha Power is the U.S. representative to the United Nations, not just to the U.N. Security Council.