Anne Applebaum on Sudan and the Postliberal World
A lot of great writing is being in the right place at the right time. Achieving that is usually not an accident. And some writers are so obviously on another level at finding the right subject, at the right moment in history, and knowing how the specific details relate to some kind of story. Ever since I read Anne Applebaum’s book on the Soviet Gulag system, I have thought that she was one of those writers.
She has a new piece out this week in the Atlantic on latest chapter of war in Sudan: “The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth”:
The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.
If you want to write well about something, it helps a lot to have firsthand knowledge. Sometimes all the imagination and descriptive powers in the world can’t make up the difference, and this piece is a great example of that. Applebaum recently travelled twice to Sudan this year, in what must be one of the most dangerous places to visit. She describes getting stranded in the desert near the end of her trip, watching a jeep filled with unidentified gun-toting militia approach her small group in the dark. One of them happened to be related to her guide: “In a lawless world,” she writes, “you are perfectly safe as long as your relatives are the ones in charge.”
The article is many things: a description of the almost total loss of any aid when international groups (like USAID) withdraw, and a portrait of a microcosmic version of a world war:
Turkish, Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Russian, Iranian, and Ukrainian interests intersect and overlap…helping make Sudan, like Yemen and Libya, a place where antagonists from around the planet fund violent proxy wars, at the expense of the people who live there. Sudan’s neighbors, including Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, also get drawn into the conflict, either by the middle powers or through links of their own. The Chinese hover in the background, looking for business deals. Sudan’s strategic location on the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, attracts everyone too. Meanwhile, the countries that might once have banded together to stop the fighting have lost interest or capacity. The institutions that might once have helped broker a cease-fire are too weak, and can’t or won’t help. “We live in a very interesting, many people call it, new world order,” Hamdok, the former Sudanese prime minister, told me. “The world we got to know–the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post-Second World War consensus–is just no more.”
Applebaum’s article is so committed to the details of each scene and person because any possible explanation of why this war is happening lead to “nihilism,” to the absence of all the higher-order generalizations about causes and motivations:
There was no school at the camp, and no work. There was nothing to do in the 100-degree heat except wait. The artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital–all of that had led to nothing, built nothing, only this vacuum. No international laws, no international organizations, no diplomats, and certainly no Americans are coming to fill it.
How does one talk about a war in which no end to the conflict could achieve peace? What is war and conflict once it has lost the the hope of achieving something? This is why her description of the international community’s withdrawal hits so hard. In the absence of outside diplomacy or negotiation for peace, all you can do is relieve suffering. If you can’t–won’t–do that, what do you have?