Old tropes and shaky geopolitics in Anne Applebaum's article about Sudan

The Atlantic’s September cover story, written by celebrity journalist Anne Applebaum, is titled “The War About Nothing” or, if you read online, “The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth.”

Either way, the reference is to Sudan, where war since 2023 has produced immense, immense tragedy. According to the United Nations’ current numbers, over 30 million people (out of approximately 45 million Sudanese) need humanitarian assistance, and over 12 million have been displaced. Casualty counts vary, but even in late 2024, estimates of over 150,000 dead were circulating. The war is nothing to talk about lightly.

In this context, the title “The War About Nothing” has deeply offended many people. The Continent, one of the best magazines from and about Africa today, responded with a cover story of its own, “The War About Everything in Sudan.”

And it is not just Applebaum’s title, but also the contents of her article, that have landed poorly for so many readers already. The Continent’s editors write (p. 13):

“An American journalist recently stirred controversy with a cover story in The Atlantic magazine framing the war in Sudan as “about nothing”. In the piece, the conflict’s drivers are deemed so inconsequential that Sudan becomes a backdrop for a tangential argument:

“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.”

We asked Sudanese people to explain what the war is about. In response, journalists and researchers pitched reported analyses; community organisers and ordinary citizens sent in personal essays. One submission was a report, rich in detail, that stretched to nine pages long. What emerges is clear: there is no such thing as a war about nothing. Sudan’s conflict is in fact no longer a single war, but a series of fragmented contests over just about everything – gold, identity, agricultural land, social philosophies, you name it. Here are five of those perspectives, edited for brevity and clarity.”

The rebuttals to Applebaum’s depiction are clear and convincing in The Continent’s collection, and were already implicit in much analysis of the conflict in Sudan: the war is about counterrevolution, as journalist Eiad Husham recently said in an interview here; the war is about settling the question of who is the ultimate heir to Omar al-Bashir’s thirty-year rule (1989-2019); the war is about the culmination and crash of a mode of political economy; the war is about what kind of say mercenaries and paramilitaries will have in politics; the war is about what kind of state and what kind of governance Sudan will have; the war is about the future of millions of people. To reduce the deaths of millions of people to the supposed absence of American power is to devalue those deaths and to misread the causes and nature of the war.

Applebaum’s Argument Is Political and Ahistorical

Here is how Applebaum lays out her thesis on her Substack:

“On both trips [to Sudan while conducting reporting for her article], I saw what happens when the state disappears. Sudan is now in its third year of a civil war that seems to have no point, no purpose, and no end. Like a tsunami or a hurricane, the war has left wide swathes of physical wreckage in its wake, and human damage too. Food is scarce. The education system has collapsed. International institutions are weak. And, as it turns out, when you take away the liberal world order, you don’t get something better. Instead, you get anarchy, nihilism, and a war fueled by outsiders - Saudi, Emirati, Turkish, Egyptian, Russian, Iranian – and a scramble for Sudanese gold.”

Note how Sudanese are erased in this phrasing - it is either the war itself that acts, like a force of nature, or it is the war that is acted upon, by outsiders. Either way, Sudanese themselves play no active role in Applebaum’s telling.

Applebaum’s phrasing in the article itself is similar: for her, the suffering in Sudan is the consequence of “an anarchic, post-American world, an era that does not yet have a name.” She laments further that “the disappearance of any form of international order has left Sudan as the focus of intense competition among countries that are not superpowers but rather middle powers” (p. 69). Or as she writes later in the article (p. 71):

“In Khartoum, Darfur, and everywhere exiled Sudanese now gather— Abu Dhabi, London, N’Djamena, Washington— I spoke with ambassadors, experts, diplomats, and politicians who repeatedly asked not just about American humanitarians, but also about the Americans who would come from the White House to negotiate, knock heads together, and find a way to end the war. They wanted Americans who would galvanize the rest of the international community, rope in the UN, bring some peace keepers, make something happen: the Jimmy Carter–at–Camp David or the Richard Holbrooke–at-Dayton model of big-league, American-led, problem-solving diplomacy, which once played a role in Sudan too, during both Democratic and Republican administrations.”

One immediate problem for Applebaum’s argument is how to reconcile it with the devastating civil wars that Sudan fought from 1955-1972 and from 1983-2005, conflicts that may have claimed 2.5 million lives or more.

Applebaum contrasts a past where American power supposedly constrained conflict with a present where conflict is supposedly the result of middle powers run amok without America’s guiding hand to restrain them. In making the argument that America used to matter in Sudan, Applebaum ends up spending much more space discussing the scale of American governmental and civil society mobilization around Sudan than she does assessing the impact. Applebaum, tellingly, credits the United States with “help[ing] end the north-south civil war, one of the longest-running in Africa,” but then gets fuzzy when describing why the key outcome of that settlement - South Sudan’s independence - turned so tragic: “Independent South Sudan descended into internal ethnic conflict and failed to thrive” (p. 74). The two verbs in this sentence are grammatically active but semantically passive - who are the people responsible for that descent, that failure? Two paragraphs above, Applebaum had credited the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations with tremendous influence, but then suggests that some time during Obama’s presidency, U.S. disengagement doomed South Sudan. Applebaum blames the media landscape for the change (“social media brought a deluge of misinformation, about Sudan and everywhere else, producing a culture of cynicism and sneering,” p., 75) - but could such a shift really have happened just from 2011, when South Sudan became independent, to 2013, when that country fell into its own violent conflict?

Sudan, then, is for Applebaum mainly a device for making political arguments about the United States itself; one major villain of Applebaum’s story of Sudan is Donald Trump, in keeping with Applebaum’s broader interventions about American politics. I’m no defender of Trump, and Applebaum has some criticism of Biden too, but it seems to me that supposed champions of the “liberal world order” - Bush, Obama, and Biden - all had serious failures when it came to Sudan. Applebaum’s center-right politics have been extensively discussed by numerous authors - one good starting point for that topic is David Klion’s 2021 review of her book Twilight of Democracy. Klion writes, “Applebaum’s blind faith in the center-right strains of neoliberalism and meritocratic mobility…conveniently absolves her and her remaining friends of any responsibility for the present crisis.” Klion’s observation rings true as applied to this Atlantic article too; in Applebaum’s telling, the United States was responsible for successes in Sudan until 2011, but not failures.

Old tropes, dusted off

Another reason Applebaum’s argument about Sudan and the “liberal world order” rings hollow to me is that her article reminded me intensely of two other very problematic articles. The first of those is Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy,” published in The Atlantic (!) in February 1994. The second is Jeffrey Gettleman’s “Africa’s Forever Wars,” published in Foreign Policy in 2010. The three articles by Kaplan, Gettleman, and Applebaum all share a core feature - they use an African conflict or conflicts to illustrate a world supposedly gripped by chaos. They also flatten Africa and Africans into a few one-dimensional categories: power-hungry warlords, brainwashed soldiers, helpless victims, Western-friendly diplomats, and hapless politicians.

For Kaplan - in an article I and many others find truly racist and atrocious - the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, along with crime in Cote d’Ivoire and elsewhere in West Africa, were a preview of the then-approaching twenty-first century:  

Kaplan and Applebaum not only make similar arguments (namely, that African violence is meaningless and it is your future, O Western Reader), they even use some of the same literary techniques - both authors have passages reflecting on how maps don’t accurately convey how these countries aren’t “real” countries at all, just as their wars aren’t “real” wars. Kaplan is openly Malthusian, whereas Applebaum deploys a kind of condescending attempt at compassion. Both of them, strikingly, reach for empire as a comparison: for Kaplan the 1990s was reminiscent of the early colonial period, while for Applebaum the collapse of the American-led order resembles the fall of the Roman Empire.

I’m not the only one who was reminded of Kaplan - Sam Harris raised the comparison to Applebaum when she appeared on his podcast; they both agreed that Kaplan’s predictions had not come true in full, but Applebaum does not reject the comparison to Kaplan.

Gettleman, meanwhile, closely prefigures Applebaum’s arguments about “nihilism”:

“There is a very simple reason why some of Africa’s bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don’t have much of an ideology; they don’t have clear goals. They couldn’t care less about taking over capitals or major cities — in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today’s rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people’s children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent’s most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find.”

Gettleman and Applebaum also used some overlapping imagery: the refugee camp and the hospital are, for both authors, symbols of a world gone mad.

All three authors also make sweeping claims about conflict that they then attribute to vague causes - for Kaplan, it was “environmental scarcity” driving a wave of crime and war; for Gettleman, senseless violence resulted from the end of the Cold War and the world’s many “sick states.” In fact, Gettleman’s thesis may now sound familiar to readers of Applebaum’s article:

“What changed in one generation was in part the world itself. The Cold War’s end bred state collapse and chaos. Where meddling great powers once found dominoes that needed to be kept from falling, they suddenly saw no national interest at all. (The exceptions, of course, were natural resources, which could be bought just as easily — and often at a nice discount — from various armed groups.) Suddenly, all you needed to be powerful was a gun, and as it turned out, there were plenty to go around. AK-47s and cheap ammunition bled out of the collapsed Eastern Bloc and into the farthest corners of Africa. It was the perfect opportunity for the charismatic and morally challenged.”

The fact that variations on the same theme have been published from the 1990s to the present in leading American publications suggests to me that each writer was interpreting the African conflicts of that moment through the prism of their own geopolitical views. Which is it - was Africa doing ok until environmental pressure mounted? Or until the Cold War ended? Or until Trump was elected? In each article, we learn more about the author’s politics than we do about violence in Africa. And again and again, Africa stands in as a symbol for chaos. 

A sublimated comparison to Gaza?

When discussions of the Israeli genocide in Gaza arise, pro-Israeli voices as well as commentators uncomfortable with the term “genocide” often practice a kind of whataboutism, asking pro-Palestinian voices why they don’t care about Sudan as well. The answer from the pro-Palestinian side is often, very sensibly, that pro-Palestinian activists do care about Sudan as well; this is not zero-sum. I have also not heard many Sudanese thinkers say they want people to stop paying attention to Gaza. But in some circles in the West, Sudan has been wielded as a symbolic tool in the attempt to delegitimize Western solidarity with Palestine. Applebaum used a subtle version of this technique in a July 2024 interview with The Guardian’s Tim Adams:

“She fears that the horrific war in Gaza has become a similar kind of simplistic ‘wedge issue’. Her book [Autocracy, Inc.] was mostly written before the Hamas attack on 7 October. ‘I was able to make some adjustments to it later on,' she says. ‘But it was not conceived as a book about the Middle East.’

The nature of the rhetoric around the war emphasised that for her. ‘The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this,’’ she says. ‘I’m not an expert in the region. I’m not there. I’m certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what’s happening in Sudan, say? That’s another huge crisis.’”

In light of Applebaum’s contempt (as expressed in the Atlantic article and elsewhere) for social media, her comments in the interview scan as (a) the familiar talking point that ordinary people are too quick to form political views online and too slow to change them, (b) the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too complex to permit blanket moral judgments, and (c) the tangential reference to Sudan in order to imply that those decrying Israeli violence in Gaza are highly selective in their engagement with geopolitics.

The word “Gaza” only appears twice in Applebaum’s Atlantic article:

• “Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined” (p. 66).

• “Even after Biden took office, American popular and political attention focused first on Afghanistan and then on Ukraine and Gaza; it never returned to Sudan” (p. 75).

These two mentions could be taken as the same kind of implication - namely, the suggestion that Sudan matters more than Gaza, or that Gaza consumed attention that should have gone to Sudan.

In that vein, it’s telling when Gaza is not mentioned in the article:

• “The Russian invasion of Ukraine pitted one security-council member directly against three others for the first time since the Cold War, ending, perhaps forever, any role for the UN Security Council as a serious place to debate matters of war and peace” (p. 76)…no discussion of the idea that the U.S. veto in the UNSC, wielded repeatedly on behalf of Israel, may have also damaged the ability of the UNSC to play a constructive role in “matters of war and peace.”

• “The same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are re-shaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing” (p. 83)…no mention of whether any of this applies to the most discussed conflict in the world right now.

I am sure Applebaum would reject this reading of the article, but to me one can read between the lines and detect two threads about Sudan and Gaza - one, an insistence that Sudan matters more, in a zero-sum way; and two, an implication that Israeli forces are largely playing by the rules in Gaza and the West Bank while in Sudan, “middle powers” are taking advantage of a vacuum in U.S. leadership.

All of this recalls Peter Beinart’s 2024 comparison of Applebaum, Michael McFaul, and Max Boot - three “liberal hawks [who] attack Russia while giving Israel a free pass.” Beinart wrote:

“They tell a particular story about America, and about the last century, which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns on its head. The story is that America’s rise to global pre-eminence ushered in a freer and more law-abiding world. Applebaum has applauded the “Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order”. Boot argues that after winning the second world war, the US avoided “pursuing our narrow self-interest” and instead created “lasting institutions such as Nato and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of the World Trade Organization) to promote prosperity and security for all”. McFaul insists that “the US has not for many decades engaged in annexation or colonization, does not attack democracies, and does not use terrorism deliberately as a method of war”.

But there are many places, especially in the global south, that do not fit this story of American power producing moral progress.”

Sudan does not that fit that story - but the Atlantic article boils down to trying to shoehorn Sudan into a global, pro-American account while ignoring the challenge that Gaza presents to supposed American moral leadership. As Adam Johnson bluntly put it on Twitter,

“Applebaum, and The Atlantic in general, are focusing on Sudan for two reasons and two reasons only 1) to boost Applebaum's broader thesis that bad things only happened because the US ‘withdrawals [sic]’ from policing the world 2) as a gotcha w/r/t Gaza genocide which they 100% support.”

In closing - what Is “nihilism”?

A final note is that authors use of “nihilism” to describe violence in Africa has long bothered me. The colloquial meaning of “nihilism” appears to be something like “wanton” or “lacking ideology.” But the nihilist movement of the nineteenth century, for example in Russia, was actually a thoughtful philosophical and political worldview that aimed at sweeping away tradition in the pursuit of progress. The ultimate literary icon of nihilism - Yevgeny Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons - is a character drawn with significant complexity. The nihilists believed in something; the term does not mean killing for fun. The colloquial use of nihilism, then, is not an attempt at analysis but rather a political epithet, and to me it signifies an author’s refusal to engage seriously with the causes and motivations of violence. The title “The War About Nothing” shocks with its callousness, but the title “The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth” is in a way just as bad, reducing real people to mindless killers.

There is also much room for reflection about why The Atlantic chose a celebrity journalist, rather than someone with a depth of expertise about Sudan, to write this cover story. Applebaum made her mark writing about the Soviet Union before pivoting to writing about authoritarianism; the argument that she is qualified to write about Sudan because she is a supposed expert on the “liberal world order” is a huge stretch. The magazine sidelined thousands of potential authors who could have written amazing articles in order to foreground someone with a glib and profoundly wrong argument.

• This article first appeared on Sawahil Substack and is republished here with the author’s permission.