Washington's role as convenor of effective talks to ease tension in global flashpoints is faltering, with Sudan the latest example, as the influence of the once 'indispensable nation' fades
AFP
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (L), Israeli Premier Menachem Begin (R) and US President Jimmy Carter (C) shake hands after a press conference in the East Room of the White House, on September 17, 1978.
The latest round of Sudanese peace talks collapsed in August. The US-mediated negotiations, hosted in Switzerland, appeared doomed from the start, given one of the two key protagonists in Sudan’s civil war, the regular army, refused to take part.
This is a tragedy for Sudan. A conflict that has already claimed over 40,000 lives and caused 10 million to be displaced looks set to grind on with few hopes of resolution. However, the breakdown of the talks was also a blow to the United States.
Despite investing political capital in the talks, which were originally to be attended by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Washington proved unable to clear the first hurdle of persuading the army to attend, let alone making progress on substantive issues.
The Sudanese case is no anomaly. It comes alongside repeated failures to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and, in the years before, failures to resolve either the Libyan or Syrian wars. This is a long way from its past role as the central mediator in Middle Eastern conflicts.
In the late 1990s, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously claimed the US was the "indispensable nation"—the essential player in global peacebuilding. Today, in contrast, the US mediation record in the Middle East is largely a story of failure.
The US is no longer the sole power able to provide credible incentives, assurances, and guarantees
The indispensable nation
From the 1960s onwards, the US positioned itself as the key external power broker in the Middle East. According to Professor Kenneth Stein and Samuel Williams, a former diplomat, Washington became "the essential third party, the only mediator able to provide credible incentives, assurances, and guarantees."
Such efforts were particularly focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict, achieving steady progress in the next three decades. The first breakthrough came in 1979 with the Camp David Accords, which secured peace between Israel and Egypt, mediated and guaranteed by US President Jimmy Carter.
Further efforts in the 1980s stalled, but by 1991, Washington arranged the Madrid Conference, ultimately facilitating the emergence of the 1993 Oslo Accords. It also brokered the 1994 peace between Jordan and Israel and oversaw ultimately unsuccessful talks between Israel, Lebanon and Syria.
The 2000s saw less success, but the US still made multiple attempts to broker Middle Eastern peace. Bill Clinton tried, but failed, to bridge the divide between Israel and Syria in 2000. George W. Bush revived the flagging Israeli-Palestinian peace track with his Roadmap for Peace first and then the 2007 Annapolis conference.
While these initiatives ultimately proved unsuccessful, the US could still use "incentives, assurances, and guarantees" to pressure the key parties to attend and take the process seriously, even if they could not secure a deal.
President Anwar Sadat, US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Meacham Begin celebrate after signing the Camp David Peace Accords 1978
Mediation failures
Fast forward to 2024, and the US mediation position in the Middle East is less robust. The first reason for this is that other states have emerged as rival mediators. As far back as 2008, Turkey offered to revive the stalled peace talks between Israel and Syria with little input from the US. In the 2010s, Russia mediated a dialling down of the Syria conflict with Turkey and Iran in the Astana process from 2017.
More recently, China increased its brokering credentials by mediating a reconciliation deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 and then between Hamas and Fatah earlier this year.
Secondly, Washington's efforts in this time have been far less effective. Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority got nowhere. The Geneva process to end the Syria conflict, sponsored by Washington from 2014 onwards, made little progress and was overshadowed by Russia's more effective process in Astana.
In 2021, Washington stepped up mediation efforts in Libya. A US diplomat, Stephanie Williams, was appointed to lead United Nations efforts to forge a reconciliation between factions, but without much progress. Now, as well as an inability to secure a ceasefire in Gaza despite months of trying, the US has made little progress with the Sudan talks in Geneva.
The story has not been all negative. In recent years, America's greatest diplomatic triumph in the Middle East was the Abraham Accords, when Washington brokered normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Yet this agreement proved an anomaly in what was otherwise a steady decline in the US mediation successes.
(L-R)Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan after signing the Abraham Accords on 15 September 2020.
Declining power and interest
One obvious factor explaining this relative weakening of US mediation has been the relative decline of US power globally and in the Middle East.
The rise of China and Russia as military rivals to the US globally—alongside the increased assertiveness of regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, the UAE, and Israel—means Washington is no longer the only game in town as in the 1990s. While it may still be the most powerful actor, the US is no longer the sole power able to provide credible incentives, assurances, and guarantees. Recent mediations from Russia, China, and Turkey have demonstrated that.
The nature of conflict in the region has also shifted, making mediation harder for the US. Much of the effort from the 1960s until the 1990s focused on state-to-state conflicts, particularly attempting to broker agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours. It is no coincidence that the Abraham Accords, one of the US mediation successes in recent years, was a state-to-state agreement.
Most of the recent conflicts the US has tried to mediate have been intra-state civil wars. These are, famously, harder to resolve, and perhaps the US is less capable and well-placed to achieve success. It doesn't help that often, the key belligerents are non-state actors, such as Hamas, that the US considers to be terrorists.
A further factor is America's own diminishing interest in the Middle East. While Israel remains a core concern, beyond this, the region has lost the salience in Washington it once held. As a result, mediation efforts have not attracted the same level of executive interest.
While the US president himself led the Camp David summits of 1979 and the 1990s, recent mediation efforts in Sudan, Libya, and Syria have been delegated to secretaries of state or less senior officials. This may contribute to their lack of success, given the belligerent parties recognise that the US may only be half-hearted in its willingness to push through peace.
A dispensable mediator?
This is not to say the US will always fail in its mediating efforts in the region; it is just that the circumstances that allowed it to succeed in the past have now changed. The US is weaker and less interested in the Middle East, and many of the conflicts are more complex and intractable.
Concerted efforts, such as Trump's Abraham Accords, can still deliver results, but given Washington's restraints, such successes may prove few and far between in the coming years and failures like the Geneva talks on Sudan may prove the norm rather than the exception in years to come.
