In a blunt interview on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, America's Africa envoy said each side in Sudan's war believes it can still win outright — the frankest explanation yet of why every peace initiative keeps failing.
Donald Trump's Africa envoy, Massad Boulos, said on Friday that each side in Sudan's civil war believes it "could get a decisive military victory" — a strikingly candid admission that the conflict, now in its fourth year and the world's largest humanitarian crisis, has no end in sight. Speaking to France 24 on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, Boulos also conceded there is no "imminent solution we can feel or touch" in the Western Sahara dispute and rejected Rwanda's accusations that U.S. sanctions have taken sides, saying the measures "can easily be reversed."
The remarks land at the end of a UN General Assembly week that exposed, more than resolved, the deadlock over Sudan. The United States withheld a visa for Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan ahead of the gathering — reportedly making his attendance contingent on agreeing to a 90-day ceasefire proposal, according to Reuters — and the State Department declared that neither the army nor the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) "represent legitimate, constitutional governance for Sudan." Secretary of State Marco Rubio described mediating an end to the war as "frustrating": "Every time it seems like we're on the verge of making progress, one side or the other will back off because they think they're winning or they think they could win."
What Boulos actually said
The France 24 interview is worth quoting precisely, because Boulos — who oversees the entire Africa portfolio for the Trump administration — put Washington's assessment on camera. Asked about Sudan, he said each of the warring sides feels it could still achieve "a decisive military victory." That is not a description of the battlefield; it is a description of the perception of the battlefield, and in war that perception is often the thing that keeps the shooting going.
Boulos's framing is notable because it cuts against his own earlier message at the UN Security Council, where he argued that neither side was actually positioned to win outright and proposed extending the Darfur arms embargo to cover all of Sudan, explicitly including drones and drone systems. The contradiction is only apparent: Washington's position is that neither side can win, but both sides believe they can — and belief, not capability, is what has vetoed every truce.
Why this matters: the perception trap
Analysis: wars usually end when both sides accept they cannot win. Sudan's war persists because both sides reject that premise. The army, under Burhan, points to its retaking of Khartoum and its foreign backers — Egypt and Turkey supply drones, ammunition and air-defence systems, according to Middle East Eye's reporting — as evidence the tide is turning. The RSF, under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ("Hemedti"), points to its grip on Darfur and its external supply lines, documented by UN experts and weapons tracing, as reason to hold out.
Each side's confidence is, in a sense, the other's veto. A mediator can propose ceasefires, truces and quartets all day — and Washington has, through the UAE-U.S.-Saudi-Egypt Quartet framework — but a party that thinks it is about to win does not sign. Rubio said it plainly: progress collapses the moment one side decides it is winning. Boulos has now confirmed that this is not a transient problem but the structural condition of the conflict.
The honest implication of Boulos's interview is that U.S. policy has shifted from promising a breakthrough to managing expectations downward. "No imminent solution we can feel or touch" is the language of a diplomat preparing the ground for failure, not heralding a deal.
Background: four years of war, four years of failed diplomacy
The war erupted on April 15, 2023, from a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF. More than three years later, it has displaced some 14 million people, devastated wide swathes of the country, ruined harvests and decimated the economy, according to UN estimates. The army and RSF signed the Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan in Jeddah in May 2023 — pledges to respect humanitarian law and facilitate aid — but Sudan's government says the RSF reneged, and the fighting has only metastasized since.
The diplomatic record is a catalog of near-misses. Washington has pushed humanitarian truces, threatened and imposed sanctions, and now proposes to widen the arms embargo to drones — which, tellingly, Boulos told the Security Council killed more than 1,120 civilians in the first half of 2026 alone, close to eighty percent of the period's recorded civilian deaths. Sudan's foreign minister, Mohieddin Salem, used his own UNGA press conference this week to say Khartoum is ready for "a positive negotiating track" with the United States and regional and international partners — while firmly rejecting any externally imposed solution that infringes on Sudan's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
That sovereignty line is aimed squarely at the visa episode. Burhan's absence from the General Assembly — the army chief had represented Sudan there since the coup — was the week's biggest surprise absence in New York, and Khartoum treated the State Department's legitimacy remarks as an insult. The result is a peculiar stalemate: Washington wants a truce and a civilian-led transition in which neither general governs; Khartoum wants dialogue on its own terms and calls the U.S. approach an attack on its sovereignty; the RSF, for its part, consolidates territory in Darfur. Nobody's position has moved in three years.
The data: what the numbers actually imply
The humanitarian figures make the diplomatic stalemate look indefensible. The UN refugee agency said this week that more than 400 people a day have been crossing into eastern Chad over the past week — a 20-fold increase from recent months — fleeing fighting, aerial bombardments and drone attacks in Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile. Almost one million refugees have crossed into Chad since the war began; more than 55,000 arrived this year alone.
Meanwhile, only 18 percent of the $1.6 billion UNHCR needs this year has come in — a funding shortfall that follows the Trump administration's broader cuts to foreign assistance. "It means less food. It means less capacity for people to be relocated to safer areas," UNHCR's regional coordinator Mamadou Dian Balde told reporters in Geneva. The agency warns of knock-on effects: its analysis shows many refugees move on toward Europe after repeated failed attempts to find safety.
Put those numbers next to Boulos's assessment and the picture is grim arithmetic: a war that generates 400 new refugees a day is one in which neither belligerent feels enough pain to stop. The pain is overwhelmingly civilian — drones accounted for the vast majority of recorded civilian deaths this year — while the armies fight on with foreign-supplied weapons. That asymmetry is why embargo proposals keep surfacing at the Security Council, and why Russia and China keep pushing back on them.
Who wins, who loses
The arms pipelines win. Every month the war continues is a month of revenue for the external networks supplying both sides — the UAE-linked channels sustaining the RSF through Libya, Chad, Ethiopia and Somaliland, and the Egypt-Turkey support for the army. Stalemate is profitable; resolution would end the market.
Civilians lose, catastrophically. Fourteen million displaced, a 20-fold surge into Chad, food aid collapsing to less than a fifth of need. The war's most vulnerable — children, the malnourished, the besieged — have no seat at any negotiating table.
Washington's leverage is diminishing. Withholding Burhan's visa produced defiance, not a ceasefire. Sanctions are dismissed as reversible. The State Department's own framing — that neither side is legitimate — leaves the U.S. without a preferred interlocutor, which is a principled position and a practical handicap.
Khartoum's sovereignty posture wins domestic points and loses international room. Rejecting imposed solutions plays well at home but narrows the space for the very dialogue Salem says he wants — because every mediator's proposal is, by definition, externally imposed.
What happens next
Three scenarios. One: the war grinds on into 2027. Both sides keep believing victory is near; foreign sponsors keep the arsenals topped up; the refugee flow into Chad accelerates and the aid system, already at 18 percent funding, buckles. This is the default path — the one Boulos's interview describes.
Two: coercion bites. The U.S. widens sanctions and the arms embargo, including on drones; external patrons recalculate the cost of sustaining their clients. The precedent is thin — sanctions on both SAF- and RSF-linked figures have not yet bent the war — but the visa episode shows Washington is willing to escalate the pressure on Burhan personally.
Three: humanitarian collapse forces a truce nobody wanted. Past ceasefires have come not from diplomacy but from exhaustion. With harvests ruined, the economy decimated and the fighting now reaching Blue Nile and Kordofan, the material basis for continued war could erode faster than either side's confidence. A truce born of exhaustion would be fragile — the Jeddah commitments collapsed within weeks — but it would at least pause the dying.
Watch the drones. They killed the overwhelming majority of civilians recorded this year, and the U.S. push to bring them under the embargo is the one concrete policy lever on the table. If the Security Council moves on that, it matters. If it doesn't, expect the next envoy interview to sound exactly like this one.