Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here, starting out with an ask for our readers:
Summer vacations are just around the corner, and we’re compiling some SitRep summer reading lists. We’ll be polling our readers and other national security experts, and adding a few recommendations of our own.
We’d love your thoughts on both fiction and nonfiction books that make great summer reads. Let us know your suggestions, and we’ll send our curated summer reading lists out soon (crediting who rec’d what book if it makes the final cut, of course!)
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The Biden administration taps a Sudan envoy (who already has another important job), the new NATO boss is likely to be the old NATO boss, and the Wagner Group is apparently now sidelined in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Who Wants to Be a Sudan Envoy?
On Sept. 6, 2001, then-U.S. President George W. Bush held a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden to give a major update about his foreign-policy team. Bush was there to announce John Danforth, a former senator from Missouri, as his new special presidential envoy for Sudan—a country that provided a safe haven to the mastermind behind the deadly terror attacks that would alter the course of history just five days later. Bush’s announcement carried outsized significance for the location where it was announced (the Rose Garden is frequently used for high-level dignitaries and special ceremonies) and the political heavyweight who took the job.
In the ensuing two decades, the United States has gone through more than a half-dozen more special envoys to Sudan, throughout major lurches in the country’s history, from autocracy to democracy to coups, and now, to the brink of a civil war and a failed state in a strategically important location on the Red Sea.
Over time, the stature and experience of those envoys has slowly been downgraded—from former senators serving as presidential envoys, to experienced diplomats reporting to the secretary of state, to envoys with less experience reporting to an assistant secretary of state, and so on. (For decades, Washington didn’t exchange an ambassador to Sudan because it was designated a state sponsor of terrorism under former autocrat Omar al-Bashir, meaning envoys helped fill that gap.)
Another day, another envoy to Sudan. Now, the Biden administration is poised to name a new special envoy to Sudan yet again, four current and former officials confirm to SitRep. And that envoy also happens to be John Godfrey, a senior U.S. foreign service officer and first-time ambassador to none other than … Sudan. Godfrey was out of the country right before the fighting erupted but rushed back on the eve of the conflict, before the U.S. Embassy was evacuated.
At first glance, it may be hard to tell what the significance of this announcement is beyond adding an extra title to Godfrey’s business card.
But the announcement reveals a mounting frustration in Washington over U.S. policy on East Africa and offers insight into a fierce political battle between Congress and the administration over its engagement on Africa more broadly, as multiple current and former officials as well as congressional aides tell SitRep.
The justification. Administration officials say that upgrading Godfrey to special envoy as well as ambassador will empower him to work not only with Sudanese power brokers, but also with other countries in the region vying for influence over the trajectory of the conflict and power struggle in Sudan. An envoy can both operate within Sudan’s messy political scene and work to coordinate a response outside of its borders—something ambassadors typically don’t have power to do alone.
“We do not comment or speculate on personnel decisions,” a State Department spokesperson said when asked about the matter, but added that Godfrey “is central to both our internal policy process and our diplomatic engagement with partners and stakeholders.”
“There is no acceptable military solution to the conflict. We and Saudi Arabia stand ready to reconvene formal talks in Jeddah, but only once the parties demonstrate their commitment” to meaningful talks, the spokesperson said.
The conflict. The conflict in Sudan, which erupted in April, pits the chief of Sudan’s armed forces, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, the head of a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. The conflict has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis and turned the capital of Khartoum into a war zone, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage despite months of fighting. (It also led to a hasty evacuation of the U.S. Embassy, carried out by a special military operation amid the fighting.)
The conflict is, to use some technical foreign-policy jargon, a complete mess, as foreign powers including Russia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Chad have all backed competing factions. Meanwhile, the United States has tried and failed numerous times to negotiate a sustained cease-fire through talks with both sides in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The specialness of special envoys. Successive administrations have had a tendency to throw special envoys at a thorny foreign-policy problems—particularly in Africa—and call it a day, leading many seasoned diplomats to bristle at the proliferation of special envoys that dilute the roles of assistant secretaries of state and ambassadors. In this case, again, the administration was reluctant to throw an envoy into the mix on Sudan.
The backlash. Congress has been sharply critical of the Biden administration’s approach to Africa policy under the stewardship of Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee, and top lawmakers have pushed the administration to appoint a new special envoy to Sudan that would report to the president.
Godfrey’s expected appointment may be viewed, in some ways, as an effort by Team Biden to throw frustrated lawmakers a bone and bow, in part, to their demands to name a special envoy. Congress may not be satisfied, however, given Godfrey won’t have the weight or clout of a special presidential envoy and, after all, he’s already busy with Sudan as ambassador.
A full plate. Then there’s the question of whether one person can take on the two jobs. Here, experts are skeptical. “It is a full-time job for the ambassador to be trying to talk to all the parties within Sudan on the way forward, and it also happens to be a full-time job to engage outside regional powers with competing interests as a special envoy,” said Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive presidential special envoys for Sudan, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Those are two very separate, distinct full-time jobs that need to be filled, and filling those two full-time jobs with one person is a downgrade for both jobs,” he said.
A very, very full plate, for that matter. The task list for a new special envoy to Sudan seems daunting, according to Nicole Widdersheim, the deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch. It includes rallying humanitarian resources to aid embattled civilians in Sudan, ensuring that an arms embargo is enforced on the conflict-riven Darfur region, coordinating diplomatic pressure among competing African and Middle Eastern states, and ramping up pressure and actions against actors committing crimes and atrocities in Sudan. “It is hard to believe one diplomat can do all this and be ambassador at the same time,” Widdersheim said.
Either way, the Biden administration’s new approach to Sudan represents a stark shift from the days of yore, when the president personally announced his envoy pick in a Rose Garden ceremony.
Let’s Get Personnel
Counterterrorism expert Daniel Byman has joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a senior fellow with the International Security Program’s transnational threats project.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Meet the new boss. The new NATO chief will be the same as the old one, three sources tell SitRep. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has led the alliance since 2014. His term was supposed to end, but it got extended. And then extended again. And now, most likely, it will be extended again (again) despite him publicly saying countless times that he wanted to exit stage right.
The problem with Jens is that everyone in NATO likes him, and despite tons of behind-the-scenes jockeying by the likes of U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, allied members couldn’t find a way to agree on a new secretary-general ahead of a major NATO summit next month.
Stoltenberg is expected to extend his term for one more year, the three sources say (though NATO hasn’t confirmed this publicly). Then we can go through this whole process again next year.
“Since there was no clear, unanimous choice, it makes sense to keep Stoltenberg,” Jane Harman, the former president of the Wilson Center think tank and a former member of the U.S. Congress, told our colleague Alexandra in an interview—though she cautioned that she, like the rest of NATO world, couldn’t definitively confirm the news of Stoltenberg’s extension. “He inspires confidence, and he has a gigantic job at the moment trying to handle new [NATO] entrants and focus on Ukraine and keep a very large organization functioning at a stressful time.”
Collateral damage. The Wagner Group’s head honcho Yevgeny Prigozhin was told that his mercenaries will no longer play a role in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine after the caterer-turned-warlord apparently refused to sign contracts to bring the group under the control of the Kremlin-led Defense Ministry, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Thursday.
Andrey Kartapolov, the head of the defense committee in the Duma, Russia’s unicameral parliament, said that Russia’s Defense Ministry said a few days before Prigozhin’s rebellion (which seized the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don) that all groups fighting in support of the invasion “must sign a contract” with the government. Prigozhin apparently refused to sign the contracts. Prigozhin reportedly arrived in Belarus earlier this week after he was exiled for the rebellion, though his exact whereabouts remain unclear since he left Rostov over the weekend. (The warlord was last heard from in an audio message released on Monday)
Tired of spy balloon news? Too bad. The Chinese spy balloon that flew over large swaths of the United States and Canada earlier this year had high-tech U.S. gadgets on board to collect photos of sensitive sites and send them back to Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. defense and intelligence agencies that have analyzed the debris of the balloon, which was shot down by F-22 fighter jets off the coast of South Carolina in early February, found that it had both off-the-shelf technology on board from the United States and more specialized Chinese spying gear. The investigation into the balloon leaks could prompt a strong diplomatic outburst from Beijing that could further derail the already fragile diplomacy between the two superpowers.
Snapshot
Members of the mercenary Wagner Group sit atop a tank in a street after taking part in a brief abortive coup against the Russian Defense Ministry in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on June 24. STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
Put on Your Radar
Friday, June 30: The mandate of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali is set to expire. A Security Council resolution reportedly could give 13,000 U.N. peacekeepers six months to withdraw.
Saturday, July 1: The United Kingdom takes over the presidency of the U.N. Security Council for a month; Spain takes over the presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Sunday, July 2: French President Emmanuel Macron is set to begin a two-day visit to Germany. It is the first state visit by a French leader in more than two decades.
Quote of the Week
“He is clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
—U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking of Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, and mixing up the war in Iraq and Russia’s war in Ukraine for the second time in 24 hours.
This Week’s Most Read
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
A headline to sum up this bizarre Wagner saga. Via Business Insider: “Ukraine managed to gain ground in Ukraine as Russia faced off against Russia in Russia.”
Getting a little too good at your job. A Harvard professor who studies dishonesty and unethical behavior has been accused of dishonesty and unethical behavior in falsifying data, NPR reports.
Update, June 30, 2023: This article was updated to include comments from a U.S. State Department spokesperson.
Correction, June 29, 2023: This article was corrected to clarify that Godfrey went back to the embassy before the fighting in Khartoum broke out.
