“A Modest Proposal”: Reading the U.S. Envoy’s Proposal to Expand the Arms Embargo on Sudan
Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb
In 1729, Jonathan Swift, in his A Modest Proposal, used the language of calculations and tables to suggest that Ireland’s poor sell their children as food for English gentlemen’s tables. The horror lay not only in the idea itself, but in its tone: asking victims to be more reasonable in their dying, and to remain neutral toward those killing them.
On Monday, August 24, U.S. presidential adviser Massad Boulos presented the UN Security Council with a four-point draft proposal: expanding the Darfur arms embargo imposed under Resolution 1591 to cover all of Sudan; applying it to all parties; explicitly including drones and related technologies; and increasing the number of experts on the sanctions committee. He argued that the measures would neither give an advantage to one side nor harm another.
But the proposal has a history that reveals its function. Its intensity rises whenever the Sudanese Armed Forces make military gains against the Rapid Support Forces militia, and fades whenever the army’s advance stalls. Boulos did not invent the proposal himself. He was preceded by the “Sumoud” alliance, headed by former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who is based in the United Arab Emirates.
The problem is not the arms embargo itself. The problem lies in the structural design of an embargo based on a superficial symmetry within a conflict in which the parties are not symmetrical in their conduct, their access to weapons, or their adherence to international law.
The proposal was not introduced as a standalone resolution, which Washington could easily have done. Instead, it was inserted into discussions on extending Resolution 1591—the embargo that has been continuously violated since April 2023 through the provision of weapons and mercenaries to the Rapid Support Forces via Chad and Libya, as well as military aircraft landing at airports in Darfur. When condemnation of these violations extended to the U.S. Congress, Boulos did not propose measures to constrain the behavior of those supporting the militia. Instead, he moved to turn the embargo and its monitoring mechanisms into a hostage.
If the draft remains in its current form—with its mandate expanded to cover all Sudanese territory—through the September 12 vote, and if no alternative proposal is introduced for a technical extension of Resolution 1591 in its current form, the Council will face two choices: an embargo that restricts the state’s ability to defend its citizens, or the collapse of the sanctions regime altogether, including the Panel of Experts that monitors and documents violations.
Given opposition from Russia, China, Pakistan and the African group, alongside the insistence of Washington, London and Paris, the second outcome is more likely unless a technical extension is proposed during the consultations.
That is the paradox: a debate that begins with a call to strengthen the embargo ends by dismantling it, while a mechanism established to protect civilians is transformed through procedural manipulation into a mechanism that enables the continuation—and escalation—of mass atrocities.
A legal rule is not measured by the elegance of its wording, but by its enforceability against those who violate it. That is where the flaw lies.
The Sudanese state has ports, banks, legal personality, and a seat at the United Nations. As such, it is bound by international procedures: its vessels can be inspected, its transactions monitored, and its accounts frozen. The Rapid Support Forces, by contrast, have no legal address. Their weapons arsenals do not move through regular channels, but through unregistered airstrips, smuggling routes, forged end-user certificates, and intermediaries operating outside the world’s formal commercial registry. This is precisely what the militia’s backers have exploited to violate the embargo in its previous form over the past three years.
A formally symmetrical restriction can produce a profoundly asymmetrical effect in practice. It does not operate on weapons themselves, but on the legal ability to obtain them. It therefore penalizes those who can be monitored while failing to reach those whose strength has been built on violating the rules.
Boulos repeatedly told the Security Council that the two sides were equally lacking in legitimacy. That is not correct. The difference between them is not merely the scale of violations. It is a difference in function, structure and outcome.
In terms of function, the army is an institution within a state. It receives its budget from the public treasury, is subject to the law and the courts, and the state bears responsibility for its actions as a party to the Geneva Conventions. Behind it, despite everything, stands a state that pays teachers and doctors, operates ports and banks, and performs its role as a provider of protection.
The militia, by contrast, practices violence in its most unrestrained form and takes civilians in areas under its control hostage to documented forms of brutal violence.
In terms of structure, the militia is not a parallel army. It is a system of violence. Its financing comes from smuggled gold; its recruitment is driven by promises of spoils; and its control is exercised through looting, ransom and rape. Looting is not a deviation from its operating model—it is its business model. Demanding that it protect or serve civilians amounts to demanding that it cease being what it is.
The test in terms of outcome is simple: What happens to populations when either side takes control?
In El Fasher, after a siege lasting more than 500 days, the Rapid Support Forces stormed the city in October 2025 and seized it from the army. Based on 140 interviews with survivors and satellite imagery, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that more than 6,000 people were killed within three days, while indicating that the actual figure was likely higher.
At the Saudi Maternity Hospital, the last functioning hospital, 460 patients and their companions were killed, according to the World Health Organization. Sexual violence was systematic and targeted Zaghawa women.
When the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab investigated a wave of displacement from a city with a population of a quarter of a million, it found little movement: most residents had been killed, captured, or forced into hiding.
The barrier that delayed this outcome for 500 days was the army’s resistance.
In El Obeid, where the Rapid Support Forces failed to storm the city, the siege was accompanied by drone attacks. In January 2026, drones targeted the thermal power station, followed by an attack on the main transformer in June. The city was plunged into darkness, water pumps stopped operating, and drones struck 18 health facilities in a single quarter.
The pattern is the same: starvation, followed by blackout, followed by assault.
By contrast, the International Organization for Migration documented the return of nearly five million internally displaced people and refugees to areas recaptured by the army. This is the “voting with their feet” described by Charles Tiebout in his A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures: when arguments fail, people’s movements reveal their preferences. People return to places where schools reopen and birth certificates are issued.
The drones that plunged El Obeid into darkness were not manufactured in Nyala. Since January 2024, the Panel of Experts has documented “credible” evidence that Abu Dhabi—the most prominent external financier of the Rapid Support Forces—has supplied the militia with weapons through Chad.
In the language of law rather than politics, this means that what is happening is not simply a purely “civil war,” but the use of force by another state through an armed proxy.
In the Nicaragua case in 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled that arming an armed group to fight inside another state constituted an unlawful use of force. The principle was reaffirmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda case in 2005. Article 51 describes self-defense as an “inherent right”—a right that predates the Charter rather than deriving from it. No resolution grants that right, and no resolution takes it away.
Two Lessons That Have Not Been Properly Learned
In 1936, Britain and France established the Non-Intervention Committee during the Spanish Civil War. The principle appeared neutral: no weapons for anyone.
But the Republic was the recognized legitimate government and therefore possessed the rights of any sovereign state to purchase weapons. The arrangement effectively suspended an existing right.
Meanwhile, Franco received aircraft and troops from Germany and Italy, both of which were signatories to the same agreement. The result was the fall of Spain under fascist rule for 36 years.
In September 1991, the Security Council imposed a comprehensive arms embargo on all of Yugoslavia through Resolution 713, at Belgrade’s own request. The wording was geographically symmetrical.
Yet the federal army possessed one of Europe’s largest arsenals and an established military-industrial base, while Bosnia had nothing comparable when it became a UN member state in 1992. Bosnia remained constrained by an embargo imposed on a state that no longer existed.
When Bosnia protested that the embargo obstructed its right to self-defense under Article 51, the embargo was not lifted until 1996—too late for Srebrenica.
While Boulos warns about drones and calls for their explicit inclusion in the embargo, the U.S. government decided on July 10, 2026, to remove the United Arab Emirates from the “D-3” and “D-4” country groups under the Export Administration Regulations and reclassify it under the “E-5” group.
This was not merely an administrative adjustment to a table. The “D-4” group is associated with controls on missile technology and delivery systems, including drones. The U.S. Department of Commerce stated that the removal would, among other things, lift restrictions on support for the UAE’s drone programs.
The move to “E-5” also opens the door to broader arrangements under the Strategic Trade Authorization for items subject to U.S. controls.
In other words, the relaxation covered the technological and supply environment that produces drone capabilities for the militia’s principal external financier.
That contradiction cannot be ignored.
Nor is Britain in a better position; its own record is documented in its own figures.
This is not neutrality at all.
Sudan does not need a new arms embargo. It needs enforcement of the one already in place:
First: A technical extension of the measures under Resolution 1591 on September 12, 2026, while ensuring the continuation of the Panel of Experts’ mandate, which runs until October 12, rather than using the renewal process to engineer the paralysis of the sanctions regime.
Second: Shift the center of gravity from geography to actors by pursuing states, intermediaries, carriers and financiers; placing them on sanctions lists; and subjecting supply routes to mandatory inspection.
Third: Include drones and their technologies in the embargo—not merely where the drones fall, but across the supply chain. Tighten end-user certification requirements, mark and track equipment, and verify re-exports.
Fourth: Empower the Panel of Experts to investigate third countries and smuggling routes, publish the names of violators, and expand its mandate to include arms flows into the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin. Regional security does not stop at borders drawn by a resolution.
Fifth: Preserve the legal distinction between the state and the militia.
This does not mean immunity. The state is responsible for violations committed by its forces, and every attack on civilians, markets or hospitals must be investigated. But there is a fundamental difference between holding a state accountable and stripping it of its ability to defend its citizens. The former is a demand for reform; the latter shifts the cost of compliance onto the party that complies.
The Security Council faces two choices, not one.
It can stop weapons at their source by confronting financiers, intermediaries, ports and licenses—and by demonstrating courage toward wealthy allies.
Or it can stop defense at its destination by confronting the only party with a legal address that can be sanctioned, requiring nothing more than elegant drafting.
Choosing the second option is not neutrality. It is not gradualism. And it is not political realism.
It is Jonathan Swift’s proposal in contemporary clothing: a logic with no flaw in its internal consistency, but with no connection to the world it claims to be repairing.
When the history of this war is written, the Council will not be judged by what it said in Monday’s session, but by what its text allowed to happen in the next El Fasher.
