After months of hard work and analysis, the Obama Administration recently unveiled its Sudan strategy. According to the US State Department, the Sudan strategy will focus on three areas:
- A definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses, and genocide in Darfur.
- Implementation of the North-South CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) that results in a peaceful post-2011 Sudan, or an orderly path toward two separate and viable states at peace with each other.
- Ensure that Sudan does not provide a safe haven for international terrorists.
The Obama Administration will continue to use its carrot and stick approach to foreign policy. As President Obama said:
If the Government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community. As the United States and our international partners meet our responsibility to act, the Government of Sudan must meet its responsibilities to take concrete steps in a new direction.
What’s important about this decision is that it shows the ability of President Obama to change direction when faced with deep policy thought. In the 2008 President Election, then Senator Obama talked tough regarding Sudan. But with a policy team of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, special envoy to Sudan Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration and Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama White House has decided on a different tact. And it seems that the appointment of Gration, a retired Air Force General, was the catalyst in organizing the State Department’s approach to Sudan.
Oddly, the Sudan strategy is receiving Republican support. In a radio interview, Congressman Jim Moran (R-VA), one of the leading Republican experts on Sudan, was nothing but supportive of the actions taken by the Obama Administration.
The Sudan strategy may have taken over six months to develop and we will have to wait to see how it is implemented, but these are positive steps that will hopefully affect a a country that has been wracked by civil war and genocide.
Maybe, as Americans, we should get out of our McDonald’s mind-set of “order now/have now” and take solace in the fact that policy and change don’t happen overnight.