After the blue tsunami, Sudan is still common ground

Tuesday’s midterm elections have already been given a name: the “blue tsunami.” Democrats won the House by a margin not seen in years and picked up Senate seats in states from Kansas to Texas, where few expected them to. At least one foreign-policy file could come out of the wave stronger rather than more divided. On Sudan, Democrats and Republicans have stood on common ground for decades, and this may be the best moment in years to stand there again.The 2002 Sudan Peace Act, written by Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo and Democratic Rep. Donald Payne, passed the House 359 to 8 and opened the road to a peace that President George W. Bush brokered and President Barack Obama completed. President Bill Clinton sanctioned Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime, Bush kept the sanctions, and on Darfur the House spoke with one voice, 422 to 0. When Sudanese toppled Bashir in 2019, Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) wrote the Sudan Democratic Transition Act together. Four presidents, two parties, one policy. Recommended Stories There has never been a stronger reason to reclaim that legacy. By the State Department’s count, Sudan’s war has killed more than 150,000 people, displaced 14 million, and produced famine. It is the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. The reasons go beyond conscience. Sudan sits on the Red Sea, between the Suez Canal and Bab al Mandeb, and Washington has found Iran’s Revolutionary Guard training Islamist fighters there. Now Moscow is bidding for the same coast. On Oct. 30, in the Kremlin, General Abdel Fattah al Burhan offered Russian President Vladimir Putin a free economic zone on the Red Sea for Russian fuel and wheat storage, along with gold and copper deposits for Russian investment. By Sudanese press accounts, the talks reopened discussion of the naval base Moscow has long sought at Port Sudan. A general who cannot win his war is trading the coastline and the gold to keep fighting it. Whether the concern is Iran, Russia, atrocities or refugees, both parties are looking at the same country, and the same answer. The Trump administration, to its credit, has acted on that understanding. In September 2025, it brought Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates into the Quad behind a single road map: a humanitarian truce, a permanent ceasefire, and a transition to civilian government that neither general leads. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and its al Baraa bin Malik Brigade as terrorists. In September, the State Department declared that neither the SAF nor the RSF is a legitimate government and promised to raise the cost on every belligerent.Read the bill House Democrats are positioned to move. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA)’s U.S. Engagement in Sudanese Peace Act cleared House Foreign Affairs 34 to 5 in June. It mandates sanctions on the leaders of both the SAF and the RSF responsible for atrocities, and on anyone who blocks humanitarian aid. It requires a U.S.-led diplomatic push toward a comprehensive ceasefire, calls for extending the United Nations arms embargo to all of Sudan so that it binds both warring parties, and gives civilians a place in the transition. Pressure on both generals, a ceasefire first, a civilian future: that is the Quad road map in statutory form. The convergence runs across the Democratic caucus.In September, eight senators, from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), wrote to Ambassador Mike Waltz welcoming the proposal by Massad Boulos, the president’s senior adviser, to extend the arms embargo to all of Sudan, and urging the Security Council to choke off the gold that funds both sides. The Senate track is bipartisan by birth. The PEACE in Sudan Act was written by Chairman Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). The sanctions on both generals were imposed under former President Joe Biden and expanded under President Donald Trump. Reconciling the two bills into law should be the new majority’s first foreign-policy act.EVANGELICAL VOTERS LEFT THEIR DISCERNMENT IN 2022Legislation is where the new Congress’s role begins, not where it ends. Beyond the bill, it holds other tools that matter just as much. It can keep the spotlight on: hearings keep a war without cameras on Washington’s agenda. It can fund the response through appropriations, because famine does not wait for a continuing resolution. It can help the administration cut the two arteries that keep the war alive, the arms reaching both warring parties and the gold flowing out, by championing at the Security Council an arms embargo that covers the SAF and the RSF alike, a step senators from both parties have already urged, and by demanding that Treasury go after Sudan’s gold-smuggling networks. And through oversight, letters and the confirmation process, it can insist that those who commit atrocities and those who refuse a truce are sanctioned by name, on both sides. A ceasefire that costs nothing to reject will keep being rejected.Americans have just reshaped Washington. On Sudan, its two parties have never stood apart, and they need not start now. Let Sudan be the file on which a Democratic Congress and a Republican president prove that the United States still has one foreign policy, not two, and that it can still end a war it has already decided it wants to end.Khalid Omer Yousif is a Sudanese political leader and former Minister of Cabinet Affairs in Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government (2019–2021).