After months of mass demonstrations against a military coup and crackdown that killed over 100 protesters in June, Sudan’s governing generals, the Transitional Military Council (TMC), are negotiating a power-sharing agreement with liberal capitalists in the political opposition, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). But the main contradiction in Sudan, the tension that generated the current crisis, is the same one shaping events around the world: inter-imperialist rivalry between a rising China and a declining U.S. as they head toward the next world war.
Sudan is a gateway into Africa from the Middle East. The country’s current instability is an opening for the U.S. main-wing finance capitalists to reassert their power in the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial trade route and potential choke point between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean. Only 24 miles wide, the strait is “the only route to the open ocean for over one-sixth of global oil production and one-third of the world’s liquified natural gas” (aljazeera.com, 7/11). For the main wing bosses, control over eastern Africa is critical to their control over Middle East oil, the capitalists’ lifeblood.
But the domestic wing of the U.S. ruling class, represented by the Koch and Mercer families, Sheldon Adelson, and President Donald Trump, is less inclined to commit a big outlay of troops and tax dollars to keep its clamps on the region. Instead, these bosses are giving free rein to the rabid ruling thugs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel to do their bidding.
As this split deepens, it will accelerate the bosses’ move toward war and fascism. It will only hurt the working class. Only under an international communist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party, can workers end wars for profit and create a society to meet our needs.
An echo of Darfur
In the June massacre in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, “heavily armed troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, some dumped in the Nile”(New York Times, 6/15). This brutal paramilitary was following the leadership of the TMC’s  General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. The murderers were carrying on the legacy of Darfur, the Sudan region where a genocidal civil war slaughtered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions between 2003 and 2008 (The Lancet, 1/30/10).
As one protester said, “For years Hemeti killed and burned in Darfur. Now Darfur has come to Khartoum” (NYT, 6/15). The militias had carried out massacres and atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003.  The U.S. bosses, who looked the other way under both George Bush and Barack Obama, also have Darfur blood on their hands.  
Sudan: a notch in China’s belt
As the U.S. bosses’ infighting under Trump has created a global vacuum of power, the more unified rulers of China have filled the void. Given its location on a vital trade route between Asia, Europe, and Africa, Sudan is critical to the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (formerly One Belt One Road). As the Chinese bosses take on U.S. imperialism and push to become the world’s leading economic power, Port Sudan on the Red Sea will be an important notch on that belt. (Nearby Djibouti, which borders the Strait of Hormuz, houses China’s first foreign military base).
The Chinese rulers’ challenge has been a long time coming. In 1995, they signed an oil deal with Omar al-Bashir, the recently deposed Sudan president. China now controls 75 percent of Sudan’s oil output of 133,000 barrels a day (thediplomat.com, 6/17). The ousting of al-Bashir in April by the TMC was a blow for China—and a potential opening for U.S. imperialists to reassert their influence.
Meanwhile, faced with a weakening U.S. and an aggressive Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are moving to align the Horn states with their axis against rival regional imperialists Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. After funding the ouster of the unreliable al-Bashir (Foreign Affairs, 7/19), they are now backing the ruling TMC with political and military support, as are Egypt and Eritrea. The prize is control over the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz, which figure to play a prominent role in the coming battles leading up to World War III.  
U.S. bosses’ splits play out in Sudan
While both factions of the U.S. ruling class understand the importance of Sudan, they are split on how to manage that relationship. In 2017, after al-Bashir’s dictatorship committed 7,000 troops to the U.S.-backed Saudi-Emirati coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen, a campaign now opposed by the main wing, the Trump administration lifted economic sanctions and removed Sudan from the Muslim travel ban list (NYT, 7/18). Most recently, the Trump administration is considering “new ways to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism” (reuters.com, 4/16) and has refrained from open criticism of TMC repression. This hands-off policy squares with the domestic wing’s push to outsource the job of maintaining Middle East stability to its regional thugs-for-hire.
On the other hand, the main-wing finance capitalist coalitions—including the European Union, the United Nations, and the African Union—all support the “pro-democracy” FFC’s “nonviolent civil disobedience” opposition. Their hope is for the U.S. to take the lead in extending the liberal world order’s long-term influence over Sudan. This will be a rebuke to China and Russia, neither of which backed the UN’s condemnation of the TMC junta: “U.S. leadership has been badly lacking…The [African Union] has an important role to play, but it needs an international ecosystem of support” (Council of Foreign Relations, 6/11).
Democracy for the bosses, dictatorship for the workers
The U.S. and EU bosses’ media are hailing Sudan’s power-sharing agreement as a step toward “democracy,” the term they use for a dictatorship of the bosses. But history has shown  that workers can never negotiate the terms of their freedom through our oppressors’ democracy. When workers are duped into compromises with the capitalists, the consequences are always deadly.  Workers in Sudan will be “sharing” power with the very forces responsible for the genocide and displacement of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters in Darfur and Yemen.
Workers in struggle today must rebuild a communist movement that will correct the errors of its predecessors. Otherwise, the brave struggle against Sudan’s junta will be diverted into fighting for the interests of either U.S. or Chinese imperialism. Protesters must pick up the red flag where the old communists of Sudan left it, before making a wrong turn toward national independence. Join the communist movement with PLP!