#429 — The New World Order

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Anne Applebaum. Anne, thanks for joining me again. No. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Well, so you've just written a, cover article in The Atlantic, current titled online at least. I haven't seen the physical magazine, but the title online is The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth. This is recounting your two trips to Sudan, which has been plunged into yet another civil war. And I I wanna use it as you do in the article, I wanna use your, experience of Sudan as a lens through which to look at the consequences of of American retreat from the world and this just this kind of general unraveling of of the system of of international law and international aid, which has really underpinned the what we have come to call the liberal world order for more or less as long as we've been alive, a little bit longer. So let let let's start with your experience in in Sudan. What what is happening in Sudan? So Sudan is engulfed by a civil war. The two main warring parties, and actually there are several others as well, but the two main warring parties are formerly components of the Sudanese military. One part is the Sudanese Armed Forces, the kind of main part of the army, and the another is a group called the Rapid Support Forces who older readers or older listeners rather will remember as the Janjaweed. Mhmm. This was a a group that was created couple of decades ago by a previous Sudanese dictator, and it was used as a force against it was there was a there's an ethnic conflict in Western Sudan between Arab speaking nomads and non Arabic farmers. Very old conflict resolved many times through intermarriage and so on. But in the modern era was juiced up by outside weapons, outside interests, and so on. And that's a kind of that's more or less a broader version of that is what's happening now. But, anyway, the the the other the rapid support forces or the other group, They are fighting for control of territory. There's some other groups involved as well, but they're the main two groups. And the the hard thing about the war and the thing that makes it hard for outsiders to understand is that it's not ideological. It's not a war of ideas. Mhmm. It's not clearly an ethnic war either. It's really a war between two …