THIS IS WHAT THE END OF THE LIBERAL WORLD ORDER LOOKS LIKE

In a post-American world, greed and nihilism are destroying Sudan.

- BY ANNE APPLEBAUM

In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians.

If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia's commanders would turn their artillery on residential neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from the Sudanese capital.

From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side. Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother killed, a house destroyed.

Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate, bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later, probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away. This wasn't merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities closed, futures curtailed.