More than 50 South Sudanese and international human rights organizations have demanded an arms embargo against both the SPLA and the opposition forces. “More weapons will mean these civilians will face more abusive attacks — killings, rape, burnings, pillage,” Geoffrey Duke, secretariat team leader of the South Sudan Action Network on Small Arms, told Human Rights Watch last November. “Now is the time to take action.”

Seven months have passed since Duke’s urgent appeal, and yet the SPLA and the opposition forces are still receiving a steady supply of munitions.

In order for an arms embargo to work, countries with substantial ties to South Sudan — such as China, which has invested billions in the nation’s oil industry — must be on board. At the moment, the Chinese government is more concerned with protecting oil refineries and supplying weapons to the SPLA than with saving civilian lives and limiting the proliferation of arms.

Further complicating the situation is Uganda, which has allied itself with Kiir’s government. Ugandan ground troops and fighters jets have turned the tide in several battles, and SPLA soldiers have been outfitted with arms from their southern neighbor.

At the same time, evidence has surfaced that rebel forces are receiving weapons from Sudan — a development that should surprise no one who recollects Machar’s often close relationship with Khartoum during the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Tragically, even if an arms embargo goes into effect and China, Uganda, Sudan and other countries comply — and even if the flow of black market weapons is curtailed — the fighting might not stop. The infamous White Army that joined the SPLA-in-Opposition is anything but a modern military force. In the absence of guns, the rebels have resorted to hacking people apart with machetes and spears.

Despite the limitations of an arms embargo, the international community must work to ratify one immediately. If nothing else, an embargo will send an unambiguous message to Kiir and Machar — the world is watching, disapproves of their mishandling of the peace talks, and is willing to assert that disapproval by challenging not only the rebels’ purchase of weapons but the sovereign right of Kiir’s government to secure munitions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, senior members of the Obama administration, and Valerio Amos, the U.N. humanitarian chief, have lent their voices to the call to restrict the supply of weapons. The United States can and should take the lead on imposing an arms embargo. However, the U.S. — which was instrumental in bringing about the peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA in 2005 — has been slow to take decisive action to help end the crisis.

In the brief period between South Sudan’s independence and the start of the war, the relationship between Kiir and Obama deteriorated. According to Ty McCormick’s February 2015 piece on South Sudan for Foreign Policy, Obama did not begin his presidency with strong convictions about how the U.S. could continue to invest in South Sudan. Furthermore, Kiir reportedly lied to Obama in 2011 about the SPLA’s operations along the border with Sudan — a mistake that the U.S. president apparently took personally.

Due to the strained relationship between Kiir and Obama, the U.S. was ill-prepared to act as a voice of reason — or a voice of authority — when South Sudan’s internal conflict began spinning out of control 18 months ago.

The Obama administration has made some progress in its political engagement with the embattled nation, but it simply does not recognize the crisis as a high priority. The White House and Congress are responding to various conflicts around the world, most of which have a far greater political and emotional pull for Americans than South Sudan’s war.

The U.S. could begin to redeem itself by both imposing the aforementioned arms embargo and ordering a raft of hard sanctions against elites in the SPLA/M and the opposition, who continue to commit human rights abuses and spoil the peace process.

In May 2014, the U.S. took a step in the right direction by issuing sanctions against two military commanders, one on each side of the conflict. More recently, the U.S. wrote and then helped to pass a resolution within the U.N. Security Council, which creates a system for imposing sanctions. The resolution was adopted on March 3 of this year — a few days before the peace talks fell apart in Ethiopia.

Justine Fleischner, an analyst for the Enough Project, believes that sanctions are the most vital tools for ending the violence. “The only thing the warring parties will respond to at this point are real consequences,” she told me on the phone last December. “We just haven’t seen any real consequences for either side yet.”

Sanctions would include travel bans and asset freezes, which would force targeted commanders and politicians to reassess the value of maintaining the war machine’s forward momentum. Fleischner calls this “changing the calculus” of the warring elites. South Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Francis Deng, calls it something else — “condemnation.”

Deng along with China’s ambassador, Liu Jieyi, view sanctions as a complication, not a solution. “Pushing the protagonists into a corner will not change anything,” Deng told the U.N. Security Council in March.

The political deadlock between Kiir and Machar combined with the ongoing skirmishes have a produced a situation that demands the U.N. put the resolution to work by authorizing the first sanctions.

“A lip-service resolution on sanctions will be meaningless,” Fleischner told me. She added that IGAD member states, such as Kenya and Uganda, must be involved in administering sanctions on the ground by identifying, for example, the bank accounts to be frozen and the properties to be seized.

The task of issuing and enforcing sanctions will be a logistically difficult and ethically treacherous endeavor, to say the least. Kiir and Machar are responsible for much of the violence and destruction in their country. In other words, they are quite possibly the most deserving of sanctions. However, it’s unlikely that the members of the U.N. Security Council will move to freeze their assets and forcibly take control of their property.

“You have to weigh the need for accountability and punitive measures against the need to find a political settlement, which is probably going to involve some kind of a power-sharing agreement between these two leaders,” Fleischner explained.

The political solution — favored by IGAD and groups within both the SPLA and the opposition — hinges on the belief that a return to the previous state of affairs is necessary to end the conflict. Before the peace talks fell apart, the negotiators were working to reinstate Machar as vice president. During this same period of time, South Sudan’s cabinet postponed elections until 2017 and thus extended Kiir’s term for an additional two years.

There’s an unspoken outcome to all this political maneuvering. Kiir and Machar were being set up to slip free of any consequences for the human rights violations that have occurred under their watch.

In all likelihood, the president and his former deputy will not merely escape sanctions. They will be granted immunity from prosecution. If they can relearn how to play nice with each other then they will probably maintain their seemingly unimpeachable roles. Moreover, they will be allowed to reap the benefits of sitting at the top — or near the top — of a broken nation-state.

If they don’t end up killing each other, then their bank accounts and assets may well survive this war and continue to expand beyond the wildest dreams of the average citizen under their rule.