Yassin K Fawaz
America is betting that Libya’s rival dynasties can reunite a country that elections and diplomacy could not.
15 years after NATO aircraft helped topple Gadhafi’s regime, America is again trying to remake Libya. This time there are no bombers, no talk of humanitarian intervention and little enthusiasm for transforming the country into a liberal democracy. Instead the Trump administration is attempting something at once more modest and more audacious: persuading the two families that dominate Libya’s rival halves to share the state.
The proposal being pushed by Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s adviser on Arab and African affairs, would leave Abdulhamid Dbeibah, the prime minister of the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, in his job. Saddam Haftar, the increasingly prominent son of Khalifa Haftar, the military strongman who dominates eastern Libya, would chair a reconstituted Presidential Council. The arrangement is intended to reunify political, economic and eventually military institutions that have been divided for more than a decade.
It is an inelegant solution to an inelegant problem. It may also be the most serious attempt in years to put Libya back together.
Since Qadhafi was killed in 2011, outsiders have repeatedly treated Libya as a constitutional puzzle. If only Libyans could agree on electoral laws, organise a vote and establish legitimate institutions, the thinking went, militias would submit to politicians and rival governments would disappear.
The United Nations produced road maps, conferences and transitional arrangements. Elections were scheduled, postponed and argued over. Governments described as temporary acquired an impressive gift for permanence.
Meanwhile power settled elsewhere. In western Libya Mr Dbeibah built a durable political machine around the Government of National Unity (GNU), state spending and alliances with armed groups.
In the east Field Marshal Haftar constructed something closer to a military family enterprise, controlling Benghazi, much of the south and, crucially, territory containing much of Libya’s oil infrastructure. Neither side could conquer the other. Neither could be wished away by diplomats.
Mr Trump’s people appear to have noticed.
Their approach reverses much of the logic that has guided Western policy since 2011.
Rather than elections producing legitimacy, which produces unified institutions, which eventually produces stability, America is betting on stability first.
Unite the people who possess actual power, align their economic interests and postpone the harder question of democratic legitimacy until the state is functioning again.
There is something distinctly Trumpian about this. It treats politics less as constitutional engineering than as a negotiation among proprietors. The question is not who ought to govern Libya but who can prevent anybody else from governing it. Once those people are identified, a bargain can begin.
Money helps. Libya possesses Africa’s largest proven oil reserves but produces far less than its geology suggests it could. Its National Oil Corporation wants as much as $40bn of investment to lift output from roughly 1.4m barrels a day to 2m by 2030. More than 60 discovered fields remain undeveloped. American firms, including Chevron and Conoco Phillips, have reasons to be interested. European energy companies have never really left.
Oil also provides the rare commodity that both Libyan camps need from one another. Tripoli controls internationally recognised financial institutions and the machinery through which much state revenue flows. The Haftars command territory containing fields, pipelines and export terminals.
One side has the cheque book; the other can interrupt the income that fills it. Libya’s division has therefore produced an odd form of mutually assured insolvency.
The first important crack appeared in April, when rival authorities agreed on the country’s first unified national budget in more than a decade. Budgets rarely inspire poetry, but in Libya this one mattered.
It created a mechanism for spending across the divide and provided more money for the National Oil Corporation. Mr Boulos hailed it as evidence that eastern and western authorities could compromise.
Washington hopes commerce can do what communiqués could not. The promise of American investment gives both camps something larger to divide than the existing spoils.
Reconstruction, electricity, infrastructure, hydrocarbons and mining could attract tens of billions of dollars if investors become convinced that contracts signed in one half of Libya will be honoured in the other.
That is a formidable “if”. Libya’s political economy has long rewarded division. Militias collect salaries from the state they periodically threaten. Politicians profit from opaque spending.
Fuel subsidies encourage smuggling. Institutions duplicated between east and west provide jobs, contracts and patronage. Reunification would create winners, but also plenty of losers with guns.
Nor are the Dbeibahs and Haftars neutral custodians of a national project. Critics of the American proposal see an elite bargain that would convert temporary incumbency into dynastic entitlement.
Their objection is difficult to dismiss. Saddam Haftar’s elevation would formalise the rise of a son inside a military system built by his father. Mr Dbeibah, appointed in 2021 to lead a transition towards elections, would remain prime minister five years later.
Yet this criticism contains the uncomfortable reason the scheme may have a chance. Libya’s problem is not a shortage of plans. It is that previous plans have often depended on powerful actors voluntarily surrendering power. The American proposal instead asks them to preserve much of it in exchange for accepting limits on how it is exercised.
- Diplomatic convergence
The regional weather has also changed. Turkey, once the military saviour of Tripoli, is cultivating the Haftars. Its officials now travel between Tripoli and Benghazi. Egypt, traditionally the eastern camp’s most important Arab patron, has received Mr Dbeibah while continuing its close relationship with Khalifa Haftar.
Qatar supports the UN process but also wants stability. Pakistan has emerged as an unlikely intermediary. The countries that once treated Libya as an arena for proxy competition increasingly seem interested in ensuring that they are not excluded from a settlement.
The diplomatic convergence is striking because these countries spent of the past decade backing opposite sides. Ankara’s military intervention in 2019 helped stop Haftar’s assault on Tripoli; Cairo regarded his forces as a barrier against Islamists and disorder on its border. Their interests have not become identical. Rather, the cost of fragmentation has risen.
A settlement offers Turkey contracts and influence in the east, Egypt a calmer frontier, Qatar a process it can support and Washington a chance to turn overlapping rivalries into overlapping incentives. Foreign powers helped harden Libya’s partition. They may now, for self-interested reasons, help soften it.
The alignment is not sentimental. That may be its advantage: arrangements based on interests tend to survive disappointment better than those based on friendship.
For Europe the attraction is obvious. A more coherent Libyan state could make energy investment safer and help control migration across the central Mediterranean.
For America there is another prize: reducing Russia’s room for manoeuvre. Moscow developed deep ties with the eastern authorities while Western governments largely dealt with Tripoli.
A national arrangement that brings the Haftars closer to Washington would complicate Russia’s position without requiring America to dislodge it militarily.
Saddam Haftar’s reception in Washington in June was therefore more than ceremonial. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, discussed with him efforts to unify Libya’s military, economic and political institutions.
The meeting conferred something the younger Mr Haftar has long sought: recognition that he is not merely his father’s son but a national interlocutor.
None of this means the deal will work. Tripoli is not Mr Dbeibah’s private estate. Armed factions in western Libya have their own interests and some fiercely oppose a settlement with the Haftars.
Eastern Libya is more hierarchical, but succession inside the Haftar family may yet produce tensions. A presidential council cannot unify competing chains of command by changing the stationery on their letterheads.
Then there is the question of elections. Mr Boulos insists his initiative complements rather than replaces the UN road map. Perhaps.
Temporary political arrangements in Libya, however, have a habit of becoming geological formations. Give two entrenched families control of a unified state, its budget and its oil revenues, and their enthusiasm for submitting themselves to voters may prove limited.
This is the central gamble. America is attempting to use Libya’s oligarchic reality as scaffolding for a functioning state without allowing that scaffolding to become the permanent structure. It is trying, in effect, to make Libya stable enough to become democratic rather than democratic enough to become stable.
That may offend those who remember the aspirations of 2011. But the intervening 15 years have been unkind to grand theories. Libya has had elections, UN envoys, constitutional drafts, peace conferences, rival cabinets and enough road maps to pave a motorway from Tripoli to Benghazi.
What it has lacked is a political bargain sufficiently attractive to the men with the power to wreck one.
America’s proposal may fail for precisely the reasons its predecessors did: too many armed men, too much money and too little trust. But it begins with a useful recognition. Libya is already divided among strongmen. The task is not to pretend otherwise. It is to persuade them that a whole country is worth more than half of one.
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Yassin K Fawaz is an American business executive, publisher and security and terrorism expert.
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