The Great Gaddafi Revival: Washington's Latest Gambit in Libya

The news from Tripoli is never simple. On 5 May 2026, Middle East Eye reported that the Trump administration is pursuing a diplomatic initiative in Libya structured around two dominant ruling families — a framework the outlet described as "the big pact" — with the stated aim of finally consolidating a unified government in a country that has lacked one since 2015. The proposal, per the reporting, would concentrate state authority in the hands of figures whose legitimacy traces directly to the pre-2011 order.

The administration has not announced the initiative publicly. A senior official, quoted in the same report, insisted that the visa system for Libyan nationals would not be tightened in ways that deter investment — a reassurance offered to Gulf partners and domestic constituencies worried about the diplomatic turbulence such a move would create. The statement, stripped of its technical language, amounts to this: Washington wants to be seen as open for business even as it remakes the political map of a sovereign state.

Libya has been here before. In 2015, the UN-backed Government of National Accord arrived in Tripoli with international blessing, a structure designed to fold armed factions into a single authority. It never fully worked. Rival administrations in the east, financial smuggling networks, and the persistent pull of tribal and family loyalty meant that any national consensus existed only on paper. The 2019-2020 military campaign by Khalifa Haftar, backed at various points by the UAE, Egypt, Russia, and France, pushed the country to the edge of outright partition before a ceasefire held. Today, the nominally unified government in Tripoli governs with the consent of armed groups it can barely control. The eastern administration, backed by Haftar's Libyan Arab Armed Forces, governs Cyrenaica with its own logic and its own foreign sponsors.

Into this vacuum, the Trump administration reportedly wants to build a new structure around two families whose reach spans the pre-revolutionary state. The appeal for Washington is obvious: these are actors with demonstrated capacity to deliver, or at minimum suppress, armed groups on the ground. They are known quantities in a political environment where known quantities are scarce. They have survived two regime changes, a civil war, and a decade of competitive patronage. From a transactional perspective, they make sense.

The problem is that Libya's disorder is not a management problem. It is a legitimacy problem. The families who enriched themselves under Muammar Gaddafi did so as instruments of a personalist state — a system designed to prevent the emergence of any independent institution that could challenge the regime. When that regime collapsed, the institutions it had hollowed out collapsed with it. What replaced them was not nothing; it was a proliferation of armed actors, each backed by some combination of oil revenue, smuggling, external sponsorship, and tribe. Any political settlement that does not grapple with that underlying dynamic — that does not address how power and resources are actually distributed — will produce the same result: a piece of paper, signed by everyone, honored by no one.

There is a secondary concern that Western analysts have quietly raised for years without it ever reaching official communiqués. The Gaddafi regime, for all its eccentricity, ran a state that provided a basic level of services, kept smuggling networks partially in check through a combination of co-option and coercion, and maintained a degree of territorial control that its successors have never matched. The 2011 intervention was justified partly on humanitarian grounds — those grounds were real — but the aftermath produced outcomes that the intervention's architects did not anticipate and have never fully accounted for. A settlement premised on restoring elements of the old system to authority is, whatever its strategic logic, an admission that the alternative failed.

What makes the current moment distinctive is the broader realignment underway in American foreign policy. The administration has signalled, across multiple theatres, a preference for transactional deals over institutional multilateralism. The visa-system reassurance from a senior official — that the immigration apparatus will not become a barrier to commercial ties — reflects a consistent posture: the United States will engage where engagement serves its interests, and the interest in Libya is primarily about access to its oil reserves and geography, not about the terms on which Libyans govern themselves. This is not a critique uniquely of this administration; every major power behaves similarly in weak-state environments. It is an observation about what the framework prioritises and what it does not.

The people most directly affected by this gambit — Libyans in Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata, and the southern interior — have had minimal input into the shaping of any deal their country is said to be receiving. That is not unusual in the long history of external interventions in post-colonial states. It is, nonetheless, worth noting, because the reason the intervention in 2011 was framed as humanitarian was that the people of Libya were the supposed beneficiaries. If the settlement being constructed serves the interests of two families and the geopolitical convenience of outside powers, the humanitarian rationale evaporates entirely. What remains is a strategic arrangement, and it should be assessed on those terms alone — with clarity about whose security and prosperity it is designed to advance.

The piece of paper, when it is eventually signed, will probably be called a breakthrough. The wire services will run the headline. The Gulf states and the Europeans will express cautious support. The families will consolidate further. The armed groups not included in the arrangement will recalibrate. And the underlying logic — a state built on patronage, personalism, and external backing rather than on any genuinely shared compact among Libyans — will remain, waiting for the next rupture. This publication has reported on Libya for over a decade. Nothing about the current trajectory is unrecognisable.