The US has a secret plan for Libya. It will backfire

The US has a secret plan for Libya. It will backfire

The Boulos initiative fails at its core by treating Libya as a corporate asset rather than a sovereign nation
For nearly a year, Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on Arab, Middle Eastern, and African Affairs, has aggressively pursued a diplomatic circuit connecting Tripoli, Benghazi, Paris, Rome, and Abu Dhabi. His primary objective is to push a transactional political settlement to resolve Libya’s administrative paralysis and the internal west-east divide by formalizing an alliance between the country’s rival power centers.
Taking shape behind closed doors since last September, first in Rome then across other capitals, the core mechanism of this US-brokered blueprint is a restructuring of the executive presidency: placing Saddam Haftar (Commander of Ground Forces in eastern Libya and to his father) at the helm of a reformed Presidential Council, while keeping Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh as Prime Minister. Rather than fostering a democratic transition, the framework accepts state fragmentation as a permanent reality, securing the Dbeibeh administration in the west and the Haftar family network in the east as a dynastic duopoly.
To pave the way for such initiatives, Washington has leveraged preliminary milestones. In April, Boulos helped broker a record 190 billion dinar budget agreement – the first in Libya since 2014. At the same time, joint military maneuvers were executed in Sirte under AFRICOM’s Flintlock exercises, bringing together east and west forces alongside participation from Italy and over a dozen African nations.
Treating this unwritten transactional design as a national settlement fundamentally misreads the crisis.
Rather than establishing a legally grounded framework for general elections or dismantling entrenched militia networks, the arrangement codifies an elite duopoly. By relying on temporary financial distributions and supervised unified military drills to broker a top-down truce, Washington is mistaking a fragile pact between ruling families for actual state-building – guaranteeing that Libya’s hydrocarbon wealth continues to line the pockets of an entrenched cartel at the expense of its people.
Crucially, the Boulos initiative operates as an unwritten diplomatic push devoid of statutory grounding. By ignoring the foundational UN Security Council resolutions that grant legal mandate to external mediation, Washington’s ad-hoc gamble lacks the institutional backing required to bind local actors. Furthermore, the plan offers no long-term enforcement mechanisms. It relies on current US political backing and provides no protocol if the newly installed executives simply refuse to vacate power after the proposed two-to-three-year interim.
Without a universally accepted arbiter to compel compliance, the initiative risks becoming a dangerous power trap, leaving Libya vulnerable to renewed confrontation the moment external priorities shift.
Read more This bilateral push also directly collides with the ongoing UN-led mediation process overseen by the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). While the UN’s track has certainly been slow and struggled to deliver a breakthrough, it remains anchored in UNSC mandates and operates through recognized, albeit heavily discredited, domestic institutions – such as the House of Representatives and the High Council of State. By attempting to bypass these constitutional bodies in favor of an elite shortcut, Washington risks completely undermining the delicate institutional consensus UNSMIL has spent years attempting to build. Replacing a broad-based, rules-driven process with a fast-tracked bargain creates a parallel route that further fragments international diplomatic efforts and deepens institutional paralysis.
The fundamental flaw of the American initiative lies in its false equivalence between the political dynamics of eastern and western Libya. While the eastern region serves as a traditiona