The United Nations Security Council adopted a new resolution this week extending and tightening the international sanctions regime on Libya, with the United Kingdom leading the effort to ensure that Libyan oil revenues flow exclusively through official state channels rather than into the parallel financial networks that have quietly sustained the country’s division for more than a decade. The resolution, unanimously adopted, reaffirms that the National Oil Corporation is the sole entity authorized to market and export Libyan petroleum, prohibits the deposit of oil revenues outside official accounts, and expands sanctions designations to cover individuals and entities involved in oil smuggling or arms embargo violations.

Read charitably, this is institutional housekeeping. Read honestly, it is a confession. The international community has now found it necessary to pass a binding Chapter VII resolution simply to prevent Libya’s most valuable national resource from being systematically plundered by the very power structures the world has spent fifteen years pretending to negotiate between. That is not a routine sanctions renewal. It is a diagnosis.

The resolution reaffirms that the National Oil Corporation is the sole entity authorized to market and export Libyan oil and calls for prohibiting the deposit of oil revenues outside official accounts, in an effort to prevent the emergence of parallel financial systems. The careful diplomatic language obscures a brutal reality: those parallel financial systems already........

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