Fifteen years after NATO bombs helped topple Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has at last clawed its way back to producing roughly 81 percent of the 1.7 million barrels of oil per day it pumped before the 2011 war. That milestone arrived only in 2025. On the surface it reads like a quiet success story for Western intervention. Dig deeper and the numbers reveal a harsher truth. Output plunged to just 22,000 barrels a day at the nadir of the fighting. The partial rebound has not restored the country. It has merely underscored how thoroughly the liberal experiment in state building failed.

The 2011 campaign was sold as a model of humanitarian precision. A brutal dictator was advancing on rebels in Benghazi, the argument ran, and a limited no fly zone plus air support would let Libyans finish the job themselves. What followed was not a smooth transition to democracy but the swift evaporation of central authority. Tribes, militias, and rival governments seized the vacuum. Oil, which once funded a centralized patronage machine under Gaddafi, became the ultimate prize in a fragmented scramble. Fields changed hands through force or extortion. Export terminals were blockaded whenever one faction sought leverage over another. The National Oil Corporation survived in name only, its decisions increasingly dictated by armed groups rather than technocrats.

Today the same pattern endures. Recent United Nations reporting has documented how factions linked to both the Tripoli based government of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and the eastern........

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