Elevating Saddam Haftar offers temporary stabilization, but partitioning the state into family cartels invites systemic collapse.

The Logic of Transactional Stability

A decade and a half after the collapse of the Muammar Gaddafi regime, Libya has evolved from an active war zone into a highly structured ecosystem of managed instability. The formal division between the United Nations recognized Government of National Unity in Tripoli and the eastern based administration of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar no longer represents a fluid ideological conflict. Instead, it operates as a calculated duopoly where rival factions utilize tactical crises to justify their mutual survival. Seeking to shatter this permanent transition, an aggressive diplomatic track spearheaded by United States Senior Adviser Massad Boulos has bypassed traditional, slow-moving multilateral frameworks in favor of an unapologetically transactional power sharing formula. This strategy attempts to trade macroeconomic predictability for elite political consolidation, leveraging a newly unified fiscal architecture to incentivize cooperation between the country’s two most powerful family networks.

Beneath the realpolitik veneer of this American mediation lies a volatile, top-down compromise. The proposed framework aims to install Lieutenant General Saddam Haftar, the designated heir of the eastern military apparatus, as head of an empowered Presidential Council, while allowing Abdul Hamid Dbeibah to retain his position as prime minister in Tripoli. By treating state building as a corporate restructuring negotiation between competing dynasties, Washington is gambling Libya’s long-term sovereignty on a localized elite bargain. While this approach addresses the immediate catastrophic risks of the status quo, it fundamentally miscalculates the deeper structural grievances of the Libyan body politic. By transforming state authority into liquid capital, the strategy merely modernizes the architecture of the impasse while shifting systemic risks toward a far more explosive future alignment.

The Realpolitik Case for the Family Compact

To evaluate the Boulos initiative accurately, one must first recognize the profound, immediate risks of the alternative. For years, conventional diplomacy has chased a comprehensive constitutional roadmap, an idealistic pursuit that has repeatedly stalled due to the calculated obstruction of entrenched institutional actors who benefit from state fragmentation. In the absence of a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)