Nicolas Sarkozy did not invent the idea of intervening in Libya, but few leaders embraced it with quite the same theatrical urgency. In early 2011, as Muammar Gaddafi’s forces advanced on Benghazi, the French president positioned himself at the front of the charge. France recognised the rebel National Transitional Council early, lobbied aggressively for UN …
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Donald Trump has always treated geography the way a child treats a map drawn in crayon: everything outside the gilt-edged boundaries of Mar-a-Lago is, by definition, a shithole. Africa, in particular, occupies a special place in this cartography of contempt. It is not merely distant; it is disposable. In his second coming, the man who once governed by tweet now governs by decree, treating Congress as an optional accessory and the Constitution as a set of polite suggestions best ignored when they inconvenience the royal will.
In September 2016 the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published a report that, by the gentle standards of Westminster, amounted to a public flogging. Titled Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options, it examined the 2011 military campaign that Britain and France had so enthusiastically led. The verdict was …
David Cameron once stood in Benghazi and declared it “great to be in free Libya.” Fifteen years later, free Libya still can’t decide who is in charge, who gets the oil money, or why the electricity keeps cutting out in a country floating on petroleum. The United Kingdom helped create that particular freedom. The bill …
