With the Saudi announcement that it no longer can maintain its European oil shipments, European officials are panicked. Decades of European investment in alternative energy have raised prices but not fulfilled Europe’s core energy demand. Meanwhile, even Germany has now recognized that cutting separate deals with Russia to purchase natural gas puts the entire continent at risk. Europe needs fossil fuels; without them, Europeans will suffer and, eventually, European capitals will need to ration gasoline or even scale back industry.
It never had to be this way. The problem is not just that successive generations of European leaders’ have failed to take the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies seriously or, as with President Emmanuel Macron in France, actively sought to preserve them. European foreign ministries’ mercantilism and sanctions-busting both pumped money into Iranian and proxy coffers that sacrificed Europe’s broader long-term financial health for their own companies’ or nationals’ short-term financial gain, and Europe’s indulgent attitude toward China ignored the fact that Beijing might play hardball with Riyadh to ensure that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman put China’s energy needs ahead of Europe’s.
Decades of European investment in alternative energy have raised prices but not fulfilled Europe’s core energy demand.
The problem in Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome, however, is not just the cynicism of their leaders, but also their willingness to elevate an arbitrary United Nations’ embrace of Islamist extremism above their own national interests. It is this element that European leaders should now consider as they enter a cold winter.
They do have an out, however: Eastern Libya and the Libyan Arab Armed Forces that control more than 70 percent of that North African country, including its oil field, pipelines, and major export terminals.
The problem dates back 15 years. After Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s regime collapsed, Libya briefly descended into chaos. In the United States, the memory of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens’ murder in Benghazi, at the hands of the extremist group Ansar al-Sharia, looms large. What happened next, though, is crucial.
In Benghazi, former Qadhafi-era general Khalifa Haftar rallied the citizenry to take back the country. They lost more than 5,000 people, but restored order throughout eastern Libya, killing and imprisoning militiamen, or forcing them to flee their area of control. Libyans have common sense. They know their country has great natural wealth and while, on an individual level, they are religiously and socially conservative, they also realize that the Islamist groups bring only misery. In a religious society like Libya’s, Islamists less protect religion than use Islam to deflect any questions about their own corruption, mismanagement and, often, foreign allegiances.
It should have surprised no one that Libyan nationalists won the subsequent election. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her aide Jake Sullivan, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his Special Representative for Libya Ian Martin, as well as European officials worried that the Islamists’ electoral marginalization could lead them to choose insurgency. Their response was appeasement, forcing Libya’s electoral victors to accept an Islamist prime minister in Tripoli, whom the UN recognized as the legitimate leader of Libya.
Today, that man is Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, the front man for a Misrata business family, who most Libyans regard as a bumbling fool. Dbeibah can hardly string together two sentences, and his record suggests he is far more interested in promoting Islamism and enriching himself than in rebuilding Libya. A case in point is Tripoli’s airport: Destroyed in the civil war, it remains unusable, with international flights diverted to a decrepit former military base. Benghazi, meanwhile, has refurbished its older Benina International Airport, and is completing a state-of-the-art new airport on the other side of the city, designed to compete with Dubai and Qatar.
There is also a night-and-day difference in security. Benghazi, Sirte, Derna, and Tobruk, and even the southern cities like Sabha, Qatrun, and Traghen, are generally secure: I often walk and drive around Benghazi and Sirte, for example, without security. Tripoli and Misrata, both still under Dbeibah’s control, remain safe-havens for militias, including Ansar al-Sharia, and are more like Mogadishu than Milan. Dbeibah cultivates Turkish and Qatari support—and solicits their cash—both to keep himself in power and to follow their diktats, including the promotion of Islamism, the provision of Libyan contracts to Turkish and Qatari concerns, and endorsement of broader Turkish maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. In short, Dbeibah is a puppet and a Trojan Horse who has no real popular support inside Libya and whose theoretical mandate expired years ago.
The question European leaders, specifically, must now ask is this: If there are two competing claims to power in Libya, one of which shows clear capacity, controls both territory and the oil infrastructure, and delivers security, while the other enables militias and demonstrates little ability to stabilize, let alone develop, the country, why should Europe recognize the latter?
Khalifa Haftar and his son Saddam are not separatists; indeed, they defend Libyan sovereignty more than those who would sell it out to Ankara or Doha, or who embrace ideologies that disregard national borders. They center their government in Benghazi not because they seek to divide Libya into its pre-20th century components, but because Turkey supplied drones to protect its assets in the Tripoli government. Regardless, Libya’s original constitution calls for two co-equal capitals.
By shifting European energy security to Libya, Europe can guarantee itself a flow of oil that does not need to transit the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, or the Suez Canal.
With an energy crisis looming, rather than double down on Clinton and Ki-moon’s mistakes as the State Department’s Libya desk is still prone to do, Europe should recognize reality. In this case, it would not be self-serving, but rather, symbiotic. Libyans, including those in Tripoli, want the international experiment appeasing Islamists to end. They might tie recognition of the Haftars as the interim authority in Libya in exchange for a commitment for Libyan elections within a year and the establishment of a unified capital in the symbolically important city of Sirte, halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli.
They might then deal directly for Libyan oil. Certainly, this is not a new idea, nor would it be difficult. As of 2024, Europeans already purchased more than $21 billion of Libyan oil, though Dbeibah is difficult to deal with and he diverted most of the proceeds. By working with Haftar, the Europeans can increase production and compensate for the Saudi shortfall. Haftar is direct; he is in position, and he can strike the deal Dbeibah cannot.
By shifting European energy security to Libya, Europe can guarantee itself a flow of oil that does not need to transit the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, or the Suez Canal. Saudi oil can become primarily China’s problem, as Europe instead secures itself with Libyan oil and Eastern Mediterranean gas.
If effete diplomats in European capitals, however, double down on Dbeibah, and the governments they represent do nothing, they deserve the chaos that could soon befall the continent.
