As President Donald Trump presses on with a war against Iran, another intervention that led to the death of an adversarial leader 15 years ago Tuesday looms heavily over the White House.
In some ways, the chaos and conflict mismanagement that followed the slaying of Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi in October 2011 at the hands of a rebellion backed by NATO airpower helped pave Trump's path to power.
An explosion of migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, the deadly storming of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012 and a swell of anti-establishment sentiments directly link the death of Qaddafi to the political triumph of Trump five years later.
But the U.S. policy missteps on Libya that then-President Barack Obama once referred to in 2016 as the "worst mistake" of his presidency now threaten to be dwarfed by an even greater imbroglio for the very same U.S. leader who campaigned against costly regime change operations abroad.
"This mistake is that this is a war unlike any war not in American history, it's a war unlike any in global history," Jason Pack, host of the Disorder Podcast and geopolitical consultant who advised the Obama administration during the 2011 uprising in Libya, told Newsweek.
In Libya, the limits of U.S. airpower were laid bare due to inability and unwillingness to comprehensively shape events on the ground once Qaddafi's four-decade rule had collapsed to a large-scale, well-armed insurgency. In Iran, no comparable opposition force exists on the ground, nor have top military officials defected from the Islamic Republic.
"Obviously in 2011 we were supporting a multi-million person strong, 10,000-person armed uprising," Pack said. "We happened to play the role of the air force via the no-fly zone by shooting down Gaddafi's planes and an attacking tank column."
Because the war on Iran "wasn't coordinated or didn't facilitate a new Iranian uprising, it was an attempt to do something that no one has ever thought to use air power alone to do, which is to overthrow a regime," he said. "That makes no sense."
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Qaddafi Falls, Trump Rises
When regional Arab Spring unrest first erupted into open clashes between the government and opposition forces in Libya, Trump—already an established public figure years way from his first presidential bid—initially urged U.S. action to unseat Qaddafi "quickly" and "surgically" in February 2011.
By April, however, the future U.S. president had grown skeptical of what he viewed to be Obama's ceding of key decision-making on the NATO operation to allies, particularly France. Trump also warned at the time of a situation in which "we get rid of Qaddafi, we end up with worse."
It's a warning Trump has repeated more recently in an acknowledgment of a worst-case scenario in Iran, where the assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was swiftly replaced by his potentially more hard-line son and an increasingly influential cadre of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials.
Trump's comments at the time proved prescient for another reason. While then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously celebrated Qaddafi's grisly demise with her "We came, we saw, he died" quip, Trump saw a "disaster" unfolding after the toppling of a leader who at least "had control over the country."
The September 2012 attack by Islamist militants that befell the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, killing 10 people, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, marked an especially troubling episode for the Obama administration. The backlash elicited inquiries that ultimately gave rise to an entirely new controversy in the form of an official investigation into Clinton's use of private email server for official communications.
The scandal served as key fodder for Trump's attacks against Clinton as he defied the odds to become the Republican candidate and then emerge as victor against his heavily favored Democratic rival in the November 2016 election.
Pack, who wrote "Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder," traced the shock electoral outcome and the associated emergence of a new populist wave across the West to trends born in the aftermath of Qaddafi's overthrow.
"These mistakes in Libya are entirely responsible for the blowback that led to Brexit and Trump," Pack said. "There is no Brexit and Donald Trump without the Arab Spring because the specter of migration in Europe is the thing that allowed Brexit to be possible."
"Without that specter of migration, you can't have Brexit, and without Brexit and Ambassador Stevens being killed, you cannot have all of these fears and the rise of neopopulism that would allow someone like Trump, rather than Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, to be the candidate."
Vice President JD Vance also highlighted the vast ramifications of what he called a "very stupid decision" by the Obama administration to sponsor the overthrow of Qaddafi.
"What happened? Libya basically turned into a failed state," Vance said during a July appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. "You had a refugee crisis. You had people pouring into Europe, pouring into other parts of Asia, other parts of Africa. You had a lot of violence, a lot of terrorism come from that."
He said it was a scenario the White House sought to avoid in the current conflict, even if he felt "there are people who would like that to be the outcome in Iran."
"How is it in the United States’ interest to have 94 million desperate people flooding into Europe, flooding into the United States? To have sort of the terrorist infrastructure that can get established when you fan terrorists all over the world?" Vance said.
"We have run this experiment before and so our policy right now, what we are trying to accomplish is get the Straits open, ensure the free flow of oil and gas," he added. "Obviously we want to keep the Iranians from having a nuclear weapons program and using the tools of diplomacy and military power to accomplish that."
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Mistakes Old and New
Critics of the U.S. war with Iran, including a number of Iranian officials, have also often evoked comparisons of Libya as a cautionary tale of the consequences of U.S. adventurism abroad. But the two experiences are markedly distinct.
The two nations not only differ vastly in terms of history, culture, governance and power but also the manner in which Washington stepped in. U.S. strikes against Libya were coordinated with allies and green-lit by both the United Nations Security Council and the African Union, while the Iran war was launched in tandem with Israel alone against the expressed opposition of other regional partners and no international mandate.
Where both Obama and Trump may find common ground, however, is in a shared struggle to conceive of what comes next after the bombs have been dropped.
"The intervention in 2011 was defensible, but the coalition behind it never fully aligned on what should follow Qaddafi, and Washington likely could have done more to manage that," Frank Talbot, a former U.S. State Department official who has advised on Libya policy and today serves as nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s North Africa Program, told Newsweek.
"Those misalignments let Libya's divisions harden as international partners backed different Libyan stakeholders on the ground," Talbot said.
Today, Libya remains divided between two rival governments. The Tripoli-based Government of National Unity enjoys international recognition, while the Benghazi-headquartered Government of National Stability controls more territory, a larger army and influential allies.
Clashes have yet to return to the height of the post-Qaddafi civil war that raged between 2014 and 2020, but the absence of a lasting solution has the left the nation with Africa's largest proven oil reserves generally poorer and less stable than prior to the 2011 revolution.
If there were lessons for the current conflict with Iran, Talbot said it would be that "airpower can be effective at degrading an adversary or collapsing a government, but Libya shows it does not equate to a light footprint or an easy exit."
"What follows an air campaign takes sustained diplomatic engagement, and often security assistance, to ensure stability and prevent the power vacuums that may emerge," Talbot said.
Christopher Chivvis, a former U.S. intelligence official serving today as senior fellow and director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's American Statecraft Program, argued that Obama's "smart" strategy entering into the Libyan conflict in concert with allies marked, somewhat ironically, "an early case of the U.S. pushing allies to share the burdens of providing for their own security—just like Trump did later more forcefully."
And yet, he argued, the current setbacks this time around may prove even more consequential.
"Libya shows the real limits of air power, which could not stabilize Libya or end its civil war," Chivvis told Newsweek. "It is also failing in Iran and at far greater cost to America."
"But even with large numbers of ground forces, Iran is far too big and has too many powerful allies for the United States to invade, occupy, stabilize and control, and the Iranian leadership knows this."
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Libya's Long Legacy
The ramifications of Libya's post-Qaddafi turmoil also continue to be felt within the North African nation's more immediate vicinity. To the south, the Sahel region has emerged as the world's top hotbed for militant groups, including those associated with the likes of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda.
Boubacar Ba, a Mali-based researcher at the Center for Analysis on Governance and Security in the Sahel, said the collapse of Qaddafi-led Libya had "a very important impact" on the security situation in the region, particularly as ethnic Tuaregs with experience battling alongside pro-Qaddafi loyalists turned their guns elsewhere.
"If you see today, the if you see today the, the guys who are responsible for the FLA, the Front for the Liberation of the Azawad, some of them come from Libya, and they are active," Ba told Newsweek. "And then they have played a role in Libya in the army, and they would like to export the vision and the revolution they got from Muammar el-Qaddafi in the in the north of Mali."
Meanwhile, Russia, which stepped up its efforts to challenge the U.S. in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East in direct response to Qaddafi's ouster, went on to expand its security influence in the Sahel and other parts of Africa as well.
Since the U.S. embarked on its war against Iran, reports have indicated that Moscow has provided Tehran with intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities allowing the Islamic Republic to unleash destruction on U.S. bases in the region with greater precision.
If the legacy of Libya's intervention fueled existing skepticism surrounding global confidence in U.S. interventionism after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pack argued that the repercussions of the Iran conflict would prove as unprecedented in modern times as the unique manner in which Trump has opted to wage the war.
"You would have to go back to the Roman Empire to think of a military action which has more harmed a hegemonic power in their ability to do the key things you need as a hegemon, which is to have deterrence, so you don't have to fight every battle, people are just afraid of you," Pack said.
"This has more catastrophically harmed our deterrence, vis-a-vis other Middle Eastern adversaries, but most critically Russia and China, than any action in human history."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Edward T. Cummins