While headlines scream about U.S. diplomatic collapse, the Pentagon regularly sponsors multinational military exercises across the globe in which collectively dozens of countries participate. Jordan, for example, hosts the annual Eager Lion exercises. After the 1978 Camp David Accords, the United States and Egypt began annual Bright Star exercises in Egypt. Morocco will soon begin its annual U.S. Africa Command-led African Lion exercises.
While European officials gauge diplomacy by cocktail parties and meetings, military exercises have the virtue of continuing over days and enabling personnel to really get to know each other. It is one thing to make polite conversation in a hotel reception — it is another to stage a landing and a long march with colleagues from different countries. These exercises are not mutually exclusive with diplomacy. Ambassadors and other diplomats observe and have an opportunity to meet with each other and host-nation officials.
Because these exercises are regular, they often pass without notice. This year, however, Flintlock, U.S. Africa Command’s annual, combined special operations exercise, deserves notice: It will jointly occur in the Ivory Coast, the Western Africa bulwark that increasingly has become an anchor of stability and a counterterrorism partner for the U.S. and France in an increasingly unstable region. Abidjan deserves America’s support and multiagency focus, not only for its role in military security but also for its importance in any successful effort to stop Hezbollah money laundering to Lebanon.
Far more symbolic, however, is the exercise’s secondary location in Sirte, Libya. The de facto U.S. withdrawal from Libya after Ambassador Chris Steven’s Sept. 11, 2012, murder at the hands of Turkish-backed Islamist militias was a humiliation that encouraged extremists, much like the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon after the 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing, and the 1993 flight from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident.
While Somalia, at least outside the unrecognized state of Somaliland, remains chaotic, Libya has quietly turned. Stevens’s murder shocked Libyans as much as it did Americans. Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the Libyan National Army, launched Operation Dignity. It fought block by block to kill or expel the militants. Today, Haftar’s forces control 70% of Libya. Militant militias and terrorist groups remain only in and around Tripoli under the protection of a government that Secretary Marco Rubio’s State Department continues to support. In 2020, the Libyan National Army captured Sirte, around which much of the Libyan oil and gas industry is based.
U.S. Africa Command is right to choose Sirte as a secondary location. It signals the reality that, contrary to propaganda, Haftar and the Libyan National Army are not under Russia’s sway, but rather seek a more balanced, multinational alignment. Flintlock also signals that Libya’s past and its new reality are diametrically opposed. Libya is open for business.
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While Rubio’s State Department follows former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s policy to undermine and delegitimize the Haftar-centered administration in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the European Union, and the Turkish-backed government in Tripoli, Flintlock’s decision to include both Libyan militaries reflects a wiser path forward. The real problem for Libyan unity and security today is not disputes between the Benghazi- and Tripoli-based militaries. Both are willing to cooperate with each other in pursuit of broader security. Rather, the real issue remains the Muslim Brotherhood forces in Tripoli who pursue ideological agendas at odds with security and the desire of most Libyans to reunite.
The Pentagon is on the right track in Libya. It is time for the State Department to catch up. As Trump envoy Massad Boulos takes the Libya file and seeks to promote unity, he should take note: The way forward is not to work through Tripoli’s political leadership, all of whose electoral mandate expired, but rather to work with the military chiefs of both Libyan governments to establish a new order in which militias and grand muftis have no role.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.