American military history began on Cyrenaica’s shores with the nation’s first post-independence victory abroad. When William Eaton and Presley O’Bannon raised the U.S. flag over Derna in 1805, they forged eastern Libya’s first true polity through sheer force of arms. Decades before the United Nations manufactured an artificial paper kingdom, Sayyid Idris al Sanusi solidified this legacy by proclaiming the sovereign Emirate of Cyrenaica from Benghazi. Yet, the State Department stubbornly ignores this enduring reality, filing all Libyan policy under a dysfunctional Tripoli letterhead. Foggy Bottom simply prefers comfortable diplomatic fiction to cold geographical facts.
Geopolitical reality completely dismantles Washington’s outdated policy framework. Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army firmly commands the east, the strategic south, and the critical Sirte Basin oil fields. This territorial control translates to real economic leverage: hydrocarbon production recently peaked near 1.5 million barrels per day, channeling billions into regional development. Today, Benghazi showcases this growing strength through expanding deep-water ports and a massive new airport designed for 15 million annual passengers. Even Israeli media reports have tracked eastern Libyan government aircraft coordinating directly with Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi — strategic flights proving that the eastern administration already acts as a sovereign, responsible state capable of independent diplomacy. However, despite offering nothing but absolute instability, Tripoli continues to hold Libya’s U.N. seat.
In western Libya, criminal militias routinely shut down vital oil fields for financial ransom, effectively holding the global energy market hostage. Ankara exploits its 2019 maritime memorandum with this weak Tripoli regime to carve up the Eastern Mediterranean, directly threatening Israeli, Greek, and Cypriot sovereignty. Nonetheless, Washington’s lazy insistence on a false moral equivalence between Benghazi’s constructive governance and Tripoli’s militia-led chaos only invites hostile powers into the Mediterranean vacuum. Russian President Vladimir Putin happily capitalized on this profound American blindness. Today, Russian forces occupy six critical airfields across eastern Libya, transforming Jufra and al Khadim into permanent logistics hubs for an expanded Africa Corps. Moscow readily leases the strategic geography that our State Department foolishly downplays.
President Donald Trump must execute an immediate, bold shift to correct this dangerous strategic drift. To do so, the White House should bypass irrelevant U.N. bureaucracy and invite Cyrenaica directly into the historic Abraham Accords. This integration can take shape through a comprehensive Sirte-Haifa Maritime Compact, leveraging joint radar feeds and coordinated naval patrols from Tobruk to Haifa, alongside a unified legal strategy to dismantle Ankara’s illegal maritime claims. By weaving the eastern administration into a shared security architecture, Washington can effectively secure the Mediterranean basin for its most critical regional allies.
Furthermore, bilateral defense cooperation must rapidly expand through targeted hardware deployments. Deploying Israeli high-power laser counter-drone systems and coastal electronic intelligence batteries along the Gulf of Sidra would provide an immediate shield against Ankara’s aggression. Simultaneously, this architecture would feed the U.S. 6th Fleet vital tracking data on Russian military transports moving toward sub-Saharan Africa. By anchoring these capabilities in Cyrenaica, the West gains a critical southern sensor while permanently stabilizing a highly volatile maritime border.
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Finally, Washington must swap limited American landing rights at strategic eastern airfields such as Tobruk for priority commercial access to Sirte crude oil. Crucially, this bilateral agreement should explicitly include a written ban on expanding the Russian military footprint. By establishing a small American military footprint in Cyrenaica, the United States can effectively break Moscow’s monopoly on the vital Mediterranean-to-Sahel corridor. Foggy Bottom spent a decade pretending this region did not exist, but strategic reality now demands decisive executive action. Ultimately, a policy that accepts the de facto authority controlling the coast, the oil fields, and the runways is the only way to secure American interests.
Two centuries after Lt. O’Bannon took Derna and King Idris built a sovereign state, Putin is busy leasing their infrastructure. Trump must act now to secure the ground before America’s adversaries permanently claim it.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the Israeli special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a doctorate in intelligence and global security in the Washington, D.C., area.