How Gaddafi went from friend to foe in US eyes
Pablo de Orellana
How do diplomats distinguish friend from foe, and navigate the ambiguous shades in between? This question is vital to understanding key foreign policy shifts, especially those predicated on identifying and categorizing an enemy. For example, the importance of whether US policymakers recognized an actor as a communist during the Cold War, or terrorist during the war on terror is difficult to dispute.
This issue is explored in a chapter of a new collection of essays on diplomacy, which investigates the reasons behind the shift that led to a dramatic turnaround in US policy towards Libya in 2011.
Following an improvement in relations between Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Europe and the US during the 2000s, Libya re-entered the international community as an ally against Islamic terrorism and as warden of illegal migration into Europe. But in 2011, as the so-called Arab Spring spread throughout North Africa, the United States changed tack. Having previously viewed the Libyan regime as an ally in the war on terror, Gaddafi suddenly became a ‘madman’ bent on the ‘genocide’.
This bewildering two-month turnaround raises questions. Specifically, what kind of information was reported to policymakers and by whom, and what was the role of diplomacy in producing this knowledge?
How does diplomacy work?
Diplomacy is an ecosystem of knowledge production. Reports are sent from missions abroad, which are then compiled, analysed, summarized if considered relevant, and possibly briefed to policymakers. Feedback is also sent back down the structure of diplomacy, shaping future reporting. But how does prioritization from above govern these systems as information makes its way up the chain of command? How do practitioners respond to these pressures? And why are some perspectives are entirely ignored, while others thrive?
Concern about effective knowledge production is as old as diplomacy itself. Renaissance pioneers of early modern diplomacy like Machiavelli, Botero, Callières and Guicciardini were concerned about misidentifying actors, intentions and events in ‘speculative’ analysis. Furthermore, they were aware that persuading foreign powers of a certain interpretation of events could facilitate the pursuit of policy goals.
My research draws on post-structuralist concepts to offer a method for understanding how diplomacy produces representations of actors in international politics. Empirically, it examines how diplomatic reporting, analysis, and prioritization practices come to classify the political identity of the actor they are looking at.
This approach has been applied to a variety of cases, from Vietnam, where it reveals how France persuaded the US to support its colonial war in Indochina in 1947, to more recent US policy shifts against Mali and Morocco, based on identifying them as enemies in the war on terror.
The Libya—US relationship in 2011
Application of this method to the case of Libya — US relations in 2011 also reveals critical insights.
In terms of reporting, while the State Department had little analytical capacity on North Africa, it did inform policymakers that the rebels were a complex coalition that included deeply anti-American elements. Likewise, they warned against taking Gaddafi’s ever-bombastic statements of revenge against the rebels at face value, citing his long tradition of overblown rhetoric and evidence that there were no plans or resources for such attacks. However, within a month the image of a Gaddafian genocide of peaceful democracy-seeking protesters became dominant at the State Department and the White House.
How did this vital shift occur? Diplomats on the ground transmitted vital nuances and warnings about the complex composition of the ‘peaceful pro-democracy protesters’, and how best to ‘mitigate the potential for Islamic extremists and Al-Qaeda to exploit the transition’. These reports were rarely pursued by the Secretary of State and were deprioritized across US diplomatic knowledge production. Instead, Secretary Clinton relied on a small circle of informal advisors, ranging from Sidney Blumenthal to Tony Blair, who insisted on a simpler view featuring freedom-loving democrats rebelling against a tyrant.
This method traces the dominant representations of the conflict in US policy and the origin of the exact wording and conceptualization used. Denoting the power of descriptions, in a ‘quick note on vocabulary re Libya’, former Clinton advisor Anne-Marie Slaughter advised her to ‘support [the rebels] by pushing back against the idea that this is anything other than a popular revolt’. This was influential: from then on Clinton referred to the conflict only by these terms. These featured in President Obama’s subsequent 28 March speech, which compared Libyan rebels to American independence heroes and laid the ground for US support of the revolt.
Why we need to understand diplomatic behaviour
Examining how diplomats understand the identity of international actors allows for two new perspectives of relevance to diplomatic practice and analysis. First, a detailed understanding of diplomatic reporting reveals how a specific description works, how it functions and what ideas, narratives and links it depends on. Second, analysis of how representations of actors and their contexts are constituted, reveals the dynamics of knowledge production of diplomatic institutions and systems. This allows for a constructive critique of information management, analysis, prioritization and the role of dominant policy priorities.
For the practice of diplomacy and policy, this method helps understand past mistakes, avoid new ones, and, crucially, make better use of available resources. Crucially, it stresses the need to make better use of the vast, nuanced and multi-perspective pool of diplomatic knowledge, and understand the reasons why it is often brushed aside.
Dr Pablo de Orellana is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research interests include diplomacy, nationalism and the relationship between art and conflict.
New Voices in Global Security is a collaborative blog series between the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, and International Affairs. Drawing on cutting edge research, the blog series highlights diverse empirical, methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding global security and engages with questions of equality, diversity and inclusion within the discipline. Contributions are based on the New Voices event series — organized and chaired by Dr Amanda Chisholm, School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead — which promotes the research of PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) working both within and beyond the School of Security Studies.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
