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Libya: the new geopolitical arena

Almost without warning, Libya seems to have become the new geopolitical arena for the Middle East in North Africa. Its new status is the consequence of Turkey’s decision to intervene in the Libyan political quagmire in support of the internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli at the end of 2019. That decision by Ankara has, at a stroke, called into question a series of assumptions that have guided Western policy in the Southern Mediterranean over the past decade. It has also raised questions about NATO, an organisation of which Turkey is itself a member, with respect to its ‘Southern Flank’ policy, and about NATO’s likely response to the parallel involvement of Russia in Eastern Libya, alongside apparent American indifference to the regional geopolitical changes that these developments imply. At the same time, the Turkish initiative has integrated the geopolitics of North Africa into parallel developments in the Middle East which have, ever since 2011, created new alignments between states sympathetic to moderate political Islam and their counterparts who ferociously resist an interaction between secular and theocratic politics.