WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is actively working to reopen the Embassy of the United States in LibyaSecretary of State Antony Blinken told senators on Wednesday, nearly a decade after unrest in the Libyan capital forced US diplomats to withdraw.
The United States has lacked a diplomatic mission in the country since 2014, when more than 150 embassy staff in Tripoli were evacuated under a heavy military escort to neighboring Tunisia amid the fledgling Libyan civil war. Currently, US diplomats assigned to Libya are based at the Libyan Foreign Office on the US Embassy compound in Tunis.
Blinken declined to give a timeline for when the embassy might reopen, but told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday that the administration was looking for it.
“This is something we are very actively working on,” Blinken said. “I want us to be able to re-establish a continuous presence in Libya.”
In its fiscal year 2024 spending plan released this month, the State Department requests funding for “a possible Libya Diplomatic Travel Support Operations Center and related operations for a possible United States presence.”
A senior American official previously told Al-Monitor that the administration is “looking internally and, as appropriate, consulting with Congress” on steps toward reopening. The official also hinted at “more regular and higher level travel” to Libya as security conditions allow.
This week, the State Department sent its top diplomat for the Middle East, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf, to the country for a surprise visit with Libyan leaders, including General Khalifa Hifter and the head of the Libyan Presidential Council, Mohammed. al-Menfi. Leaf’s journey continues A visit from CIA Director Bill Burns in January.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) raised concerns about remote diplomacy at Wednesday’s hearing, telling Blinken that without a permanent US presence in Libya, “we’re going to have a hard time protecting our actions and a lot of taxpayer dollars have been spent there.”
Murphy noted that several countries have reopened their embassies in the war-torn country, including Italy in 2017, France in 2021 and the UK in 2022. But returning diplomatic staff to Libya is less politically risky for Europeans.
The September 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, prompted increased scrutiny of US diplomatic posts. The embassy reopening process would involve notifications to Congress, where Benghazi remains a politically charged issue.
“If there were another attack on our embassy, there would be a lot of finger pointing and blame,” said Tom Hill, a North Africa expert at the US Institute of Peace. “Congress didn’t want to be the one to have to explain why they passed a new embassy in a country that was so dangerous.
A State Department spokesperson told Al-Monitor that the administration intends to resume diplomatic operations in Libya “as soon as conditions permit,” adding that the process “involves careful logistical and security planning, in addition to inter-institutional coordination to comply with legal and security requirements”.
There is talk of reopening the embassy when the civil war has ended, the result of a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2020 between the country’s warring factions. The UN’s top diplomat for Libya, Abdoulaye Bathily, is pushing to hold presidential and legislative elections by the end of 2023.
In his testimony Wednesday, Blinken noted that US diplomats are helping to move the electoral process forward, but that such engagement “would obviously be much easier and more effective if they were on the ground day in and day out.”
Ben Fishman, former director of the National Security Council for North Africa and now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says there is no substitute for diplomacy on the ground.
“The job of diplomats is to understand what’s going on in the country, and you can only do that to a certain extent if you’re in Tunisia or Malta,” Fishman said. “But re-establishing a presence is much more difficult than removing it, especially after the political storm that was Benghazi.”
