Fifteen Years On: The Failure of Liberal Foreign Policy

“I think every nation has a right to establish that form of government, under which it conceives it shall live most happy; provided it infracts no right, or is not dangerous to others; and that no governments ought to interfere with the internal concerns of another, except for the security of what is due to themselves.”
— George Washington

In 2011, a wave of civilian protest swept the Arab world. These protests reached two very different countries and, within months, produced two very different wars. In Libya and in Syria, one specific throughline could be measured. What began in protests across the two counties, meant to express genuine popular grievances, rapidly transformed into Western interventions sold to the American and European people on humanitarian grounds. These “humanitarian interventions” produced an outcome that no honest foreign policy analyst ever wanted. Fifteen years on, in both countries, the bill eventually came due, and it has been paid by the millions of men and women who today live in squaller, worse off, less free, and more exposed to the terrors of extremism than they were under the dictators removed at the will of incompetent Western bureaucrats.

Libya

It is a fact conveniently absent from most retellings of the War on Terror that Muammar Gaddafi spent the last eight years of his rule as, by the standards of the region, an American partner. In December of 2003, and in the wake of the Iraq War, Gaddafi voluntarily surrendered Libya's weapons of mass destruction and its underlying program to American and British inspectors. The Bush administration lifted its sanctions, restored full diplomatic relations by 2006, and erased Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Gaddafi's high regard for his new partners was quite personal. So personal, that when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Tripoli in 2008 to share an iftar meal at Gaddafi’s compound, he greeted her as his "darling black African woman", having already declared his love for her on Al Jazeera the year prior. When rebels stormed his compound in 2011, they found a photo album he had kept, filled with pictures of her. Gaddafi had clearly, and wrongly believed, that he had bought himself security.

He had not.

In March 2011, the UN Security Council authorized a no-fly zone over Libya on the strength of warnings that Gaddafi's forces, advancing on rebel-held Benghazi, were about to carry out a massacre. Whatever the truth of that threat, a 2016 UK parliamentary inquiry later concluded that the danger to civilians had been “significantly overstated”, revealing once and for all that the mission which had been sold to the public as one of “civilian protection”, had always been one of regime change. The loudest voices pushing Washington toward war in Libya were France and Britain. One State Department memo, since declassified, reported to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that French President Sarkozy's enthusiasm for the war was driven in significant part by French oil interests and by fears that Gaddafi's gold reserves were intended to back a pan-African currency that would have undercut the French-backed CFA franc across Francophone Africa.

What followed Gaddafi's death needs no elaborate retelling. President Obama himself, asked years later to name the single worst mistake of his presidency, answered that it was "failing to plan for the day after" in Libya. There was no plan, because there wasn’t even a functioning state left to hand to any viable successor. What there was, for the next decade and a half, was a country that became a way station for jihadist recruitment, weapons trafficking, and, by 2017, open-air slave markets reported by international journalists. ISIS held the city of Sirte outright before a costly campaign dislodged it, and until this April, the two rival governments that cemented after Gaddafi’s could not even agree on so much as a national budget until America arrived at the table.

The Libya of today is no longer a country. On February 3rd of this year, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the one figure who might have offered Libyans a path back to a unified national government through the ballot box rather than the gun, was shot to death in his home in Zintan by four masked men, weeks before he could stand in an election that was, once again, never held. What remains in Libya is a UN-recognized government in Tripoli, an eastern administration built on the Haftar family's militia, and a United States now negotiating a power-sharing arrangement between the two factions dressed up under the guise of oil investment. DC did not save Libya from a dictator. Instead, it traded one for a fractured militia state, and fifteen years later it is back at the table with the next generation of the very kind of strongmen it once claimed to be liberating the country from.

Syria

Syria's Ba'athist state under the Assad Dynasty was many things. It was clientelistic, brutal to dissent, and most notably, an Alawite minority ruling over a Sunni majority through a security apparatus that answered to a single family before the nation. But it was, in practice, a secular one. Christians, Druze, and other minorities held real positions of power in Syria’s institutions, however constrained, and no woman in Damascus was ever told by law what she could wear to the beach.

That is no longer true.

When Bashar al-Assad's government collapsed in December 2024, it fell to a coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an organization built from the wreckage of the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's own Syrian franchise, and still designated a terrorist organization by Washington and London today. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known to a previous generation of American soldiers as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is now Syria's president. Within months, his interim constitution formally mandated Islamist governance for a five-year transition. Within six months, his government issued Syria's first-ever state dress code, mandating burkinis on public beaches, while morality police have enforced restrictions on women's movement in public without a male guardian in certain parts of the country. In March, 2026, government-affiliated militias killed more than a thousand people, most of them Alawite civilians, on the coast. Gunmen went door to door, according to survivor testimony collected by Amnesty International, asking families whether they were Alawite before deciding whether to kill them. In July, more than a thousand more died in fighting between Druze militias and state-backed Bedouin tribes in Suwayda.

It did not have to end this way, and there is great tragedy in how close it came to not doing so.

Reuters reported that in the final weeks before Assad's fall, the United States of America and the United Arab Emirates were actively discussing lifting sanctions on his government in exchange for cutting Iran and Hezbollah's weapons corridor through Syrian territory. It came too late, or was pursued too half-heartedly, and the opportunity collapsed along with the Assad regime. What has filled the vacuum instead is a government now openly rebuilding its relationship with Moscow. Al-Sharaa has visited the Kremlin twice since taking power, and on August 9th of this year, just three weeks ago, Damascus and Moscow signed a memorandum preserving Russia's military footprint at the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base, the very installations that kept Assad in power throughout the decade-long Syrian Civil War. Vladimir Putin and Ahmed al-Sharaa spoke again by phone five days ago.

Lesson Learned?

As the NNA has proclaimed elsewhere, the United States cannot retreat into isolation, and we do not say otherwise here. Small nations fighting for genuine self-determination against tyranny deserve American support, and Ukraine remains the clearest example of a fight worth backing to the bitter end. But Libya and Syria were never that story. Today, few mourn the dictatorial regimes of either Gaddafi or the Assad dynasty, but the standard by which American foreign policy should be judged is whether or not it truly left the world freer, safer, and less exposed to the extremism that American foreign policy ought to prevent. By that standard, and only by that standard, Libya and Syria are the clearest evidence available that the American political class has not learned the lesson of the post-Cold War era, and that until it does, the American people must insist that every future intervention answer a single question before another cent or another American life is committed:

What happens the day after we win?