Libya’s Spheres of Bad Influence

Karim Mezran

Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council

In this new piece written for The American Prospect, Karim Mezran highlights the decline of law and order in the North African countries touched by “Arab Spring” spillover. Dr. Mezran advocates greater American support for Libyan institutions to stem the spread of lawlessness, warning that the destabilization that spread from Libya to Mali could continue into Algeria, Niger, Chad and the Sudan.

Libya’s Spheres of Bad Influence

Karim Mezran

The tragic events unfolding in North Africa have brought to the attention of the West a reality that has been long underestimated and neglected: the rapid collapse of law and order in the countries that went through the revolts of the so-called Arab spring. Western countries have relied on the hope that new governments across the region could maintain stability and peace largely on their own, and therefore neglected to support these governments in their struggles. This is clearly not a strategy that has succeeded, and the United States will be forced to make hard choices in the next few weeks regarding the security situation in the Maghreb and Sahelian regions of North Africa. The American strategy of “leading from behind” that seemed, at first, a successful one in the Libyan intervention and the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi has been thrown into question by the unfolding of the events in Mali, Algeria, and Egypt.

> Read the full text at The American Prospect.