The Renewal of US-Libyan Diplomatic Relations: a New Chance for Libya

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s relations with American presidents, which have had their ups and downs since the 1970s and 1980s, reached a new peak with the May 15 announcement that Washington was renewing relations with Tripoli. On the same occasion, the US removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Since the US had also taken the initiative of breaking relations two and a half decades ago, this step closed a circle of enmity, terror and serious clashes of interest between two states so different, not only in their internal political character and power in the international arena, but also in their social and economic world-views, their religious and ideological cultures, and their regional and global agendas. That circle of enmity had encompassed a variety of conflicts fed, in no small measure, by the Cold War, during which Libya had sided with the Soviet Union, and by a religious-cultural contradiction that Qaddafi termed “the war between Christianity and Islam.”