The United States and Libya: the limits of coercive diplomacy Yahia H. Zoubir * Professor of International Relations and International Management, Director of Research in Geopolitics, Domaine de Luminy BP 921, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France The protests that have broken out across North Africa in 2011 over, among other issues, demands for increased democracy draw our attention to the manner in which the United States has sought to promote democracy across the region during previous decades. The case of Libya is particularly insightful. The rehabilitation of Qadhafi’s regime, one of the harshest dictatorships in the region, surprised those who had hoped that the United States was serious about making democracy and good governance one of its foreign policy objectives. In focusing on events since 1999, this article argues that the United States conditioned normalisation on Libya’s cooperation in the fight against terrorism and the abandonment of its nuclear programme. Notably, it succeeded in affecting Libya’s behaviour. However, other issues such as human rights and good governance have not been part of the package. The rehabilitation of Qadhafi’s regime without fundamental change to its structures has not enticed the regime to democratise and has contributed to the consolidation of its authoritarian nature. The Libyan case demonstrates that coercive diplomacy has succeeded in affecting Libya’s policy decisions in important ways, yet the US has not significantly affected the nature of Qadhafi’s dictatorial rule. Keywords: Libya; United States; Coercive diplomacy; WMD; terrorism; rehabilitating ‘rogue’ state Introduction The normalisation of relations between the United States and Libya has generated an interesting debate about who reaped the most benefits from that process. Scholars have sought to elucidate what produced the shift in Libya’s radical policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Some held that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 partly accounted for the change, at least with respect to the abandonment of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). US Vice-President Dick Cheney claimed that ‘one of the great byproducts, for example, of what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is that five days after we captured Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qadhafi in Libya came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all of his nuclear materials to the United States, which he has done’ (Igna- tius 2004). Others, however, including US officials, contested this interpretation and argued instead that diplomacy was the key factor in effecting such change. Bill Clinton’s Assistant Sec- retary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Martin Indyck, pointed out that ‘Libyan representatives * Email: yahia.zoubir@euromed-management.com ISSN 1362-9387 print/ISSN 1743-9345 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2011.572623 http://www.informaworld.com The Journal of North African Studies Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2011, 275–297