The Real Governing Crisis No One in Congress Is Watching
Jim Jordan declined to call for Tony Gonzales's resignation last week, citing the seven days left before a primary. Tactically sound. But the episode reminded me of something I witnessed three years ago in Benghazi — a city that once epitomized failed governance and now, under the Libyan National Army, functions with electricity, open markets, and a police force that actually shows up.
American politicians obsess over the theatrical crises. The real ones unfold in places like Libya, where the architecture of stable governance is being built from rubble — and where the lesson, if anyone in Washington were paying attention, is that order precedes liberty, not the other way around.
Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar's LNA controls roughly 80% of Libya's landmass. That number isn't contested. What gets contested is whether that control constitutes legitimacy. But legitimacy is earned by performance. And in Cyrenaica — the eastern region centered on Benghazi and Tobruk — the LNA has delivered what the UN-backed Government of National Accord never could in Tripoli: functioning courts, border security, suppressed ISIS activity, and oil infrastructure that actually produces.
What Tripoli's Militia Economy Looks Like From the Ground
Western Libya is a different world. The GNA-aligned militias that nominally control Tripoli operate what can only be described as a franchise system of violence. Each checkpoint extracts rent. Each neighborhood belongs to a different armed faction. The Radaa Special Deterrence Force controls the airport. The 444th Brigade answers to its commander, not the government. The GNU prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, survives by distributing contracts and cash — not by governing.
This isn't a partisan reading of the situation. It's the conclusion of the UN Panel of Experts, which documented in 2023 how militia commanders use their positions to funnel state revenue into private accounts. Tripoli's government doesn't govern. It manages competing armed interests and calls that stability.
Contrast that with Benghazi, which in 2016 was an active warzone where ISIS flew flags and snipers controlled whole districts. Today it hosts international business conferences. Not because anyone handed Haftar a blueprint. Because the LNA fought block by block, cleared the city, and then — critically — stood up civil administration behind the military advance.
That sequencing matters. Security first. Governance second. This is not a comfortable lesson for Western liberal internationalists who want elections before there's a census. But it's the lesson history keeps handing us, whether in post-war Germany or post-surge Anbar.
The Jordan-Gonzales Moment and What It Obscures
Back to Jim Jordan and Tony Gonzales. Jordan's refusal to pile on before the primary was shrewd politics. But the underlying tension — between ideological purity and coalition maintenance — maps onto a foreign policy question America keeps avoiding.
Do we demand that Haftar conform to a democratic template designed in Brussels before we acknowledge what he's built? Or do we engage with the reality on the ground and shape it toward American interests?
The Biden administration's answer was effectively to ignore Cyrenaica, funnel diplomatic energy toward a unity government that never unified anything, and watch as Turkish-backed forces and Russian Wagner contractors filled the vacuum. The result: Russia has a naval footprint at Tobruk. Turkey has troops at Al-Watiyya. And the United States has... statements of concern.
The Trump administration has a chance to reset this. The LNA isn't asking for American troops. It's asking for recognition that the eastern government — the House of Representatives based in Tobruk — represents a legitimate Libyan constituency. Granting that recognition costs nothing. Ignoring it has cost us influence across the entire eastern Mediterranean.
Congressional paralysis over domestic personnel decisions is one thing. Strategic paralysis over Libya's trajectory is another category of failure entirely. Jordan was right to keep his powder dry for a primary fight. Someone in this town should start thinking about what fight actually matters for the next decade.
