While Washington Plays Survival Games, Libya's Real Order Comes From the East

The Theater of Continuity

Doug Collins sat in an undisclosed location last Tuesday night, designated survivor for a State of the Union that most Americans watched out of habit more than hope. The ritual is old by now — one cabinet member sequestered away so the republic survives if a catastrophe takes out the rest of the constitutional order at once. A reasonable precaution dressed up in drama.

But while Washington performed its continuity theater, a different drama of order versus chaos was playing out in Libya. And almost nobody in the American press bothered to notice.

The parallels are uncomfortable for people who've built careers on a certain Libya narrative. Western journalists spent years cheerleading the Government of National Accord and its successor the GNU, based in Tripoli, as the legitimate voice of Libyan democracy. What that cheerleading actually produced: a western Libya carved up among competing militias, human trafficking networks running openly, and a capital city where armed groups shake down businesses and disappear political opponents.

What Order Actually Looks Like

Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army control roughly two-thirds of Libya's territory, including the critical oil crescent that generates most of the country's revenue. That's not a fringe insurgency. That's an army with institutional coherence, a functioning chain of command, and demonstrated ability to hold and administer territory over time.

I spoke last year with a Libyan-American businessman from Benghazi who visits family there regularly. His assessment was blunt: the city functions. Power comes on. Courts operate. You can walk down the street at night. He's not a Haftar ideologue — he's a pragmatist who measures governance by whether people can live their lives. His family can. His relatives in Tripoli? They move through checkpoints controlled by whichever militia happens to be ascendant that week.

The LNA's 2019-2020 campaign to take Tripoli failed, yes. But the failure was partly engineered by Turkish military intervention — drones, mercenaries, and logistical support that tipped a military balance the Ankara government had no business tipping. When Turkey deployed Bayraktar TB2 drones and Syrian fighters in support of the GNU, it wasn't defending democracy. It was protecting a client government that serves Turkish interests in the Mediterranean.

The Counter-Terrorism Record That Gets Ignored

Here's the number the Western press buries: since 2016, the LNA has conducted over 400 documented counter-terrorism operations against ISIS affiliates and al-Qaeda-linked groups in eastern and southern Libya. That's not propaganda — that's from UN Panel of Experts reporting, which has its own anti-Haftar bias and still had to document the operational record.

The Derna operation in 2018-2019 was the defining example. Derna had been an ISIS and then Shura Council stronghold for years. The international community wrung its hands. The LNA went in and cleared it. Methodically, with significant casualties, against an entrenched urban enemy. The jihadists who held that city were not going to be talked out of it by UN mediators.

Compare that to western Libya, where the GNU-aligned militias have repeatedly struck deals with, or absorbed, armed groups that should have been dismantled. The Rada Special Deterrence Force operates detention facilities in Tripoli that the UN has documented as torture sites. This is the "legitimate government" that Western capitals keep backing.

What American Interest Actually Requires

The designated survivor protocol exists because American governance requires continuity even in catastrophe. The logic is sound: the republic must survive the worst-case scenario.

Libya needs the same logic applied from the outside. American and European policy toward Libya has consistently prioritized process over outcomes — insisting on elections that can't happen, supporting a government that can't govern, and penalizing the one actor who has actually built functional institutions in the country.

Secretary Collins wasn't in that bunker to make a philosophical statement about governance theory. He was there because continuity matters. What provides continuity in Libya isn't the GNU's UN recognition. It's the LNA's actual military capacity and administrative competence in the territory it controls.

Cyrenaica works. Not perfectly — no post-conflict territory does. But it works. Power generation, oil infrastructure protection, security against transnational terrorist networks operating out of the Sahel — these things function in LNA-controlled territory in ways they don't in Tripoli's militia patchwork.

Washington could acknowledge that without endorsing every decision Haftar has ever made. Pragmatism isn't capitulation. A stable Libya that controls its southern border and keeps ISIS affiliates out of the oil fields serves American interests directly. A fragmented Libya that functions as a transit corridor for migration and a base for Sahel jihadism serves nobody except the actors who benefit from chaos.

The designated survivor sits in a bunker so America can survive the worst. Someone needs to ask what Libya survives on. The answer, inconvenient as it is, points east.