Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in History

Department

History

First Reader/Committee Chair

Michael Karp

Abstract

In 2011, NATO ended the 42-year-long rule of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and plunged the country into over a decade of unending strife, while an arc of crisis emanating from Libya struck much of the region. This study examines the United States' geostrategic approach in the Libyan intervention to illustrate the dialectic intersectional relationships between processes of globalization, American hegemony over the world-system, and American foreign policy in the post-Cold War period (1992-2024) with consideration to world-systems analysis to characterize the United States post-Iraq warfighting strategy in Libya as an adaptation of the purposeful destabilization of Afghanistan and cultivation of an international jihadist network from 1979-1989.

In the absence of ambition or capability to secure Libya in the periphery of the United States-led world-system, the destruction and abandonment of long-term strategic goals in Libya is characterized as a pursuit of full spectrum dominance by way of destruction of emergent Libyan hegemonic capabilities and institutions as mandated by the Wolfowitz Doctrine to maintain America’s slipping unipolar global hegemony. The Libyan crisis proves to be highly influential on the inauguration of a post-2011 period marked by a decline in American hegemonic capability which is in dire need of reflection, or it will prove to be a predictive microcosm of the terror and suffering a continuation of belligerent unipolar militarism will bring in a multipolar world.

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