The war came on fast. In early 2011, European leaders were struggling with an economic crisis that threatened the foundations of post–Cold War European unity. European parliaments and publics were anything but enthusiastic about NATO’s protracted operations in Afghanistan, and many sharply disapproved of the U.S.-led coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Across the Atlantic, the United States was still struggling to overcome the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, and the U.S. public was sick of war after a decade of overseas deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of early 2011, the chances NATO would go to war again thus seemed remote at best. Echoing this sentiment, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech at West Point on February 24, citing President Dwight Eisenhower and warning that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” Only a few weeks later, however, the United States and its allies were again headed to war in the Middle East. There would be no land army, but the fact they intervened at all was, in retrospect, rather remarkable.

Libya in the Arab Spring

The revolutions that began in Tunisia in late 2010 and spread across the Middle East in subsequent months posed a number of thorny problems for U.S. policy in the region. The United States had a long-standing tradition of supporting peaceful democratic change around the world, and U.S. support for conservative regional powers was viewed as having complicated U.S. efforts to undermine the appeal of militant Islamist extremists. At the same time, however, America’s relationship with these conservative regimes, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, was a bulwark of U.S. strategy in a region that still had major strategic significance on account of its energy resources, and it was clear the revolts underway in early 2011 might produce Islamist regimes with policies inimical to the United States.