Trump’s efforts to reunify Libya face setbacks amid violence

The Trump administration’s push to reunify Libya is hitting serious turbulence. Violent incidents have disrupted what had appeared to be genuine momentum toward bringing together the war-torn OPEC member’s rival governments for the first time in over a decade. The effort, spearheaded by senior adviser Massad Boulos, had produced some real results earlier this year. Now the question is whether those gains can survive the kind of instability that has defined Libya since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in 2011. The deal and the dealmaker Boulos has been running point on Libya mediation since at least 2025. His approach has been quintessentially transactional: broker power-sharing arrangements between the two main factions, then dangle commercial incentives to make the peace stick. Those two factions are Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces, which control the east, and Abdulhamid Dbeibah’s Government of National Unity based in the west. They’ve been locked in a standoff that has, at various points since 2014, erupted into full-scale civil war. On April 11, 2026, Libya approved its first unified national budget since 2013, worth approximately 190 billion Libyan dinars, or roughly $30 billio...