The Great Britain and Libya: 1958-1969

In the 1950s the Middle East and North Africa underwent a genuine transformation under the influence of a powerful outburst of Arab Nationalism. The Free Officers’ ascension to power in Egypt in 1952 and the subsequent actions by the Nasser regime created conditions for a significant shift in the regional balance of power to the detriment of vital interests of the leading Western powers and forced them to focus on preventing the fall of loyal monarchy regimes. The United Kingdom and the United States conducted such countersubversive activities both to the East and to the West of Suez. The United Kingdom of Libya led by the King Idris I is one of the examples of such mistakenly forgotten Cold War battlefronts. The Great Britain asserted itself as a key actor on the Libyan scene and was the most active in establishing, strengthening and preserving the Libyan stronghold of the Western influence in a strategically important region. This paper aims to fill a gaping niche in the Russian historiography of international relations in the Arab East in the 1950-60s and to unveil a complex diplomatic game played by London in Libya with the help of the newest works of British historians and declassified American and British documents mostly unknown to the Russian academic community. Examining the particularities of Britain’s strategy of ‘selective interference and its interaction with the United States, the author draws the conclusion that the Libyan case can be considered another classical example of decline in the Britain’s global influence, which became one of pivotal factors in international relations in the first two decades of the Cold War.