Diplomatic Divergence Among NATO Countries In The Initial Stage Of Libya Crisis

Military intervention in Libya is regarded as a brilliant victory of NATO. But at the beginning of the Libya War, NATO had not played a leader role of this operation. It was not until March 31, 2011 that NATO formally took over the military operation in Libya. Prior to this, the sanctions against Libya including the military intervention towards Libya was assumed by United States, Britain and France, and NATO just played a very limited role. Moreover, even though NATO eventually took over the military intervention in Libya, the process was not easy. So it was a military operation which based on NATO members but made NATO absent at the beginning of this war. In a sense, it maybe a kind of crisis of NATO.This paper argues that the diplomatic divergence between NATO’s members in the initial stage of Libya Crisis is the major cause of this situation. Hence that, the main content of chapter 2 is to introduce this diplomatic divergence, and this chapter is the key part of this article. From the beginning of Libya Crisis (February 15,2011) to the day that NATO officially took over Libya War (March 31,2011), this interval was the peak stage that generated the most diplomatic differences among NATO members. These diplomatic disagreements were mainly about two questions:first, "were there enough reasons to launch a military intervention in Libya", second, "whether should this military intervention led by NATO". Based on these two issues, NATO’s members divided into five camps that took different foreign policies towards Libya Crisis. This diplomatic divergence become a obstacle both to the military intervention in Libya and to NATO’s undertaking of Libya war. Although these diplomatic disagreements of NATO countries hadn’t been completely eradicated until the end of Libya War, after one month and a half of bargaining, most NATO countries finally reached a compromise on key issues. Finally, NATO took over the war in Libya in March 31,2011.So why did NATO countries made the obviously different foreign policies in the early stage of Libya crisis? For this question, chapter 3 make a detailed discussion. The viewpoint of this paper is that the vastly different situations among NATO countries’ domestic politics caused these diplomatic divisions. The reason why choose domestic political perspectives to explain this diplomatic divergence among NATO countries is based on the feature of Libya Crisis——Libya Crisis had a rapidly development, so that NATO countries must confront a "Crisis Diplomacy". In this case, the foreign policy making of one NATO country often reflected the will of its domestic naturally, and only the domestic political forces could efficiently consolidate diplomatic information in a short time, then responded quickly to the crisis in Libya. The system factor or international norms also played a role, but this role was mainly reflected in the latter part of the Libyan crisis, rather than early stage.From this diplomatic divergence in NATO, some problems can be found. Some problems have a good side, but the disadvantages reflected in this diplomatic differences is more. This essay discusses these problems in chapter 4, and sums up four important issues:1, domestic politics can have a huge impact on the development of NATO, influenced by each domestic politics factors, NATO countries have a "modeling" trend; 2, "Libya model" should not be a ideal model to promote NATO in the future, in order to achieve unity and development, NATO need to make a strategic shift, those areas that may give NATO external pressures should be the priority; 3, the United States is making an appropriate adjustments for its strategic, it demands more burden-sharing of its NATO allies, at the same time, the United States’ controllability to other NATO countries is becoming weaken; 4, besides US, other NATO member countries are becoming stronger to have a greater voice and to play a more important role when they participate in NATO affairs.