U.S. and the Libyan public:

Simon Anholt’s “The Importance of National Reputation” asserts that “the days of diplomacy as a means just of delivering narrow national self-interest are gone.” In today’s world the public has become a vital player in international policy. Nowhere is this shift in power from the elites to the public more clearly seen, than in the Middle East today.

Recently leaked documents have provided a unique insight into how the U.S. government utilized diplomacy and what when knew about the Middle Eastern countries which are now enflamed with uprisings. The American embassy in Libya was reopened in 2004. Yet, the Government of Libya sought to prevent U.S. embassy workers from traveling in-country and engaging with Libyans. The Libyan government “actively enforced” new strictures to prevent diplomats from traveling outside Tripoli. And diplomat’s attempts to engage with the Libyan minority communities were condemned as "unacceptable interference" in Libya's domestic affairs.

The Libyan government justified the measures on security grounds; however, it appeared to be largely motivated by a desire to circumscribe reporting on internal political issues and to specifically target U.S. diplomats. Given that the regime's other recent measures on sensitive bilateral issues appeared to have been authored at the highest levels of the Libyan government, embassy workers concluded that engagement by senior officials in Washington with their governmental interlocutors would be necessary to mitigate the constraints on their ability to conduct in-country travel and engagement with Libyan.

Despite comments by senior Libyan officials attesting to the desire for broader and deeper ties with the U.S., significant elements of the regime, particularly within the security apparatus, remained deeply skeptical of U.S.-Libya bilateral re-engagement in general, and of embassy workers’ travel and outreach in particular. Not much has been released about the Libyan government, as it maintained an expansive definition of "unacceptable interference" in its domestic affairs. Security organizations regard any effort to engage with Libyans and to report on domestic issues as dangerously subversive, reflecting the regime's overweening focus on pre-empting any potential challenge to its authority, particularly from U.S. diplomats.
It appears that the U.S. government is aware of the need to engage both small groups of particularly influential individuals as well as the general public. However, our government’s ability to reach out to the public and work with them to develop and implement international policy solutions is dependent to a large amount on what that government allows.