For the third time this year, violence returned to the streets of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, as prevailing tensions between the North African country’s two parallel authorities boiled over. This repeat pattern of flare-ups and hostilities is an inevitable development following more than a decade of political gridlock, pervasive foreign meddling, aggressive politicking and deadlocked UN-led multi-track transition dialogues in pursuit of an as-yet-undefined “permanent” solution. Over time, the seizure of the capital has become a major strategic goal for the eastern-based parallel authority that is seeking to gain control of Libya’s lucrative oil revenues, which are now a principal source of funding for the vast networks of patronage responsible for maintaining the status quo in the west of the country. Oil production — and by extension the revenues from exports — has long had strategic, political and economic significance to the multitude of actors active in Libya. Local militias, for example, often resort to disrupting oil extraction and production activity as a rather blunt, double-edged weapon in an attempt to outmaneuver rivals in zero-sum machinations that take a huge toll on the battered and fatigued Libyan public. At a regional level, the prolonged instability in a country with about 48 billion barrels of proven oil reserves is a welcome reprieve for oil-exporting competitors in the vicinity who are seeking to profit from European energy insecurity and the resultant search for alternatives to Russian crude. As a result, even when chances arise to convene the warring Libyan factions for constructive dialogue, to engage in “good faith” interventions, or to at least support the hobbled UN-led efforts, other countries in the region have often demurred despite the raft of challenges arising from a perennially unstable neighbor. At the wider international level the calculus is not much different, even after this latest episode that claimed nearly three dozen lives and left more than a hundred injured. The dogged pursuit of narrow self-interest at the expense of all else in Libya will only intensify, especially among European nations that are currently in the throes of an energy crisis as they anticipate a harsh winter. To them, every single barrel of untapped oil and every cubic foot of natural gas from North Africa has gained much greater significance of late, necessitating that they double down on a status quo that can eke out at least 1.2 million barrels a day, rather than push for more concerted efforts to find a permanent settlement that risks the outbreak of all-out war and the complete disruption of Libyan crude output. Years of practicing this kind of “moral flexibility,” coupled with the undermining of UN-led interventions, has tragically only served to nurture what are now implacable, hybrid entities in Libya that equate political power or influence with the size and variety of their arsenals. In the past six to 12 months, for instance, various armed groups have steadily amassed sufficient ill-gotten funds and political influence to become significant players, in between violent episodes of the tense east-west standoff, adding new twists to Libya’s near-incomprehensible dynamics. Even if there were a will to reengage with the Libya file, in light of last weekend’s hostilities or the shifting geopolitical landscape as a result of the conflict in Eastern Europe, it would still be a one-sided, top-down affair that has to ignore harsh realities on the ground to manage a semblance of constructive engagement. Before we even get there, however, the simple truth is that there is very little bandwidth in Western capitals for efforts to revisit the situation in Libya, even when considering it in conjunction with other issues such as migration, terrorism, arms trafficking or transnational organized crime. In addition, more than a decade of unsuccessful UN-led engagements and mediation have proven that it is impossible to unify the staggering number of rival actors, entities, interests and ambitions vying to exercise some level of control over Libyan affairs. The third eruption of violence in just over six months points to a disturbing trend as the two main factions resort to escalations, using the multiple armed groups and militias — better described as “mafias” — allied to each of them in an attempt to break the ongoing stalemate. Unfortunately, frequent flare-ups and subsequent shifts in allegiances — or, at least the perceptions of them — will eventually upend fragile military dynamics presumably being held in check by a now meaningless October 2020 ceasefire agreement. In other words, as the increasingly familiar clashes and pitched street battles between these “mafia” families continue to happen, they could convince remaining holdouts that the only way to move forward in Libya is through all-out military confrontation.