ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the beginning of a framework for analyzing Libya's foreign policy as that of a rational, goal-oriented nation pursuing its professed revolutionary aims of "freedom, socialism, and unity." Since the military coup that overthrew the government of King Idris in 1969, the foreign policy of what is formally called the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has earned the country a reputation as an "Arab Prussia" and an "international gadfly." The conception of foreign policy as the "role" of a nation has deep grounding in Arab political tradition and is a powerful tool for understanding Libyan behavior in particular. Libya's policy is a perfect fit to Walter Lippman's statement that a state's foreign policy ends and means must always be in balance. Libya's army stands at 90,000, the seventh largest in Africa and the eighth in the Arab world, about the size of Saudi Arabia's.
