>>508633625 (OP)Yes because he had the oil to facilitate untold expansion. The global economy is based around artificial scarcity the amount of untapped oil reserves and even the oil we have open now would make the prices of everything drop to the point of everything being free. Government does this to dodge accountability, same reason why 'slave' became a no-no word, because being a 'slave' means someone is accountable for you. Gaddafi, like Iran and Russia, realized they can just say no to global price controls. The only real leverage the US has was technocracy, making their subjects reliant on skills and parts that they can't manufacture themselves. You may ask 'what parts does the US send them' directly. The answer is none. Global trade is essentially federated, so if they don't participate in arbitrary price controls then they lose their ability to buy services. This is why neoliberalism supplanted liberalism, because oil is basically infinite and the logical result of it dominating trade is feudalism since the reservoirs are all regional. Russia is special because they don't have issues with tech and run black markets, Gaddafi was an idiot who thought he could break off from the global mafia by embezzling development money into military without any contingency plan other than having a standing army.