Enter ISIS. As in Iraq and Syria, the organization has filled a vacuum in Libya left by the dissolution of the state. The murder of the Egyptians—who were likely lured west by the prospect of work in Libya’s oil fields—could destabilize the region as a whole. On Monday, Egyptian President Fattah el-Sisi launched retaliatory air strikes against ISIS holdings in Derna, a city in northeast Libya, killing an estimated 40 to 50 people. el-Sisi is allied with Libya’s Dignity militia, which controls the country’s east, while Turkey and the United Arab Emirates support Libya Dawn, the movement that governs the west.

Since Obama’s optimistic Rose Garden declaration, U.S. enthusiasm for intervening in Libya has waned. In 2012, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in an attack on the U.S. consular compound in Benghazi, an event that soon stoked controversy in Washington. Congressional Republicans accused the Obama Administration of failing to provide adequate security as well as orchestrating a cover-up, a charge the White House denied. But the damage to Obama’s Libya policy was done.

“Because of the politicization of that episode in the U.S., the government paused to make sure no one else got hurt, and reduced our geographic scope and presence in the country,” a senior administration official told the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson.