In 1969, a young 27 year-old army captain, Mu'ammar Qadhafi, staged a peaceful military coup against Libya's decentralized and pro-Western Sanussi Monarchy. Initially, Qadhafi's revolution sought to address the fundamental social inequalities that had arisen during the latter Sanussi period due to the discovery of oil and the deep unpopularity of the Kingdom's pro-Western foreign policies. As this new direction facilitated oil nationalization, Qadhafi remained quite popular until 1975. Thereafter, he embarked on a truly "revolutionary" project to recast Libyan society as well as its foreign alliance structure. Libya scholar Ronald Bruce St John asserts that in Nasser’s Egypt, a new constellation of foreign policies emerged prior to the revolutionary "theory" which was created to justify them. Conversely, he maintains, in Qadhafi's Libya ideology preceded foreign policy formation. In other words, in Nasser's Egypt, ideology was a fig leaf used to cloak the pursuit of Realpolitik interests. Conversely, Qadhafi's Libya was sui generis in its pursuit of foreign policy goals which ran directly counter to Libya's economic, strategic, and security interests. The origins of Qadhafi's "counterproductive" foreign policy decisions were similar to his espousal of economically damaging domestic ideologies: attempts to co-opt key segments of the population, while marginalizing opponents. In both realms it was Libya's oil wealth that provided the cushion to pursue such "counterproductive" policies. This paper will present novel archival research conducted in Libya prior to the 2011 uprisings. It will also deconstruct the Qadhafi regime's foreign policy formation apparatus to examine how the "personalization" of the Qadhafi regime allowed domestic and ideological calculations to trump strategic and security concerns. The paper will show that -- similarly to North Korea -- Qadhafi’s foreign policy was largely a vanity project: geared to project his desired self-image as a "great" world leader. Despite Libya's uniqueness, study of Qadhafi’s foreign policy formation processes is highly relevant for the study of other small, oil rich, geostrategically important polities which paradoxically oppose the very same hegemonic power upon whom they are reliant for purchasing their hydrocarbons. Qatari support of anti-Western Islamist movements from 2011 to the present comes to mind. Such "counterproductive" policies are clearly an example of the pressure that wealthy authoritarian states face to align their foreign policies with the biases of their populations, rather than their security or economic interests.