Diplomacy is often an exercise in willful blindness, but there comes a point when reality completely shatters the fiction. For America’s foreign policy establishment, that moment has arrived in Spain.
The July 30 collapse of Ceuta shattered the fiction of Spanish sovereignty, exposing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s sanctimonious strategic deterrence. For years, he lectured allies on decolonization while exempting Spain’s own enclaves, but Morocco — once again — called his bluff. Rabat’s engineered surge of 50,000 to 60,000 migrants met a pathetic Madrid response of just 60 soldiers and 30 Civil Guard officers. As juvenile facilities ballooned to 2,400% capacity and 67 people died, Sánchez offered public relations spin instead of a real security blueprint. This aspiring dictator sowed regional hypocrisy, and Morocco harvested it. Washington must cease endorsing the fiction of Spanish colonialism in North Africa, and unconditionally recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Ceuta, Melilla, and the Canary Islands.
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This manufactured paralysis lays bare a rot that the Trump administration routinely ignores. NATO alliance membership cannot substitute for a government’s refusal to exercise state power. Flags, treaties, and diplomatic courtesies are meaningless illusions when a foreign power can shatter a European border in hours, laying bare an anti-American Madrid establishment that responds only with manipulated statistics and excuses. Sovereignty without enforcement is dangerous magical thinking that, in this case, cannot secure the Strait of Gibraltar — the world’s most strategically vital maritime chokepoint.
This assault was no spontaneous humanitarian crisis; it followed a traditional pattern of Spanish appeasement and Moroccan leverage. In 2021, Sánchez allowed terrorist Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali into Spain under a false identity. Morocco retaliated by opening the migration valve, pushing almost 10,000 people into Ceuta. After the Moroccan intelligence services compromised the phones of the leftist petty colonial master and some of his closest senior ministers with the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, a panicked Sánchez discarded four decades of Spanish foreign policy to endorse Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara. Predictably, “progressive ideological stances” collapsed when political survival demanded surrender. The same cynical bureaucratic inertia that delayed emergency action during the Valencia floods now leaves a NATO trench completely undefended.
An incompetent Madrid, incapable of policing its own borders, has become an albatross that actively endangers Western international security interests. Morocco, conversely, has proved it can control the flow whenever it chooses. Washington must face a blunt reality: Spanish sovereignty is no longer immutable. Madrid has forfeited it.
The Trump administration cannot afford further inertia. The Pentagon and the intelligence community must bypass Madrid’s pusillanimous objections and establish a Southern Strait operating picture with Rabat as the lead partner. Simultaneously, American sensors, intelligence-fusion cells, and interdiction planning must treat Moroccan forces as the primary, competent authority along the African shore. Spanish approval is no longer an operational prerequisite. American commanders cannot defend strategic lines that Pedro Sánchez’s corrupt coalition willingly abandons.
Furthermore, Congress must act, forging a Hybrid Coercion Response Authority to automatically suspend defense-technology transfers and intelligence sharing to any NATO member that deliberately engineers its own demographic collapse. Sánchez’s reckless capitulation — selling dual-use material to Iran and legalizing more than one million illegal immigrants aiming to secure his party’s survival — exemplifies this systemic folly. Washington, unequivocally, must bypass Madrid entirely, diverting and accelerating funding, hardware, and intelligence assets directly to the country actually enforcing sovereignty along the African shore — Morocco.
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Finally, the White House should offer Rabat a Gibraltar Security Guarantee. In exchange for advanced maritime surveillance, Morocco must guarantee zero-tolerance interdiction and absolute cooperation against Iranian and Hezbollah networks in Northern Africa.
America must stop subsidizing Spanish failure. Sovereignty belongs to nations, not colonial anachronisms. While Sánchez capitulates, King Mohammed VI stands ready to reclaim Morocco’s historic borders.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.
