It has now been almost two weeks since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined President Trump and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on the White House lawn to sign a peace and normalization agreement between the two Gulf Arab countries and Israel. Several other Arab and Islamic countries are reportedly considering following suit. On the one hand, most countries recognize the strategic and economic benefit of normalization. But, on the other, decades of incitement are hard to overcome and mean any leader who reverses his country’s traditional ostracization of Israel will pay a cost to their domestic legitimacy.
That cost can be overcome, however, as part of a diplomatic bargain. In the case of Morocco, the benefits of a deal prior to the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential elections could be huge.
As with many states in Africa, colonial powers victimized Morocco. In the wake of the 1911 Agadir Crisis, France and Spain divided Morocco. Spain established a formal protectorate of the northern coast minus Tangiers and consolidated control over the southern Sahara region, while the French would rule supreme everywhere else. Morocco was the first country to recognize U.S. independence, and the United States returned the favor, lobbying France privately at first and then publicly to restore Moroccan independence, which Paris finally did in 1956. The Spanish ended their protectorate on Morocco’s north coast but still continued to maintain their Western Sahara colony.
Throughout the 1960s, Rabat sought a number of diplomatic strategies at the United Nations to get Spain to exit the Sahara. Diplomatic cynicism interceded there and later at the International Court of Justice, where judges from the Soviet Union and the Soviet Cold War puppet Benin conspired to sink Morocco’s historical claims. In a mixed finding, the court affirmed the legal ties between Morocco and the territory but also found the region not to be terra nullius and, therefore, potentially capable of self-determination.
History is clearer: Five Moroccan royal dynasties trace their roots to the region, while the Sahrawi nationalism upon which some Western Saharan activists lay their claim to independence is largely a Cold War construct, a project intellectually rooted in Cuban advisers and financially tied to Algeria’s reactionary regime.
Just weeks after the court finding, the Moroccans tried a new approach: In what became known as the “Green March,” 350,000 Moroccans marched unarmed into the Western Sahara waving Moroccan flags and carrying copies of the Quran in order to lay claim to the Sahara as an essential part of Morocco and to erase the Spanish-imposed border as illegitimate. Spain was unwilling to fire on such a number of migrants and instead picked up and left.
Morocco has administered much of the Sahara since, although Algeria has pushed into the territory as well in support of the Polisario Front, a Marxist and autocratic proxy which Algerian and Cuban intelligence created in order to pursue Sahrawi nationalist claims. The Algerian strategy has less to do with so-called liberation and more to do with undercutting Morocco, its historic rival and a state far more successful despite its lack of oil and gas resources.
While the U.S. has long sought a referendum to determine the future of the Western Sahara, Algerian obstructionism — especially Algiers’ desire to stack the deck by including those not resident in the territory under dispute — has ensured the U.N. mission has gone unfulfilled for nearly three decades.
Over this time, Morocco has sought diplomatically to win American endorsement of its position on the Western Sahara. Morocco has divided itself and the Sahara into administrative divisions, which each have a degree of local autonomy, thereby giving Sahrawis in the Sahara the predominant say in their own affairs. This was long the goal of U.S. diplomacy, but, as Morocco implemented it, the State Department doubled down in its traditional moral equivalence and pivoted to continue to give credence to Algerian arguments and Polisario pretenses.
In short, Morocco has acquiesced to long-held U.S. positions only to have the State Department turn around and not uphold the American end of the bargain.
Morocco has history on its side. It also has the Sahrawi people on its side: Left to their own devices, Sahrawis have returned to Morocco and resumed their lives. Given the embarrassment of the votes Sahrawis cast with their feet, Algerians and the Polisario have sought to prevent the movement of Sahrawis outside of the Tindouf refugee camps, often by holding family members hostages to compel their return.
While the mainstream press highlights international criticism of America during Republican administrations and juxtaposes it with the international popularity of Democratic leadership, the reality is that pattern only works with Western Europe. Republicans tend to be more popular in Eastern Europe because of their historic willingness (Trump excepted) to confront tyranny. Many Arab states also favor Republican administrations: The Gulf emirates, for example, largely resented President Obama’s perceived pivot to Iran. Egypt, meanwhile, believes Republicans are less willing than Democrats to offer legitimacy to the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither of those might concern Morocco as much, but, in recent years, Democrats have bizarrely promoted the Polisario as a legitimate voice. Obama met with the Polisario leader at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela. And former national security adviser Susan Rice made the Polisario cause her own. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden side-stepped that issue slightly by passing over Rice, but many progressives within his team follow Rice’s lead.
This puts a ticking clock on Morocco’s debate about normalization with Israel. Should the Kingdom act before Trump leaves office, they could likely get a far more generous deal for the U.S. to recognize the entirety of Morocco’s claims without any caveats. Rather than designate a diplomat within the U.S. Embassy in Rabat to handle the Sahara, every diplomat should as part of the broader Moroccan portfolio. The U.S. would, in effect, see no difference in Moroccan sovereignty over Laayoune and Dakhla than over Tangiers and Casablanca. Algeria might complain, but it is unlikely that even a Democratic administration would reverse the precedent. This is likely a deal that a Democratic administration, whether progressive or just beholden to conventional wisdom, would make.
Rabat may complain they should not have to make this bargain and history is on their side. It is, but such a bargain is the reality of the U.S. position, and Morocco should not stand on ceremony and resist the tide of inevitability when its own long-standing concerns could so neatly be resolved.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
