Algeria’s opposition strategy: countering Morocco’s regional ambitions

Few bilateral relationships in the contemporary world are as persistently fraught with tension—and as consequential for regional stability—as the one between Algeria and Morocco. Since both nations emerged from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, their ties have swung between cautious cooperation and open hostility, marked by border disputes, diplomatic ruptures, and a Cold War-style rivalry for regional supremacy that has outlasted multiple generations of leadership on both sides of the Zouj Bghal border crossing. This analysis asks a deliberately provocative question: has opposing Morocco become, in effect, Algeria’s long-term national strategy—the organizing logic behind its foreign policy, military posture, regional diplomacy, and even aspects of its domestic legitimacy?

At first glance, such a claim seems overly reductive. Algeria is a nation of 32 million people, its economy heavily dependent on hydrocarbon revenues, with a youthful population often frustrated by governance challenges and security threats along five distinct borders—none of which have anything to do with Rabat. To reduce Algeria’s actions to a single obsession would be to caricature a foreign policy tradition shaped by history, complexity, and multiple competing priorities. Yet the opposite claim—that Morocco plays little to no role in shaping Algeria’s regional strategy—similarly fails to withstand scrutiny.

This analysis argues for a middle path: opposition to Morocco has become one of the most enduring, institutionalized, and costly principles guiding Algeria’s regional policy, without fully defining the scope of its broader strategic ambitions. Rather than asserting this conclusion upfront, the discussion proceeds inductively, tracing the historical origins of the rivalry, examining the Western Sahara dispute as its defining structural feature, and exploring how this dynamic has seeped into diplomacy, domestic politics, defense planning, and economic strategy. The piece concludes by weighing the evidence for and against this central thesis, before considering whether the two states can break free from a zero-sum framework that, by virtually all empirical measures, has impoverished the Maghreb relative to its evident potential.

Historical roots: from colonial borders to the Sands War

The roots of Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algeria’s independence itself. The French colonial cartography, imposed over more than a century, redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan frontier separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing to French Algeria territories—around Tindouf, Colomb-Béchar, and the Figuig region—that Rabat had historically administered or claimed. Morocco gained independence in 1956, six years before Algeria, and Moroccan nationalists—including the future King Hassan II—initially framed Algeria’s liberation struggle as a common Maghreb cause, offering sanctuary, arms supply networks, and diplomatic support to the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the 1954–1962 war. Rabat’s expectation was that an independent, grateful Algeria would negotiate the return of territories lost to colonization. That expectation collided with the post-independence Algerian leadership’s doctrine—championed by Ahmed Ben Bella—that colonial borders were sacrosanct and non-negotiable, a principle later enshrined continent-wide by the 1964 Cairo resolution of the Organization of African Unity on the inviolability of colonial borders.

This clash culminated in the brief but decisive Sands War of October 1963, in which Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed in Tindouf and Figuig. Though halted within weeks by an OAU ceasefire and Ethiopian arbitration, the conflict left a residue of strategic mistrust that has never fully dissipated. For Algeria’s revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an irredentist, expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests. For the Moroccan palace, it reinforced a view of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state, allied with the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had sheltered its liberation movement. These mutually reinforcing narratives, however partisan, have proven remarkably durable, resurfacing in every subsequent crisis.

Academic perspectives on the rivalry

Academic scholarship on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges—with minor variations in emphasis—toward a broadly similar diagnosis. Comparative studies of regional security provision in the Maghreb characterize both states as competing “regional security providers,” whose overlapping leadership claims generate structural friction independent of any specific dispute (Boukhars, 2019). Historians of French Algeria place the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: Stora’s work situates the 130 years of colonial occupation and the independence war at the heart of Algeria’s political identity formation, shaping a foreign policy culture distinctly sovereignist and anti-interventionist—far more distrustful of external engagement, including Moroccan, than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory (Stora, 2020; Stora, 2021). Analyses of the 2019 Hirak protests similarly highlight the movement’s domestic and institutional demands—centered on transparency and elite accountability—while noting how external threat narratives were later mobilized by the state in the movement’s aftermath (Souiah, 2021). Taken together, this literature does not support a monocausal reading in which Morocco explains all of Algeria’s foreign policy; yet it consistently identifies rivalry as a structuring, not a peripheral, feature of the regional order, with roots in colonial and revolutionary experiences that produced two fundamentally distinct states.

The Amazigh identity dimension

A less frequently examined but analytically significant layer of the rivalry concerns competing claims over Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco host significant Amazighophone populations—concentrated in Kabylie, the Aurès, and M’Zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both states have, at varying speeds and degrees of sincerity, granted constitutional recognition to Tamazight, Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016. Yet the political meaning attached to Amazigh identity diverges sharply between the two capitals, and this divergence has periodically been folded into the broader rivalry.

In Algeria, the Kabyle Amazigh movement has at times articulated autonomy claims that the central government has treated as a security issue; Algerian authorities have, on occasion, accused Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a tool of destabilization, a charge Rabat has consistently denied. In Morocco, by contrast, the palace has integrated Amazigh cultural recognition—most notably through the 2001 creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and the 2011 constitutional reform—into an inclusive national narrative centered on the monarchy, rather than treating it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational heritage—rooted in a pre-Arab-Islamic substratum common to both societies—has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry rather than serving, as it might, as a foundation for cross-border cultural cooperation.

The Western Sahara dispute as a central organizing principle

While the Sands War forged the psychological architecture of the rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute provided its enduring institutional content. Spain’s withdrawal from its Saharan colony in 1975, precipitated by Morocco’s mobilization of some 350,000 unarmed civilians in the Green March, triggered a conflict that has structured bilateral relations for half a century. Morocco has since annexed and administered most of the territory, presenting an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty as the only realistic basis for resolution. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition in Western Sahara, has hosted since 1976 the government-in-exile and refugee camps of the Polisario Front, provided it with diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and championed the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic at the African Union and United Nations.

The narratives of each side are total and mutually exclusive. Algiers frames its position as the application of a principle rooted in the UN Charter’s self-determination doctrine and the continuity of its own anti-colonial genealogy. Rabat, backed by a growing number of external observers, argues that Algeria is a de facto party to the dispute rather than a neutral sponsor of Sahrawi self-determination, pointing to the Polisario leadership’s location, financing, and institutional dependence on Algerian territory (Chtatou, 2021, October 22). The dispute has proven strategically self-sustaining: because sovereignty over Western Sahara is presented by Rabat as a matter of territorial integrity—the most sacred national cause—and by Algiers as a decolonization principle, neither government has the domestic margin to compromise without appearing to betray a foundational commitment. This mutual entrenchment has, over five decades, transformed a regional territorial dispute into a fixed coordinate around which nearly all other dimensions of the bilateral relationship—and much of Algeria’s broader foreign policy—have come to organize themselves.

The diplomatic dynamic shifted decisively after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of the trilateral normalization agreement with Israel, a trend that accelerated as an increasing number of European and African governments—led by France, given the long-awaited Franco-Moroccan strategic treaty—moved toward explicit or implicit support for the autonomy plan. Algeria has interpreted this trend as evidence of encirclement rather than a reason to recalibrate, a perception that, if anything, has hardened its posture (Chtatou, 2026, February 26).

Foreign policy through the Morocco lens

Algeria’s foreign policy since the 1970s has displayed a recurrent pattern: initiatives pursued ostensibly for their own sake—African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation—have frequently also served as instruments to contain Moroccan influence. Several arenas illustrate this pattern with particular clarity.

African Union

Algeria played a pivotal role in the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to the Organization of African Unity in 1984, a decision that prompted Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco re-joined the African Union in January 2017—replacing its “empty chair” strategy with direct diplomatic engagement—Algeria intensified its own continental outreach, courting Sahelian and sub-Saharan capitals in what amounted to a renewed competition for African recognition of the rival Sahrawi positions.

Normalization with Israel

Morocco’s December 2020 decision to normalize relations with Israel, secured in exchange for U.S. recognition of its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a wholly new axis of confrontation. Algiers, whose foreign policy identity has long integrated solidarity with the Palestinian cause as an ideological principle, interpreted this move as a strategic repositioning that brought Israeli security and intelligence presence to its western flank (Chtatou, 2026, June 22). Algerian authorities, along with much of the state-aligned press, subsequently promoted the notion of an “anti-Algerian axis” linking Rabat, Washington, and Tel Aviv—a framing that, while likely overestimating Algeria’s centrality in Israeli strategic calculations in the Maghreb, has concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning (Chtatou, 2026, June 22).

Breakdown and escalation, 2021

In August 2021, Algeria formally severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, citing what it termed hostile acts, then closed its airspace to Moroccan civilian and military aircraft, definitively suspended the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline that had for a quarter-century carried Algerian gas across Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure—first imposed by Morocco in 1994 following a Marrakech terrorist attack it partly blamed on Algerian security failures. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sands War, and illustrate how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policy on infrastructure, energy, and airspace (Chtatou, 2025, October 14).

Reconfiguration in 2026

Morocco’s foundational participation in the U.S.-sponsored “Board of Peace” initiative in January 2026—as a founding member, top financial contributor, and first Arab country to commit military assets—further widened the diplomatic gap between Rabat and Algiers, reinforcing Morocco’s positioning as what one analysis termed the Arab pivot of an emerging regional order anchored to the United States (Chtatou, 2026, February 26). Algeria, which has cultivated closer defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly China, finds itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical fault line that closely—and not coincidentally—overlaps with the long-standing Algerian-Moroccan rivalry.

Domestic politics and the uses of external rivalry

A substantial body of political science argues that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often derive benefit from a culture of external threats—a dynamic sometimes described as diversionary conflict theory. Algeria’s political history provides recurring illustrations of this phenomenon. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s, triggered by the annulment of the 1991–92 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front, the military-security establishment consolidated a form of opaque, unaccountable power that critics and opposition voices long described through the contested but persistent trope of the “power” or “generals’ mafia”—a ruling configuration in which military, security, and economic interests were tightly interwoven and largely shielded from electoral accountability (Chtatou, 2026, May 11). This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco foremost among them, to bolster internal cohesion and deflect attention from governance failures.

The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth term, posed the most serious internal challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, intergenerational, and centered on domestic demands—ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections, and accountable governance—rather than foreign policy grievances (Souiah, 2021). Yet the state’s response to the legitimacy crisis revealed by the Hirak included, alongside real institutional adjustments, a perceptible intensification of external threat rhetoric, in which allegations of foreign interference—often Moroccan and, after 2020, Israeli—occupied a prominent place in official and state-aligned media discourse (Chtatou, 2025, October 14). This pattern repeated itself in the 2021 diplomatic rupture, which followed a period of persistent social tension and slow political transition under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.

It would be reductive to claim that Algerian governance is *exclusively* organized around this diversionary logic. The state continues to invest, often substantially, in housing, food and energy subsidies, higher education expansion, and industrial diversification efforts, reflecting real and independent domestic development priorities. Yet the recurring coincidence between moments of domestic political tension and the intensification of anti-Moroccan mobilization in official discourse is difficult to dismiss as coincidental, and constitutes one of the clearest mechanisms by which external rivalry has become embedded in domestic policymaking.

The economic cost of confrontation

It is in the economic sphere that the price of prolonged rivalry is most measurable. The Arab Maghreb Union, founded with great fanfare in 1989 by Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, aimed for a common market, coordinated infrastructure, and ultimately a customs union inspired by, if distant from, the European integration model. Instead, it has remained moribund for more than three decades, its ministerial councils largely inactive and its founding ambitions unfulfilled. Intra-Maghreb trade remains among the lowest regional integration levels in the world; various estimates place formal trade between Algeria and Morocco at less than 3 percent of each country’s total trade—a figure that starkly contrasts with the usual intensity observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.

The closure of the land border since 1994—originally imposed by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack it partly attributed to Algerian security failures, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—has entrenched this separation, fostering in its place a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor regulated employment for either state. The definitive 2021 suspension of the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline terminated a decades-old functional bilateral economic interdependence—one of the few to survive previous diplomatic freezes—in favor of parallel and mutually exclusive energy corridors: Algeria redirected its gas exports via the Medgaz pipeline directly to Spain, while Morocco promoted the ambitious Atlantic Nigeria-Morocco pipeline project, designed to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and, implicitly, Algerian leverage over regional transit (Chtatou, 2025, October 14).

By comparison, regional groupings with far less obvious economic complementarity than that uniting Algeria and Morocco—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southern African Development Community, even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council—have, over comparable periods, achieved markedly higher levels of intra-regional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment, underscoring that Maghreb stagnation is a political constraint rather than a purely structural or geographic one. Regional integration economists have long argued that a truly cooperative Maghreb could generate substantial welfare gains through integrated transport corridors linking Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis; expanded intra-regional trade exploiting real comparative advantages, notably Algerian hydrocarbons and Moroccan manufactured and agricultural exports; coordinated renewable energy infrastructure leveraging shared Saharan solar potential; deeper and more liquid regional capital markets; a substantially expanded tourism market; and a collective bargaining position vastly strengthened vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. Instead, both governments have pursued largely parallel and non-complementary development strategies—duplicated port and logistics infrastructure, competing rather than coordinated Sahelian and African outreach, defense spending largely oriented toward mutual deterrence—imposing what regional economists have termed one of the world’s most considerable unexploited integration dividends in the developing world.

Military competition and the security dilemma

The material expression of the rivalry is nowhere more visible than in defense budgets. Algeria has maintained one of Africa’s highest military expenditures for more than a decade, officially justified by instability along its borders with Libya, Mali, and Niger, and broader Sahel insecurity following the collapse of state authority in northern Mali after 2012 and the subsequent proliferation of jihadist and separatist armed groups in the region. Algerian authorities consistently frame this spending as defensive and regionally oriented rather than specifically directed against Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has pursued parallel and substantial military modernization, diversifying its acquisitions among American, European, and—since 2020—Israeli suppliers, acquiring advanced air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, and unmanned aerial systems, while deepening security and intelligence cooperation with Washington through the annual African Lion exercises, now among the largest multinational military drills on the continent (Chtatou, 2026, May 6).

Even when each state’s security calculus responds to genuinely distinct threats—not Morocco-specific for Algeria’s southern and eastern borders, Atlantic and Saharan for Morocco—each side’s modernization efforts are almost invariably interpreted by the other through the lens of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defensive acquisitions are perceived as threatening, prompting reciprocal escalation. The closure of Algerian airspace to Moroccan aircraft since 2021, along with periodic reports of reinforced troop deployments and fortifications along the closed land border, illustrate how the daily management of the relationship has become militarized despite the absence of open conflict since 1963.

Competing models of regional leadership

Beyond the security and diplomatic dimensions, Morocco and Algeria have in recent years articulated genuinely distinct visions of development and geopolitical leadership for their own regional roles, visions that remain trapped in implicit competition. Morocco has pursued a strategy centered on economic diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and Atlantic-facing infrastructure: expansion of Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promotion of the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and more recently the launch of the African Atlantic States Initiative, designed to give Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas at odds with Paris and, in several cases, the ECOWAS—access to the Atlantic via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistics bridge between landlocked Sahel and global markets.

Algeria, drawing on its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and long-cultivated identity of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity dating back to the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in Malian internal conflicts (notwithstanding the 2024 breakdown of the Algiers Accords process with the Bamako military government), and a foreign policy identity rooted in sovereignist and anti-interventionist principles. These strategies are not, in the abstract, mutually exclusive; a genuinely cooperative Maghreb could in principle accommodate both a Moroccan Atlantic corridor and an Algerian Sahelian mediation role. In practice, however, each initiative is systematically read by the other capital as an attempt at regional encirclement, and the diplomatic energy that might otherwise support regional development is instead devoted to mutual containment.

Public diplomacy and the media battle

The rivalry is not only waged through formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions, but also through sustained competition for international public opinion and media narratives. Both governments maintain extensive networks of aligned media, foreign lobbying arrangements, and academic and think-tank outreach designed to shape how the Western Sahara dispute and the broader bilateral relationship are perceived by external publics, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Morocco’s diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with American and European policymakers, journalists, and parliamentarians, an effort that bore significant fruit with the 2020 U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the broader diplomatic momentum in favor of the autonomy plan that followed. Algeria’s diplomacy has responded in kind, mobilizing its own networks—including sympathetic voices within pro-Polisario advocacy circles, segments of the European left, and African liberation solidarity networks inherited from the FLN’s revolutionary past—to contest Moroccan sovereignty claims and publicize allegations of human rights abuses in Moroccan-administered Western Sahara.

This competition has periodically spilled over into direct state friction unrelated to Western Sahara itself. Diplomatic tensions between Algeria and France over historical memory, migration, and, more recently, the 2024 detention of Franco-Algerian dissidents occurred in a context where Algiers explicitly linked French political choices to what it perceives as a pro-Rabat tilt within France’s political and media establishment, illustrating how the Moroccan rivalry has come to color even relationships—like that with France—that possess their own long-standing and independent bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments a priori unrelated—a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup—are systematically interpreted by both capitals through the interpretive grid of the rivalry, confirming the finding that runs through this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that very little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely foreign to this rivalry.

Is countering Morocco Algeria’s sole long-term strategy? An assessment

Having traced the rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, it is possible to render a more precise verdict on the essay’s initial question. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s *only* long-term national program does not survive scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability in the context of an unfinished post-Hirak transition; reducing the dependence of an economy still heavily reliant on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; responding to acute demographic and youth employment pressures in a country where the majority of the population is under 35; guaranteeing food and water security amid recurrent droughts; modernizing aging infrastructure; and managing an exceptionally complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has nothing to do with the Morocco file.

Yet the nuanced counter-thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most enduring, consistently invoked, and decisive principles shaping Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionate to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests. Few other bilateral relationships so consistently and visibly shape Algeria’s diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, AU positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (abandonment of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, redirection of export corridors), and domestic political discourse as does the Morocco file. The rivalry functions less as one interest among others, on an equal footing in the competition for political attention, than as a persistent filter through which a wide range of otherwise unrelated domains come to be interpreted—and frequently distorted.

The opportunity cost of this configuration is considerable and increasingly well documented. North Africa remains one of the least economically integrated regions in the world, despite possessing precisely the kind of complementary economic endowments—Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan industry, logistics, and market access—that elsewhere in the world have powered successful regional integration projects. The persistence of confrontation, rather than the underlying Western Sahara territorial dispute itself, appears as the most immediate obstacle to regional cooperation, since that dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as was largely the case during 1988–94 and, in more partial ways, up until hostility resumed in the 2020s.

Rivalry or renewal? Prospects for the Maghreb

The trajectory of the North African regional order in the coming decade will largely depend on Algeria and Morocco’s ability to build functional cooperation mechanisms that do not require prior resolution of the Western Sahara dispute—a resolution that, given hardened and mutually incompatible positions on both sides, seems unlikely in the short term regardless of shifts in international recognition patterns. Confidence-building measures of the kind that have periodically eased other prolonged regional disputes elsewhere in the world—technical dialogue on shared Sahelian threats such as terrorism, arms trafficking, and organized crime; gradual sectoral economic exchanges insulated from the broader diplomatic freeze; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the large Algerian and Moroccan diasporas with family ties across the closed border—could, in principle, begin to erode the rigidity of the current impasse without requiring either government to abandon its core sovereignty position.

The realization of such measures depends heavily on domestic political conditions in both countries that transcend the strict bilateral diplomacy framework: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the balance within its security establishment between reformist and status-quo factions; the pace and solidity of Morocco’s ongoing diplomatic consolidation around its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, which reduces the incentive in Rabat to offer concessions that might be perceived domestically as gratuitous; and the broader realignment of external alignments—American, European, Russian, Chinese, and Gulf—that is increasingly overlaying and, in places, hardening the underlying bilateral dispute.

Conclusion

The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands as one of the defining—and most costly—features of contemporary North African geopolitics. It would be inaccurate, and analytically reductive, to conclude that countering Morocco represents Algeria’s *sole* long-term political and economic program: the Algerian state’s actions respond to a genuinely broad range of domestic and regional priorities, independent of Rabat, from Sahelian security to hydrocarbon diversification to demographic management. It would be equally mistaken, however, to treat this rivalry as a marginal or merely episodic feature of Algerian policy. Across diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, and defense planning, opposition to Morocco has become one of the most constant, institutionalized, and costly threads of Algerian state action since 1962—a pattern that has hardened rather than softened through successive crises in 2020–21 and 2026. Whether this pattern continues to dominate the North African landscape or gives way to pragmatic, sectoral cooperation will determine not only the future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and unexploited potential stands as the most vivid proof that prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs no society can indefinitely afford.

The analytical task, therefore, is not to arbitrate which side bears the greater responsibility for the impasse—a question that lies beyond the scope of dispassionate scholarly analysis, and to which each camp’s domestic discourse responds, predictably and uniformly, to the other’s disfavor—but to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the facts: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sands War and then by the still-unresolved Western Sahara question, into a self-sustaining organizing logic capable of absorbing and reconfiguring nearly every adjacent domain it touches, from Amazigh cultural politics to Sahelian diplomacy to hydrocarbon infrastructure. Taking the measure of this logic, and the considerable margin of maneuver each government possesses to loosen its grip, is the necessary prerequisite to any future in which the shared geography of the Maghreb becomes an asset rather than, as it has been for the past half-century, a perpetually contested frontier.