Maps have long played a crucial, symbolic role in the dispute over the Western Sahara. For years, because most world maps available elsewhere show the international border that separates Morocco from its coveted territory to the south, those that were sold in Morocco had to be separately manufactured for the domestic market, affecting everything from globes and atlases to toy puzzles and address books.
It was no surprise, then, that shortly after the outgoing Trump administration recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory in December 2020, Moroccan newspapers and officials happily praised the United States’ new official map of Morocco when it was unveiled at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat. For it showed the Western Sahara the way Morocco has long seen the territory: as its southern provinces.
The shift in U.S. policy was a victory for Morocco, culminating years of diplomatic and lobbying efforts. But more than a year later, the initial optimism in Rabat has soured into disappointment, as Washington’s recognition has not yielded the groundswell of support Morocco had hoped would follow.
Securing broad international recognition for its sovereignty over the Western Sahara is more than a high priority for Morocco: It has been the main objective of the kingdom’s foreign policy over the past two decades. Now the gap between Rabat’s expectations of what U.S. recognition would change and the reality of what it did—not much—seems to have created impatience in the kingdom.
The Western Sahara issue has long caused tensions in Morocco’s relations with neighboring Algeria, which supports the Polisario Front, a political and military movement that has fought for Western Sahara’s independence since 1973, when it was still a Spanish colony. But the issue is now also progressively poisoning relations with key allies, especially in Europe. Any hint of ambivalence toward the territory’s status from European interlocutors is now met by the kingdom with heightened animosity and immediate diplomatic retribution.
In 2021, the Moroccan government severed all contacts with the German Embassy in Rabat and later recalled its ambassador in Berlin. Among other reasons, Rabat was apparently annoyed that the German Foreign Office had taken note of the United States’ change of policy on the Western Sahara, while maintaining Germany’s support for a United Nations-mediated solution to the conflict. Furthermore, the Germans had called for a closed-door meeting at the U.N. Security Council in December 2020 to discuss the issue. Morocco, which views itself as an increasingly important regional player, was also angry at having been left out of a conference on Libya organized by Germany and held in Berlin, which included Algerian officials.
Spain received even harsher treatment. After Madrid allowed Brahim Ghali, the elderly leader of the Polisario Front, to seek medical treatment in a Spanish hospital in April, Moroccan authorities essentially allowed over 10,000 migrants to cross into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta during a two-day period in May 2021. The move caught Spanish authorities by surprise and forced Madrid to hurriedly deploy security forces to the border to deal with the influx of people. Tensions between Rabat and Madrid have since eased. But the episode showed the lengths to which Morocco is prepared to go to get other countries to adhere to its views on Western Sahara—or punish them if they won’t.
Morocco’s reaction to any country that hints at non-alignment with its Western Sahara ambitions increasingly resembles that of China regarding international views on Taiwan.Then-King Hassan II launched the decisive move to claim Moroccan sovereignty over the territory to the south in 1975, as Spain was relinquishing its former colony. A 16-year war between Moroccan forces and the Polisario Front ensued, and when peace finally arrived in the form of a 1991 U.N.-backed cease-fire agreement, Morocco was in control of most of the territory.
The peace deal was supposed to culminate in a referendum to allow Sahraouis to decide whether or not to declare independence. But since then, Morocco has invested large sums of money in the territory and encouraged Moroccan settlers to move there, while at the same time preventing any vote on self-determination from ever taking place. Instead, Rabat has offered autonomy under Moroccan rule.
Since his ascension to the throne in 1999, Morocco’s current ruler, Mohamed VI, has focused the country’s foreign policy on securing full international recognition for Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. By raising its economic profile through investment across the African continent, Morocco was able to secure the backing of several—mostly small—African states. In return for U.S. recognition, the kingdom agreed to formalize diplomatic relations with Israel as part of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords initiative. It has also gotten several Arab countries, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, to open consulates in Laayoune, in the Moroccan-controlled part of Western Sahara.
So far, however, Rabat has been unable to secure European Union support for its cause or even get individual European countries to back its claim. In September, an EU court annulled the bloc’s trade and fisheries deals with Morocco because they included Western Sahara and its coastal waters without taking into consideration the will of the Sahraoui population. Previous EU court rulings have taken the position that the territory is not part of Morocco. Rabat has been careful to avoid an excessively confrontational tone with the bloc as a whole, as the EU remains Morocco’s main economic partner. But bilateral diplomatic rifts of the sort it has engaged in with Germany and Spain, perhaps in an effort to exploit divisions within the bloc, will likely degrade relations between Rabat and Brussels.
In the absence of any concrete breakthroughs, the situation seems to be creating a sort of diplomatic doublespeak. To patch things up with Morocco, for instance, Germany simply said that Rabat’s autonomy plan is a “good base” from which to reach a negotiated solution for the Western Sahara. That is hardly a declaration of support of Moroccan sovereignty, but it keeps German policy within the status quo without having to commit to a definitive position. Berlin also recently invited Mohamed VI for a state visit to Germany. Other countries will likely follow the same path of not fully closing the door on Morocco’s autonomy plan, while not fully endorsing it either.
While it seems improbable that the Biden administration will reverse the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, Washington’s nod clearly hasn’t tipped the scale in favor of Rabat’s ambitions. And Morocco’s reaction to any country that hints at non-alignment with its Western Sahara ambitions increasingly resembles that of China regarding international views on Taiwan. This is likely to create new frictions with European countries in the near term, without giving Morocco what it really craves: for European countries to recognize the Western Sahara as part of its territory.
The conflict seems to have entered into a new, more volatile type of stalemate. Skirmishes between Moroccan forces and the Polisario Front have once again become recurrent along the desert frontlines of Western Sahara. But they will in all likelihood be matched by broader diplomatic rifts, as Morocco attempts to persuade more countries to adopt the kingdom’s preferred map of what nevertheless remains in most of the world’s eyes a disputed territory.