How Morocco Turned a Colonial Dispute into a Superpower Auction

Demonstration in support of the independence of Western Sahara in Madrid (21 April 2007). Source: Wikimedia Commons

On 31 October 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2797: a landmark text that for the first time endorsed Morocco’s 2007 autonomy plan as a ‘credible and realistic’ pathway to resolving the Western Sahara conflict. The dispute has endured for nearly five decades since Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from the territory. Rabat celebrated the vote as a ‘historic turning point’, even declaring the date a national Unity Day. Yet rather than closing the chapter on what is often described as ‘Africa’s last colony’, the vote exposed how Western Sahara has become a marketplace where global powers barter influence, resources, and strategic footholds, while the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination quietly erodes.

Unsubstantiated by any enforcement mechanism in international law, Resolution 2797 reads less like a diplomatic breakthrough than as a transactional script. Through calculated alliances and cultivated geostrategic indispensability, Morocco has transformed a colonial question into a bidding war among great powers.

Eleven Security Council members endorsed Morocco’s autonomy plan. Russia and China, which have historically maintained close ties with Algeria, abstained rather than vetoing it, signalling tacit acceptance. Washington brokered Morocco’s recognition of Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords in exchange for US support of Rabat’s territorial claims. France and Spain, whose colonial rule created the conditions for this conflict, have since deepened their economic engagement in the occupied territory. During President Emmanuel Macron’s October 2024 state visit, France announced approximately €10 billion in infrastructure and energy agreements, including projects near Dakhla aimed at developing renewable synthetic fuels by 2030.

Algeria, long the patron of the Polisario Front, found itself increasingly isolated. Its refusal to support the resolution underscored its rejection of Morocco’s autonomy plan, but the abstentions by Moscow and Beijing revealed the erosion of Algeria’s diplomatic strength. The fallout has triggered a reinvigoration of strained France-Algeria relations, exposing how neo-colonial dynamics remain deeply embedded in North African geopolitics.

Map of Western Sahara showing the Berm wall (red line) dividing Moroccan-controlled territory (tan) from the Polisario-controlled area (yellow). Source: Kmusser, based on Digital Chart of the World and UN maps. Available at: Wikimedia Commons.

Morocco has successfully monetised the conflict, creating overlapping economic and security dependencies that give major powers tangible incentives to defend its territorial ambitions. The kingdom achieved this diplomatic feat by offering Western Sahara as a portfolio of tradable assets, each tailored to address the anxieties of superpowers. Paradoxically, the territory’s resource wealth has become a curse for those who inhabit it.

For the United States: Strategic positioning and security architecture. Washington's support for Morocco is less about resolving a regional dispute than countering Chinese port investments proliferating across Africa and limiting Russian influence operating in the form of Wagner action in the Sahel. While Morocco’s normalisation of relations with Israel is politically symbolic, American interest lies in Morocco’s strategic position along the Atlantic corridor.

Morocco has since integrated Israeli military technology into its security apparatus, particularly Elbit Systems drones such as the Hermes 900 and Hermes 450. These systems, tested in the occupied Palestinian territories, have reportedly been deployed against Sahrawi targets. This integration locks Rabat into an American-Israeli security ecosystem, making strategic autonomy increasingly costly. US policy in Western Sahara once again illustrates its deep entanglement in foreign territorial disputes when strategic returns are high, often at the cost of legal principles or regional self-determination.

For France: Neo-colonialism rebranded as green transition. France’s engagement is framed as climate leadership but functions as economic entrenchment. Billions of euros have been committed to renewable energy and infrastructure projects in occupied Western Sahara, including wind and solar installations developed by European firms such as Siemens and Engie.

By 2030, nearly half of Morocco’s wind power and one-third of its solar capacity is expected to originate from Western Sahara. Critics term this strategy as ‘greenwashing occupation’ wherein renewable energy is used to legitimise territorial control while corporate communication carefully avoids acknowledging the territory's disputed status.

For China: Phosphate monopolies and resource security. Morocco controls approximately 70 percent of global phosphate reserves compared with China’s six percent, giving Rabat a near-monopoly over global fertiliser markets. For Beijing, whose food security depends heavily on phosphate imports, economic pragmatism outweighs ideological alignment with Algeria.

For Russia: Strategic ambiguity and African leverage. Russia has cultivated strong economic and military ties with both Morocco and Algeria. Bilateral trade with Morocco increased by 30 percent in 2025, while Algeria remains one of Moscow's most significant arms clients. Between 2018 and 2022, Russia supplied 73 percent of Algeria’s arms. By abstaining, Russia preserved its strategic flexibility, avoiding taking a firm stance that would antagonise either Rabat or Algiers.

Recent Russian statements describing Morocco’s autonomy plan as ‘viable under certain conditions’ indicate a subtle but notable recalibration of its foreign policy, highlighting Africa’s growing importance in a period of heightened global competition for strategic leverage.

As Western powers consolidate behind Morocco’s autonomy plan, Algeria remains the Polisario Front’s sole supporter, providing political, financial, and military backing. Algeria’s record military spending, representing nearly a quarter of its public budget and the highest in Africa, signals that its diplomatic leverage has evaporated. Once rooted in non-aligned leadership, energy exports, and Cold War-era alliances, Algeria’s geopolitical weight now rests almost entirely on military capacity. Whether this build-up serves as deterrence or preparation for escalation remains deliberately ambiguous.

For the Sahrawi population, the risk is becoming collateral in a geopolitical contest that subordinates legal rights to strategic value.

This echoes the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, when European empires carved up Africa without regard for indigenous populations. Today, phosphate exports, fishing deals, and renewable energy projects in occupied territory are marketed as Moroccan, erasing Sahrawi identity from the economic map. Meanwhile, MINURSO remains the only UN peacekeeping mission without a human rights mandate, largely due to repeated French opposition.

Morocco’s enforced ‘Moroccanisation’ of the territory raises serious questions under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory. Former Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Foreign Minister Mohamed Sidati noted that “Sahrawi people feel that every day, we become similar to Palestinians”. The parallel is striking. In both cases, international law recognises rights that geopolitical reality refuses to enforce.

Approximately 173,000 Sahrawi refugees continue to live in long-standing camps near Tindouf, Algeria, with their displacement now approaching half a century. 

The rhetoric underscores Western Sahara’s reality. U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, stated that Washington ‘believes regional peace is possible this year’ and would ‘make every effort to facilitate progress towards this shared goal of peace and prosperity for the people of Western Sahara’. Yet, Algeria’s UN Ambassador Amar Bendjama exposed the legal and moral bankruptcy of this position: “The final decision on the future cannot, must not, belong to anyone other than the people under colonial domination’ stating that the Polisario Front is a party to the conflict, and its opinion must be heard”. As the resolution vote transformed into an auction among superpowers, the Sahrawi people were never invited to bid on their own future, despite the UN acknowledging their right to self-determination since 1963. 

One statement invokes peace and prosperity while cementing occupation. The other invokes self-determination while being systematically ignored. Bendjama’s position was legally impeccable but geopolitically worthless. Algeria spoke the language of post-colonial solidarity while Morocco wielded economic and geostrategic leverage. The mismatch was not rhetorical but structural: Algeria bid with devalued currency in a marketplace that trades in tangible assets rather than abstract principles.

Western Sahara’s transformation from colonial dispute into superpower auction is not an anomaly but a pattern, revealing how contemporary geopolitics operates when legal constraints encounter strategic imperatives. Morocco has demonstrated a model that is effective, cynical and deeply troubling: convert occupation into opportunity, construct dependencies so dense that no major power wishes to unwind them, and wait for international law to quietly step aside.

In today’s geopolitics, that strategy wins. 

Written by Noor Lovatelli

Edited by Rana Zeidan