Algeria’s long-term strategy: countering Morocco’s regional influence

Few bilateral relationships in modern geopolitics have been as persistently fraught—or as consequential for regional stability—as that between Algeria and Morocco. Since emerging from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, their ties have swung between cautious cooperation and open hostility, marked by border wars, diplomatic ruptures, closed frontiers, and a Cold War-style rivalry for regional dominance that has outlasted multiple generations of leaders on both sides of the Zouj Bghal crossing. The core question this analysis explores is deliberately provocative: has countering Morocco become, in practice, Algeria’s long-term national strategy—the organizing principle of its foreign policy, military posture, regional diplomacy, and even certain aspects of domestic legitimation?

Stated so bluntly, the claim is difficult to defend in its entirety. Algeria is a nation of 32 million people whose economy relies on hydrocarbon rents, with a young and often frustrated population, persistent governance challenges, and security threats along five different borders that have nothing to do with Rabat. To reduce Algerian statecraft to a single obsession would be to caricature a complex foreign policy tradition shaped by its own historical trajectory and multiple causal factors. Yet the opposite claim—that Morocco is peripheral to Algeria’s strategic calculus—is equally unsustainable.

This analysis argues for a middle ground: opposition to Morocco has become one of the most durable, institutionalized, and costly principles of Algeria’s regional policy, without fully exhausting the country’s broader strategic horizons. Rather than asserting this conclusion upfront, the argument proceeds inductively, tracing the historical roots of the rivalry in colonial border disputes and the 1963 Sand War; examining the Western Sahara conflict as the structuring issue that has organized relations since 1975; reviewing relevant academic literature; considering the understudied identity dimension tied to competing Amazigh (Berber) claims; documenting how rivalry manifests in diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, military posture, competing development models, and public diplomacy; and concluding by weighing the evidence for and against the central thesis, before questioning whether the two states can transcend a zero-sum framework that, according to virtually all empirical measures available to regional economists and political scientists, has impoverished the Maghreb relative to its manifest potential.

Historical Roots: From Colonial Borders to the Sand War

The seeds of Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algerian independence itself. Over more than a century of French colonial rule, cartographers redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan frontier separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing to French Algeria territories—around Tindouf, 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 the Algerian 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—that an independent and grateful Algeria would negotiate the return of territories amputated by colonization—collided with the post-independence Algerian leadership’s doctrine, adopted under Ahmed Ben Bella, that colonial-era borders were sacrosanct and non-negotiable. This principle would later be enshrined continent-wide by the 1964 Cairo resolution of the Organization of African Unity on the inviolability of colonial borders.

The brief but foundational Sand War of October 1963, in which Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors, cemented a residue of strategic mistrust that has never fully dissipated. For Algeria’s new revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an irredentist and expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests; for the Moroccan palace, it validated a reading of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state close to the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had once hosted its liberation movement. These mutually partisan readings proved remarkably durable, resurfacing in every subsequent crisis.

Academic Perspectives on the Rivalry

Academic literature on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges, with minor variations in emphasis, on a broadly similar diagnosis. Comparative studies of regional security provision in the Maghreb have characterized both states as competing regional security providers, whose overlapping leadership claims generate structural friction independent of any particular dispute. Historians of French Algeria have situated the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: the 130 years of colonial occupation and the independence war at the heart of Algeria’s political identity formation, which shaped a distinctly sovereigntist and anti-interventionist foreign policy culture far more suspicious of external engagement—including Moroccan—than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory. Studies of the 2019 Hirak movement similarly emphasize that its core demands were domestic and institutional—centered on transparency and elite accountability—even as state discourse later mobilized narratives of external threat in the movement’s aftermath. Taken together, this literature does not support a monocausal reading in which Morocco explains all of Algerian foreign policy; yet it consistently identifies rivalry as a structuring, rather than peripheral, feature of the regional order, rooted in the differing colonial and revolutionary experiences that produced the two states.

The Amazigh Identity Dimension

A less frequently examined but analytically significant layer of the rivalry concerns competing claims to Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco host large Amazighophone populations—concentrated in Kabylia, the Aurès, and M’zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both states have, at varying paces and with differing 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 power treats as a security issue; Algerian authorities have occasionally accused Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a tool of destabilization, charges Rabat has consistently denied. In Morocco, by contrast, the palace has chosen to integrate cultural Amazigh recognition—including 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 framing it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational legacy—rooted in the Amazigh substratum common to both societies long before the Arab-Islamic conquest—has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry rather than serving, as it might, as the basis for cross-border cultural cooperation.

The Western Sahara Dispute as a Central Organizing Factor

If the Sand 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 settlement. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition over Western Sahara, has hosted since 1976 the Polisario Front’s exile government and refugee camps, provided diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and championed the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in African Union and United Nations forums.

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, along with a growing number of external observers, contends 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—charges Algiers consistently denies. The dispute has proven 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 possesses the domestic margin to compromise without appearing to betray a foundational commitment. Over five decades, this mutual entrapment has 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 be organized.

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

Foreign Policy Through the Morocco Prism

Algerian diplomacy since the 1970s has exhibited a recurring pattern: initiatives pursued ostensibly for their own sake—African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation—frequently also serve as instruments to contain Moroccan influence. Several arenas illustrate this pattern with particular clarity.

The 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 provoked Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco reintegrated the African Union in January 2017—substituting a “empty chair” strategy for direct diplomatic engagement—Algiers 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 sovereignty claim over Western Sahara, introduced a wholly new axis of confrontation. Algiers, whose foreign policy identity 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. Algerian authorities and 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, nonetheless concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning.

Breaking Point: 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, permanently suspended the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline that had, for a quarter-century, carried Algerian gas through Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure in place since 1994. These measures, still in effect, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sand War, illustrating how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policies on infrastructure, energy, and airspace.

Realignment in 2026. Morocco’s founding 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 troops—further widened the diplomatic gap with Algiers, reinforcing Morocco’s positioning as what one analysis termed the Arab pivot of an emergent regional order anchored to the United States. Algeria, cultivating closer defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly with China, found itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical fault line that closely—and not coincidentally—tracks the old Algerian-Moroccan rivalry.

Domestic Politics and the Uses of External Rivalry

A substantial body of political science holds that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often derive benefit from a culture of external threat—a dynamic sometimes termed diversionary conflict theory. Algerian political history offers recurrent illustrations. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s—triggered by the annulment of the 1991–1992 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front and resulting in an estimated 150,000–200,000 deaths—the militarized elite consolidated an opaque and unaccountable form of rule that critics and opposition voices long described through the contested but persistent trope of the pouvoir or the mafia of generals: a governing configuration in which military, security, and economic interests were tightly interwoven and largely shielded from electoral accountability. This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco chief among them, to bolster internal cohesion and divert attention from governance shortcomings.

The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth term, represented the most serious internal challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, cross-generational, and focused on domestic demands—ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections and accountable governance—rather than foreign policy grievances. Yet the state’s response to the legitimacy crisis exposed by the Hirak included, alongside real institutional adjustments, a perceptible intensification of external threat rhetoric, in which accusations of foreign interference—often Moroccan and, after 2020, Israeli—occupied a prominent place in official and state-aligned media discourse. This pattern recurred during 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 recurrent 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 public policy.

The Economic Cost of Prolonged 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 modeled, distantly, on the European integration project. 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 three percent of each country’s total trade—a stark contrast with the intensity typically observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.

The closure of the land border since 1994—originally imposed by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failings, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—entrenched this separation, giving rise instead to a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor regulated employment for either state. The 2021 permanent suspension of the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline ended a decades-long and 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 Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic Gas Pipeline project, designed to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and implicitly Algeria’s leverage over regional transit.

For comparison, regional groupings with far less obvious economic complementarity than Algeria and Morocco—such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southern African Development Community, or even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council—have achieved markedly higher levels of intraregional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment over comparable periods, 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 intraregional trade leveraging Algeria’s hydrocarbon wealth and Morocco’s manufacturing and agricultural exports; coordinated renewable energy infrastructure exploiting shared Saharan solar potential; deeper and more liquid regional capital markets; a substantially enlarged tourism market; and a collective bargaining position vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners far stronger than either state could achieve alone. Instead, the two 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 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 these expenditures 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 U.S., European, and—since the 2020 normalization—Israeli suppliers, fielding 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 conducted on the continent.

Even when each state’s security calculus responds to genuinely distinct threats—Algeria’s southern and eastern borders, Morocco’s Atlantic and Saharan posture—the modernization efforts of each side are almost invariably interpreted by the other through the lens of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defense-oriented 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, illustrates 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 mired in implicit competition. Morocco has pursued a strategy centered on economic diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and Atlantic-facing infrastructure: expanding Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promoting the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and more recently launching the African Atlantic States Initiative to provide landlocked Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas at odds with Paris and, in several cases, the ECOWAS—with Atlantic access via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistical bridge between the Sahel and global markets.

Algeria, drawing on its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and long-cultivated identity of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity rooted in the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in Mali’s internal conflicts (notwithstanding the 2024 rupture of the Algiers Accords process with Bamako’s military government), and a foreign policy identity anchored in sovereigntist and anti-interventionist principles. These strategies are not, in the abstract, mutually exclusive; a truly 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 complementary regional development is instead devoted to mutual containment.

Public Diplomacy and the Battle for Narratives

The rivalry extends beyond formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions to a sustained competition for international public opinion and media narratives. Both governments maintain extensive networks of aligned media outlets, 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 audiences, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Moroccan diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with U.S. 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. Algerian diplomacy has responded in kind, mobilizing its own networks—including sympathetic voices within pro-Polisario advocacy circles, segments of the European left, and the solidarity networks of African liberation movements 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 into unrelated state friction. 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 bias within the French 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 bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments that appear unrelated—a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup—are systematically interpreted by both capitals through the interpretive grid of rivalry, confirming the finding that threads through this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely foreign to this rivalry.

Assessment: Is Countering Morocco Algeria’s Sole Long-Term Strategy?

Having traced the rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, it is possible to render a more precise verdict on the opening question. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s only long-term national program does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability in the context of an incomplete post-Hirak transition; reducing an economy still heavily dependent on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; addressing acute demographic and youth employment pressures in a country where the majority of the population is under 35; ensuring 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 no direct bearing on the Moroccan dossier.

Yet the nuanced counter-thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most durable, consistently invoked, and determinative principles of Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionate to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests. Few other bilateral relationships so consistently and visibly shape Algerian diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, African Union positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (the 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 a level playing field 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 world’s least economically integrated regions despite possessing precisely the kind of complementary economic endowments—Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan manufacturing, logistics, and market access—that elsewhere 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 cooperation, since the dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as was largely the case during the 1988–1994 period and, in more partial ways, until the resumption of hostility 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, appears 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 broader diplomatic freezes; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the large Algerian and Moroccan diaspora populations 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 position on sovereignty.

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

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 only long-term political and economic program: Algerian statecraft responds to a genuinely broad range of domestic and regional priorities independent of Rabat, from Sahelian security to hydrocarbon diversification to demographic management. Yet it would be equally mistaken 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 2020–2021 and 2026. Whether this pattern continues to dominate the North African landscape or gradually gives way to pragmatic, sectoral cooperation will determine not only the futures of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and untapped potential is the clearest evidence that a prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs that neither 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 capital’s domestic discourse predictably answers in its own favor—but rather to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the facts: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sand 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, constitutes 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.