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Introduction

Few bilateral relationships in today’s world have proven as persistently adversarial—or as consequential for regional stability—as the one binding Algeria and Morocco. Since emerging from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, their ties have seesawed between cautious cooperation and open hostility, marked by border clashes, 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 border post. This analysis asks a deliberately provocative question: 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 elements of its domestic legitimacy?

The answer is neither simple nor monolithic. With 32 million citizens, an oil-dependent economy, a youthful and often frustrated population, persistent governance challenges, and security threats along five different borders that have nothing to do with Rabat, Algeria’s state cannot be reduced to a single obsession. Yet the opposite view—that Morocco plays no meaningful role in Algeria’s strategic calculus—would be equally unsustainable.

This analysis takes a middle path: opposition to Morocco has become one of the most enduring, institutionalized, and costly principles of Algeria’s regional policy, without fully defining its broader strategic horizons. The examination proceeds inductively, tracing the historical roots of rivalry in colonial border disputes and the 1963 Sand War; analyzing the Western Sahara conflict as the structural core around which relations have been organized since 1975; reviewing relevant academic literature; assessing the understudied identity dimension tied to competing Amazigh (Berber) claims; documenting the expression of rivalry across 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 considering whether the two states can move beyond a zero-sum framework that has, according to nearly all available empirical measures, impoverished North Africa relative to its manifest potential.

Historical roots: from colonial borders to the Sand War

Algeria-Morocco tensions predate Algeria’s independence itself. French colonial cartography, over more than a century, reshaped 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 Figuig—that Rabat had historically administered or claimed. Morocco gained independence in 1956, six years before Algeria, and Moroccan nationalists, including future King Hassan II, initially framed Algeria’s liberation struggle as a common Maghreb cause, offering sanctuary, arms supply routes, and diplomatic support to the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the 1954–1962 war.

Rabat expected an independent and grateful Algeria to negotiate the return of territories lost to colonization. This 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.

The brief but foundational Sand War of October 1963—fought in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors—ensued. Though halted within weeks by an Organization of African Unity ceasefire and Ethiopian arbitration, the conflict left a residue of strategic mistrust that never fully dissipated. For Algeria’s revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a view of the Moroccan monarchy as an irredentist, expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests; for the Moroccan palace, it confirmed an image of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state close to the Soviet Union, willing to use force against a country that had hosted its liberation movement. These partisan readings proved remarkably durable, resurfacing during every subsequent crisis.

Academic perspectives on the rivalry

Academic literature on Algeria-Morocco relations converges, with minor variations, toward 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 specific dispute (Boukhars, 2019). Historians of French Algeria have situated the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: works by Stora locate the 130 years of colonial occupation and independence war at the heart of Algeria’s political identity formation, fostering a distinctly sovereignist and anti-interventionist foreign policy culture far more suspicious of external—including Moroccan—engagement than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory (Stora, 2020; Stora, 2021). 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 narratives later mobilized external threat rhetoric 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 peripheral, feature of the regional order, rooted in the colonial and revolutionary experiences that shaped 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 have substantial Amazigh-speaking populations—concentrated in Kabylie, the Aurès, and M’zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both have, at varying paces and with differing degrees of sincerity, granted official constitutional recognition to Tamazight, Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016 (Chtatou, 2019, January 29). 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 occasionally accused Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a tool of destabilization, an accusation 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 treating it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational heritage—rooted in the pre-Arab-Islamic Amazigh substratum of both societies—has been refracted through the conflictive prism of bilateral rivalry instead of serving, as it might, as the basis for cross-border cultural cooperation.

Western Sahara as the central organizing dispute

If the Sand War forged the psychological architecture of rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute has 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 a settlement. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition over 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 in African Union and United Nations forums.

Each side’s narratives are total and mutually exclusive. Algiers frames its stance as the application of a principle grounded 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, a claim Algiers consistently denies. 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 of Morocco—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.

Diplomatic dynamics shifted markedly after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara under the US-Morocco-Israel normalization framework, a shift that accelerated as a growing 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 for recalibration, a perception that, if anything, has hardened its posture.

Foreign policy through the Morocco lens

Algerian diplomacy since the 1970s has displayed a recurrent pattern: initiatives pursued ostensibly for their own sake—African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation—often 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 triggered Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco rejoined the African Union in January 2017—substituting its long-standing “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 US recognition of its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a new axis of confrontation. Algeria, 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. 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, nonetheless concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning.

Breakdown and escalation, 2021

In August 2021, Algeria formally broke 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 for a quarter-century had carried Algerian gas through Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure already in place since 1994. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sand War, illustrating how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s infrastructure, energy, and airspace policy.

Shifts in 2026

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

Domestic politics and the uses of external rivalry

A significant strand of political science holds that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often benefit from a culture of external threat—a dynamic sometimes labeled 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 followed by a decade-long insurgency that claimed an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 lives—the militarized establishment consolidated an opaque, unaccountable form of power that critics and opposition voices long described through the contested but persistent trope of the “power” or “mafia of the generals”—a ruling configuration in which military, security, and economic interests were tightly intertwined and largely insulated from electoral accountability. This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco chief among them, to bolster internal cohesion and deflect attention from governance shortcomings.

The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth presidential term, represented 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 exposed 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. This pattern repeated itself 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 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 internal 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 prolonged confrontation

The price of the enduring rivalry is most measurable in the economic sphere. 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 loosely on the European experience. Instead, it has remained largely moribund for more than three decades, its ministerial councils largely inactive and its founding ambitions unmet. Intra-Maghreb trade remains among the lowest regional integration levels worldwide; 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 land border’s closure since 1994—imposed originally by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failures, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—has entrenched this separation, fostering instead a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor formal employment for either state. The 2021 permanent suspension of the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline ended a half-century-old functional bilateral economic interdependence—the only one 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 to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and, implicitly, Algerian leverage over regional transit.

By comparison, regional groupings with far less evident economic complementarity than that linking 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, over comparable periods, achieved substantially higher levels of intra-regional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment, underscoring that Maghreb stagnation reflects 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 from 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 significantly enlarged tourism market; and a collectively strengthened bargaining position vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. 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 substantial and 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 Sahelian 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 at Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has pursued parallel and substantial military modernization, diversifying acquisitions among US, European, and—since the 2020 normalization—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 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—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, triggering 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 day-to-day management of the relationship has militarized, absent 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 development and geopolitical visions for their own regional leadership, visions that nonetheless 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, telecom, 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 to provide landlocked Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas at odds with Paris and, in several cases, with ECOWAS—with Atlantic access via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistics bridge between landlocked Sahel and global markets.

Algeria, leveraging its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and long-cultivated identity of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity traceable to 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 sovereignist 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 media battle

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, foreign lobbying arrangements, and academic and think-tank outreach designed to shape how the Western Sahara dispute and the broader bilateral relationship are perceived abroad, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Moroccan diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with US and European policymakers, journalists, and parliamentarians, an effort that bore significant fruit with the 2020 US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the broader diplomatic momentum for 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 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 into unrelated state friction. Diplomatic tensions between Algeria and France over historical memory, migration, and, most recently, the 2024 detention of Franco-Algerian dissidents occurred in a context where Algiers explicitly linked French policy choices to what it perceives as Paris’s tilt toward Rabat 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 and independent bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments that might otherwise 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 this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely untouched by this rivalry.

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

Having traced the rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, a more precise verdict on the opening question is possible. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s sole long-term national program does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability within a still-unfinished post-Hirak transition; reducing an economy still heavily reliant on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; addressing acute youth demographic and 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 a complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has nothing to do with Morocco.

Yet the nuanced counter-thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most durable, consistently invoked, and consequential organizing 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 Algeria’s diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, positioning within the African Union), 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 substantial and increasingly well documented. North Africa remains one of the world’s least economically integrated regions despite possessing precisely the type of complementary economic endowments—Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan manufacturing, 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 the dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as was largely the case during the 1988–1994 period and more partially 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 hinge 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 the hardened and mutually incompatible positions adopted 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 protracted 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 diaspora populations with family ties on both sides of 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 extend beyond the narrow framework of bilateral diplomacy: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the internal balance between reformist factions and those attached to the status quo within its security establishment; the pace and solidity of Morocco’s ongoing diplomatic consolidation around its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, which reduces Rabat’s incentive to offer concessions that might be perceived domestically as unnecessary; and the broader realignment of external alignments—American, European, Russian, Chinese, and Gulf—that increasingly overlays and in some places hardens the underlying bilateral dispute.

Conclusion

The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands as one of the defining—and costliest—features of contemporary North African geopolitics. It would be inaccurate and analytically reductive to conclude that countering Morocco constitutes Algeria’s only long-term political and economic program: the Algerian state 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 erroneous 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 of 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 future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and unexploited potential constitutes the clearest proof that a prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs no society can indefinitely afford.

The analytical task is therefore not to arbitrate which party bears the greater responsibility for the impasse—a question that lies beyond the scope of dispassionate scholarship and to which the domestic discourse of each camp predictably answers in favor of the other—but to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the evidence: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sand War and then by the unresolved question of Western Sahara, into a self-sustaining organizing logic capable of absorbing and reconfiguring nearly every adjacent domain it touches, from Amazigh cultural policy to Sahelian diplomacy to hydrocarbon infrastructure. Taking the measure of this logic, and of the considerable margin of maneuver each government possesses to loosen its grip, constitutes the necessary prerequisite for 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.