Some coincidences do not mean much. But when coincidences accumulate and point in the same direction, they cease to look like mere accidents and begin to demand an explanation.

The United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara when Morocco normalized relations with Israel. A few years later, Washington began using the question of the Malvinas as an instrument of pressure on the United Kingdom for its reluctance to go along with American military adventures. Almost simultaneously, a committee of the U.S. Congress began discussing the “future status” of Ceuta and Melilla while Spain was going through one of its most serious diplomatic confrontations in decades with Washington and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Taken separately, these events admit different explanations. Taken together, they suggest a pattern: territorial disputes are beginning to function as bargaining chips within an increasingly transactional system of international relations.

The clearest precedent is Morocco. In December 2020, Rabat joined the architecture of Arab-Israeli normalization promoted by Donald Trump. Morocco was not the only Muslim-majority country to participate in the so-called Abraham Accords—the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had preceded it—but it was the only one in the Maghreb [1]. Its participation also had a decisive feature: the United States accompanied Morocco’s normalization of relations with Israel by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. On December 10, 2020, Trump formally proclaimed that Washington recognized the entirety of the Sahrawi territory as part of Morocco [2].

The importance of the episode lies in the logic it reveals. A question involving the right of a people to self-determination, and which the United Nations continues to regard as an unfinished process of decolonization, was thereby incorporated into a geopolitical negotiation. The formula can be stated simply: normalization with Israel in exchange for a territorial diplomatic gain. Territory itself becomes a negotiable asset within a regional architecture designed by Washington.

From that point on, Spain found itself facing a more unfavorable balance of forces. Madrid had never formally recognized the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, but for decades it had maintained a position closer to the principle of self-determination promoted by the United Nations. That position changed substantially in 2022, when Pedro Sánchez began describing Morocco’s autonomy proposal as “the most serious, credible and realistic basis” for resolving the conflict [3]. The shift came after a prolonged confrontation with Rabat and the 2021 Ceuta crisis. By then, Morocco had already obtained from the leading Western power something it had sought for decades—and had obtained it in the context of its strategic rapprochement with Israel.

This precedent is crucial to understanding what happened in 2026. U.S. territorial policy once again takes on an openly instrumental character.

The Malvinas

In April, Reuters revealed an internal Pentagon email discussing possible punitive measures against NATO members deemed insufficiently cooperative with U.S. operations in its war against Iran. Among the options under consideration were two particularly significant ones: suspending Spain from the Atlantic Alliance and reviewing the U.S. position on Britain’s claim to the Malvinas [4].

That fact changes the political meaning of the issue. The Malvinas do not appear here as a historical dispute that Washington has decided to reconsider on the basis of a new interpretation of colonialism, self-determination, or international law. They appear instead as one possible reprisal against allies that have failed to behave as the United States expects. A territorial dispute becomes an explicit part of the hegemonic power’s toolkit of coercion.

Four months later, on August 31, Trump publicly confirmed that he was reviewing the U.S. position on the islands [5]. Javier Milei’s Argentina suddenly found itself facing an extraordinary diplomatic opportunity. And this was not just any Argentine government: Milei has made his personal and ideological closeness to Trump, along with his support for Netanyahu’s government, two pillars of his foreign policy.

Against this background, Israel’s growing hostility toward London becomes relevant. Relations between Israel and the United Kingdom are at their lowest point in decades following Britain’s recognition of Palestine, restrictions on arms exports, the suspension of trade negotiations, and sanctions connected to Israeli policy in the occupied territories. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, went so far as to describe the British government as “antisemitic,” “communist,” and “jihadist,” while publicly endorsing Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas [6]. His argument condensed an entire conception of international relations into a remarkably transparent formula: Argentina is a friend of Israel; Britain has become hostile.

The convergence with the logic expressed in the Pentagon document is substantial. In both cases, a territorial dispute begins to be reinterpreted according to a distinction between reliable and recalcitrant allies. Law ceases to appear as a stable framework and increasingly resembles a political resource whose interpretation can vary according to the degree of alignment.

Ceuta

The Spanish case allows us to observe the same shift from another angle. Spain recognized the State of Palestine in 2024 and subsequently consolidated an arms embargo on Israel [7]. In 2026, moreover, it refused to allow the United States to use the Rota and Morón bases for its attacks on Iran, forcing U.S. aircraft involved in those operations to leave Spanish territory [8].

Washington’s response was belligerent. The Pentagon document mentioned above went so far as to consider suspending Spain from NATO. Six days later, another signal appeared that is difficult to dismiss as irrelevant. On April 30, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee approved a report that, after reaffirming the historic alliance between the United States and Morocco and allocating security assistance to Rabat, described Ceuta and Melilla as cities “administered by Spain” and located “in Moroccan territory.” The Committee also supported talks between Rabat and Madrid regarding the “future status of Ceuta and Melilla” [9].

The language deserves particular attention. This does not amount to a formal change in the U.S. position on Spanish sovereignty, but it is politically significant: an institution of the U.S. Congress introduces as a negotiable matter the “future status” of two cities whose status as Spanish territory Madrid considers beyond dispute. For an ally, there is an enormous difference between Washington treating its territorial integrity as a stable assumption and Washington beginning to suggest that part of its territory might become the subject of negotiations with a neighboring state.

At this point Israel reappears. During the recent Ceuta crisis, the activity of pro-Israel digital networks hostile to the Spanish government has been documented. An investigation by El País described the spread of alarmist narratives through a media ecosystem sympathetic to Netanyahu, including messages portraying Ceuta as a kind of new Gaza and accusing Sánchez of handing Spanish territory over to Morocco [10]. The point is not to treat those networks as proof of a state-directed chain of command, but to recognize the political convergence: Spain confronts Netanyahu over Gaza, recognizes Palestine, imposes an arms embargo, clashes with Trump over Iran, and denies the use of its bases; at the same time, Washington hardens its stance toward Madrid, Morocco maintains its territorial claim, and a pro-Israel political and media ecosystem uses Ceuta as a weapon against the Spanish government.

The accumulation of these elements gives us substantial reason to believe that the Israeli dimension is not unrelated to the new diplomatic climate. The United States, Israel, and Morocco share a strategic architecture consolidated through the Abraham Accords, whose first major territorial result was precisely Washington’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. When, six years later, Ceuta and Melilla reappear in U.S. political language amid the deterioration of Madrid’s relations with Washington and Netanyahu’s government, that precedent becomes difficult to ignore.

The Spanish and Argentine Right

This international dynamic also has a domestic dimension, and here Spain and Argentina offer two apparently opposite scenes that, on closer examination, reveal a similar contradiction. In Spain, the People’s Party (PP) and Vox have used the Ceuta crisis to intensify their offensive against Sánchez’s government. Vox has openly spoken of “treason” and demanded the use of Article 102 of the Spanish Constitution against the prime minister, while the PP has likewise escalated its political and legal offensive against the government [11]. The problem, of course, is not that the government’s handling of the crisis should be beyond criticism—there are legitimate reasons to question it—but rather the political contradiction that emerges when those denouncing the vulnerability of Spanish sovereignty have made Trump and Netanyahu privileged reference points in their own international political imagination.

The contradiction is difficult to overlook. An important part of the Spanish right sees Trump as the restoration of a foreign policy based on force, the defense of national interest, and the rejection of multilateralism, while Netanyahu is presented as a model of determination in confronting internal and external enemies. Yet it is precisely the United States and Israel that form part of the background to Spain’s deteriorating strategic environment: Washington seeks to punish Spain for refusing to participate in its war against Iran, and an institution of Congress introduces the “future status” of Ceuta and Melilla into American diplomatic language, while the Spanish government’s confrontation with Netanyahu fuels a pro-Israel political and media ecosystem that is openly hostile to Sánchez. The Spanish right thus denounces the consequences of a politics of power whose principal international protagonists are, paradoxically, among its own political reference points.

In Argentina we find the reverse side of the same contradiction. Milei has made his alignment with Trump and Netanyahu a defining feature of his foreign policy and now presents the possible revision of the U.S. position on the Malvinas as confirmation of the benefits of that alliance. Following Trump’s statements, the Argentine government hardened its policy toward oil exploitation around the islands, while Milei interpreted Washington’s reconsideration as an opportunity to advance Argentina’s historic sovereignty claim [12]. The paradox is that a cause constructed for generations around the vindication of national sovereignty is now being strengthened by a conception of international relations that makes recognition of that sovereignty dependent on personal and ideological proximity to the hegemonic power.

Spain and Argentina therefore occupy opposite positions within the same logic. The Spanish right protests because Spain’s sovereignty may be relativized when its government distances itself from Washington and Netanyahu; the Argentine right celebrates the possibility that its sovereignty claim over the Malvinas may be strengthened because Milei is extraordinarily close to Trump and Netanyahu. In one case, conditional sovereignty appears as a threat; in the other, as an opportunity. But the rule implicitly accepted is the same: the status of a territory may depend less on a universal legal principle than on the political relationship a government maintains with those who possess enough power to strengthen or weaken a particular claim.

This may be the deepest contradiction of all. A politics that presents itself as sovereignist ends up accepting a radically heteronomous conception of sovereignty. The nation is rhetorically exalted, while its capacity to assert its rights is entrusted to the goodwill of an external power. In Spain, that contradiction leads political forces to admire actors who contribute to increasing pressure on their own state; in Argentina, it leads them to interpret as an affirmation of national independence something that depends precisely on the favor of the American president. Nationalism thus becomes subordinated to an imperial hierarchy: sovereignty is invoked, but the power of others is accepted as the authority that determines when that sovereignty deserves recognition.

This is precisely where foreign policy and domestic politics meet. Sovereignty ceases to function solely as a legal principle and becomes an instrument of partisan struggle. In Spain, territorial vulnerability is used to intensify the delegitimization of the government; in Argentina, a possible shift in the U.S. position can be presented as evidence of Milei’s international success. The two right-wing movements draw opposite political conclusions from the same geopolitical transformation because they occupy different positions within it. Yet neither seems willing to question the premise that should be most troubling to any genuinely sovereignist political outlook: that a foreign great power should be able to determine which sovereignties are secure, which are open to question, and which deserve to be rewarded.

Conditional Sovereignty

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this sequence is not any single decision taken in isolation, but the change in logic that becomes visible when we consider them together. For a long time, U.S. allies could assume that certain disagreements had limits. They could argue over trade, military spending, wars, or relations with third countries, but membership in the same bloc implied certain tacit guarantees. Among them was the assumption that Washington would not use the territorial vulnerabilities of its own allies as an instrument of discipline. That is precisely what is now beginning to come into question.

Western Sahara provides the positive precedent. Morocco normalizes relations with Israel and the United States radically alters its territorial position in Rabat’s favor. A dispute involving an unfinished process of decolonization is incorporated into a broader diplomatic negotiation, and territorial recognition functions as a reward. Six years later, the same logic appears to operate in reverse. London distances itself from certain positions taken by Washington and Israel, and the Malvinas once again become politically available. Spain confronts Netanyahu over Gaza, recognizes Palestine, restricts its military relationship with Israel, and refuses to place its territory at the service of U.S. operations against Iran; shortly thereafter, Ceuta and Melilla begin to appear in Washington as territories whose “future status” might be discussed with Morocco.

The mechanism need not take the form of an explicit threat. Imperial power rarely needs to say, “Obey us or you will lose territory.” It can operate far more effectively by introducing uncertainty where previously there had been a guarantee. A diplomatic position once regarded as stable ceases to be immovable; a dormant territorial dispute becomes active again; a neighboring state discovers that its claim is receiving unexpected attention; an issue previously regarded as marginal begins circulating once again in the places where decisions are made.

We can call this capacity to manage territorial uncertainty politically conditional sovereignty. States remain legally sovereign, and their borders remain formally protected by international law. What changes is something else: the dominant power’s effective support for particular territorial arrangements ceases to function as a stable principle and begins to depend on the position each state occupies within a hierarchical structure of alliances. As long as an ally performs the role expected of it, the dispute remains closed. Once it begins to distance itself, the dispute can be reopened.

This is why the Western Sahara case is so revealing. There we see the positive mechanism: a particular international behavior—Morocco’s normalization with Israel—is accompanied by a territorial reward of enormous diplomatic significance. The Malvinas and Ceuta allow us to contemplate its reverse: the possibility that a territorial controversy can once again be politically mobilized when an ally ceases to behave as Washington expects.

Sovereignty thus begins to resemble a political currency. It can be reinforced, relativized, or called into question depending on a government’s proximity to the hegemonic power. And here an unavoidable contradiction emerges. The United States continues to present itself as the guarantor of a rules-based international order. But an order genuinely governed by principles cannot determine which territorial claims deserve support according to the political proximity of the governments involved. If the position on Western Sahara, the Malvinas, or Ceuta changes according to the distinction between friendly, obedient, and recalcitrant governments, we are no longer dealing with the consistent application of a rule. We are dealing with a hierarchy.

Imperial hierarchies do not need to abolish the formal sovereignty of subordinate states. It is enough to remind them that some of the guarantees they consider permanent ultimately depend on the continued political recognition of those occupying the dominant position. That is what makes the episodes of recent months so significant. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy is making increasingly explicit something that remained partly concealed for decades beneath the language of alliances: allies do not occupy the same position as the hegemonic power and therefore do not exercise the same degree of control over the political conditions that guarantee their sovereignty.

Allies are not equal. And perhaps their sovereignties are not equal either.

Beyond Trump

But the decisive question begins precisely where the American problem ends. What happens if conditional sovereignty ceases to be a peculiarity of Trump’s voluntarism and starts becoming a general rule of the new geopolitics? If the United States reserves for itself the right to reward, relativize, or call into question the sovereignty of other states according to their degree of alignment, it is difficult to imagine China, Russia, Turkey, or other powers indefinitely accepting a principle that only Washington is entitled to exercise.

The problem, then, is not simply that the United States violates the rules it claims to defend. Great powers have always done so. Westphalian sovereignty never produced a world of genuinely equal states, which is why Stephen Krasner famously described it as a form of “organized hypocrisy” [13]. For centuries, formal legal equality coexisted with empires, protectorates, interventions, and spheres of influence. Yet the contradiction between norm and practice retained a decisive importance: even powers that violated the sovereignty of other states still felt compelled to justify their actions as exceptions to a rule they continued, at least formally, to recognize.

What may now be emerging is something different. The exception threatens to become the principle. Sovereignty ceases to function as a universal condition of membership in the international system and becomes increasingly dependent on the position each state occupies within the global balance of forces. Not all sovereignties carry the same weight because not all states possess the same capacity to enforce them.

If that logic becomes generalized, the world taking shape is not merely multipolar. It is a world once again organized around spheres of influence, in which each great power claims a special right over the spaces it regards as strategic. The United States can do so within its Atlantic architecture; Russia in the post-Soviet space; China around Taiwan and the South China Sea; Turkey within its regional environment. These cases are obviously different and should not be conflated, but the underlying logic is similar: the sovereignty of peripheral states increasingly becomes subordinate to imperatives of security, expansion, or stability defined by the great powers.

At that point, conditional sovereignty acquires a properly inter-imperialist dimension. We are no longer dealing simply with one power disciplining its allies, but with several powers simultaneously competing for the right to determine the conditions under which others may exercise sovereignty. The border ceases to be merely a legal line and becomes once again a relationship of forces.

This may be the most troubling feature of the present moment. In the decades after 1945, the international system attempted to universalize normatively a principle it never fully realized in practice: the sovereign equality of states. The United Nations Charter did not abolish empires or hierarchies, but it established a common grammar from which those hierarchies could at least be challenged. What may now be weakening is not simply the so-called Westphalian order, but the very claim that there exists a universal rule capable of limiting—even partially—the will of the great powers. And here the question of war inevitably appears.

It may be hyperbolic to say that we are already standing at the threshold of a Third World War. But it would be equally naive to ignore the fact that great inter-imperial wars begin long before the first direct confrontation between major powers. They begin when the world is once again organized into blocs, when spheres of influence harden, when peripheral territories become bargaining spaces between centers of power, and when each power regards as legitimate what it denounces as intolerable when practiced by its rival.

The decisive question, then, is not whether Trump is single-handedly destroying the international order. Trump may be accelerating, radicalizing, and making explicit a transformation whose foundations run deeper. The real danger arises when the logic we now observe in Washington ceases to be an American anomaly and becomes a general authorization.

If the United States can decide which sovereignties are negotiable according to its interests, Russia and China will claim the same right. If every great power possesses its own periphery, its own security zone, and its own exceptions to international law, universal sovereignty begins to fragment into sovereignties placed under the tutelage of rival empires.

Perhaps this is the historical threshold we are crossing: not the end of sovereignty, but its transformation into an object of struggle among great powers.

The question, then, is no longer simply who possesses a territory. The question becomes who has enough power to decide who is still allowed to be sovereign.

Notes

[1] U.S. Department of State, The Abraham Accords, and documentation related to the joint declaration between the United States, Israel, and Morocco, December 2020.

[2] The White House, Proclamation on Recognizing the Sovereignty of the Kingdom of Morocco over the Western Sahara, December 10, 2020. The proclamation explicitly recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entirety of Western Sahara.

[3] Presidency of the Government of Spain, intervention by Pedro Sánchez before the Congress of Deputies, June 8, 2022; see also Sánchez’s March 2022 letter to Mohammed VI.

[4] Phil Stewart, “Pentagon email floats suspending Spain from NATO, other steps over Iran rift,” Reuters, April 24, 2026.

[5] Steve Holland and Bo Erickson, “Trump says reviewing US position on Falkland Islands,” Reuters, August 31, 2026.

[6] Financial Times, “How UK-Israel relations reached their worst point in decades,” September 2, 2026. The article documents both the deterioration in bilateral relations and Yair Netanyahu’s statements supporting Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas.

[7] Presidency of the Government of Spain, “Declaración institucional […] sobre el reconocimiento del Estado de Palestina,” May 28, 2024; Council of Ministers, measures relating to the arms embargo on Israel, September 2025.

[8] Reuters, “US aircraft leave Spain after government says bases cannot be used for Iran attacks,” March 2, 2026.

[9] U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Appropriations, National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Bill, 2027, House Report 119-631, April 30, 2026, p. 88. The document literally describes the cities as “Spanish-administered,” states that they are located “in Moroccan territory,” and proposes dialogue regarding their “future status.”

[10] El País, “Histeria bélica y desinformación en una red digital proisraelí: ‘Ceuta es ahora Gaza,’” September 4, 2026.

[11] See reporting on the political and legal offensive by the PP and Vox during the Ceuta crisis, including Santiago Abascal’s accusations of “treason” and calls to invoke Article 102 of the Spanish Constitution: El País, “Feijóo y Abascal fían a la vía penal su ofensiva contra Sánchez por la crisis de Ceuta,” September 4, 2026; EFE, “Abascal llama a Sánchez ‘traidor’ por estar ‘al servicio como lacayo de Marruecos,’” September 2, 2026.

[12] Reuters, “Argentina’s Milei steps up Falklands sovereignty claims with oil sanctions,” September 4, 2026; Associated Press, “Argentina’s Milei escalates Falklands dispute, seizing on Trump comments and oil tensions,” September 3, 2026. Both reports place the hardening of Argentina’s sovereignty claim in the context of Trump’s statements about a possible reconsideration of the U.S. position.

[13] Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton University Press, 1999.