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.
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