Introduction

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Few bilateral relationships in the modern world are as persistently adversarial or carry such significant regional consequences as the one between Algeria and Morocco. Since gaining independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, the ties between these two North African neighbors have swung between cautious cooperation and open hostility. This volatile dynamic has included a border war, multiple diplomatic ruptures, closed borders, and a decades-long Cold War-style rivalry for regional dominance that has outlasted generations of leaders on both sides of the Zouj Bghal border crossing. This analysis poses a deliberately provocative question: has opposing 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? Framed so starkly, this claim is difficult to fully substantiate. Algeria is a nation of 32 million people whose economy remains heavily dependent 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. Reducing Algeria’s state actions 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 plays only a peripheral role in Algeria’s strategic calculations—is equally unsustainable.

This analysis takes a middle ground, arguing that opposition to Morocco has become one of the most enduring, institutionalized, and costly principles of Algeria’s regional policy, without entirely determining the broader strategic horizon of the Algerian state. The argument is developed inductively rather than asserted upfront. It traces the historical origins of the rivalry rooted in colonial border disputes and the 1963 Sand War; examines the Western Sahara conflict as the central structuring issue around which the relationship has evolved since 1975; reviews relevant academic literature; considers the understudied identity dimension tied to competing claims over Amazigh heritage; documents the expression of rivalry across diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, military posture, competing development models, and public diplomacy; and concludes by weighing the evidence for and against the central thesis, before questioning whether the two states can move beyond a zero-sum framework that, according to virtually all available empirical measures used by regional economists and political scientists, has impoverished North Africa relative to its manifest potential.

Historical roots: from colonial borders to the Sand War

The roots of Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algeria’s independence itself. French colonial cartography, over more than a century, redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan border separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing to French Algeria territories—around Tindouf, Colomb-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, weapons supply routes, 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 Algeria’s post-independence leadership under Ahmed Ben Bella, which adopted the doctrine that colonial 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 result was the brief but foundational Sand War of October 1963, in which Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors. Although halted within weeks through the intervention of the Organization of African Unity and Ethiopian arbitration, the conflict left a residue of strategic mistrust on both sides that has never fully dissipated. For Algeria’s new revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an expansionist, irredentist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests. For the Moroccan palace, it reinforced a view of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state closely tied to the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had once hosted its liberation movement. These competing narratives, however partisan, have proven remarkably durable, resurfacing during every subsequent crisis between the two nations.

Academic perspectives on the rivalry

Academic literature on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges, with minor variations in emphasis, 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 the independence war at the heart of the formation of Algerian political identity, shaping a foreign policy culture that is markedly sovereigntist and anti-interventionist, far more distrustful of external engagement—including Moroccan—than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory (Stora, 2020; Stora, 2021). Studies of the 2019 Hirak movement similarly highlight that the movement’s central demands were domestic and institutional—centered on transparency and accountability of the ruling elite—though subsequent state narratives 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 the rivalry as a structuring rather than peripheral feature of the regional order, whose institutional and psychological roots extend into the divergent 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 over Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco have large Amazighophone populations—concentrated in Kabylie, the Aurès, and the M’zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both states have, at varying paces and degrees of sincerity, granted official constitutional recognition to Tamazight: Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016 (Chtatou, 2019, January 29). Yet the political significance 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, a charge 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 reforms—into an inclusive national narrative centered on the monarchy rather than treating it as a separatist threat (Chtatou, 2019, January 29). This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational legacy—rooted in the pre-Arab-Islamic Amazigh substrate of both societies—has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry rather than serving, as it might, as the basis for transborder cultural cooperation.

Western Sahara as the central organizing issue

If the Sand War forged the psychological architecture of the rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute has provided its durable 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 the Polisario Front’s government-in-exile and refugee camps since 1976, provided it with diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and defended the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic within 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 grounded in the UN Charter’s self-determination doctrine and the continuity of its own anti-colonial genealogy; Rabat, joined by a growing number of external observers, contends that Algeria is in fact 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 (Chtatou, 2021, October 22). 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 matter of anti-colonial principle, neither government has the domestic leeway to compromise without appearing to betray a foundational commitment. This mutual entrapment has, over five decades, 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—now revolve.

Diplomatic dynamics shifted markedly after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of the trilateral normalization agreement with Israel, and accelerated as an increasing number of European and African governments—led by France, given the long-awaited Franco-Moroccan strategic treaty—moved toward explicit or implicit endorsement of the autonomy plan. Algeria interpreted this trend as evidence of encirclement rather than cause for recalibration, a perception that, if anything, has hardened its posture (Chtatou, 2026, February 26).

Foreign policy through the Morocco lens

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 into the Organization of African Unity in 1984, a decision that triggered Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco re-entered the African Union in January 2017—replacing its “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 two 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 Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a 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 (Chtatou, 2026, June 22). 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 (Chtatou, 2026, June 22).

Rupture and escalation, 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 for a quarter-century had carried Algerian gas through Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure first imposed in 1994. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sand War, and illustrate how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policies on infrastructure, energy, and airspace management.

The 2026 realignment. Morocco’s foundational participation in the U.S.-sponsored “Board of Peace” initiative in January 2026—as a founding member, leading financial contributor, and the first Arab state to commit military assets within the framework—further widened the diplomatic gap between Rabat and Algiers, consolidating Morocco’s positioning as, in one analysis, the Arab pivot of an emerging regional order anchored to the United States (Chtatou, 2026, February 26). Algeria, which has cultivated deeper defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly with China, finds itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical fault line that closely—though not exclusively—overlaps with the long-standing Algerian-Moroccan 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 derive domestic benefit from a culture of external threats—a dynamic sometimes labeled the “diversionary conflict” theory. Algerian political history provides recurrent illustrations of this phenomenon. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s—sparked by the cancellation of the 1991–1992 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front—an insurgency that claimed an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 lives, the military-security establishment consolidated an opaque and 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 interwoven and largely shielded from electoral accountability (Chtatou, 2026, May 11). This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco foremost 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, posed the most serious internal challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, intergenerational, and focused on domestic demands—ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections, and accountable governance—rather than on 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 (Chtatou, 2025, October 14). 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 argue that Algerian governance is organized *exclusively* 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 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 public action.

The economic cost of 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, aspired to a common market, coordinated infrastructure, and ultimately a customs union inspired—at a distance—by the European integration model. 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 trade intensities in the world; various estimates place formal trade between Algeria and Morocco at less than three percent of each country’s total trade—figures that starkly contrast with the commercial intensity typically observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.

The closure of the land border since 1994—imposed originally by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failings, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—has entrenched this separation, fostering instead a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates for neither state tax revenue nor regulated employment. The definitive 2021 suspension of the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline terminated a decades-old 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 to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly circumventing Algerian territory and, implicitly, Algerian leverage over regional transit (Chtatou, 2025, October 14).

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, and even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council—have, over comparable periods, achieved significantly higher levels of intraregional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment, underscoring that Maghreb stagnation stems from 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 hydrocarbons 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 collectively strengthened bargaining position vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. Instead, both 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 most considerable unexploited integration dividends in the developing world.

Military competition and the security dilemma

The material expression of the rivalry is nowhere more visible than in defense budgets. Algeria has maintained one of the highest military expenditures in Africa for more than a decade, officially justified by instability along its borders with Libya, Mali, and Niger, and by 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 this spending as defensive and regionally oriented rather than directed specifically at Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has undertaken parallel and substantial modernization of its armed forces, diversifying 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 (Chtatou, 2026, May 6).

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 are almost invariably interpreted by the other through the prism of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defensive 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 in 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-oriented infrastructure: expansion of Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promotion of the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and most recently, the launch of the African Atlantic States Initiative to provide Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas in strained relations 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 rooted in the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in internal Malian 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 media battle

The rivalry is not confined to formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions, but also plays out in a sustained competition for international public opinion and media narrative. 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 by external publics, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Morocco’s 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 favoring the autonomy plan that followed. Algeria’s 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, most recently, the 2024 detention of dual Algerian-French dissidents have unfolded in a context where Algiers explicitly linked French policy choices to what it perceives as a pro-Rabat tilt within French political and media establishments, illustrating how the Moroccan rivalry has come to color even relationships—such as 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 appear unrelated—a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup—are systematically read by both capitals through the interpretive grid of rivalry, confirming a finding that runs through this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely untouched by it.

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

After tracing the rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, a more precise verdict on the initial question of this analysis is possible. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s *sole* long-term national strategy does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability amid an ongoing post-Hirak transition; reducing the economy’s heavy dependence 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 a particularly complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has no connection to Morocco.

Yet the nuanced counter-claim—that rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most enduring, consistently invoked, and consequential principles of Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionately influential relative to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests—is equally well supported. Few other bilateral relationships shape Algerian diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, African Union positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (abandonment of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, redirection of export corridors), and domestic political discourse as consistently and visibly as the Moroccan dossier. The rivalry functions less as one interest among others, on an equal footing 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 least economically integrated regions in the world 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 underpinned successful regional integration projects. The persistence of confrontation, rather than the underlying territorial dispute over Western Sahara itself, appears as the most immediate obstacle to regional cooperation, since that 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 depend on Algeria and Morocco’s ability to build functional cooperation mechanisms that do not require the 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 sort 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; incremental sectoral economic exchanges insulated from broader diplomatic freezes; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the large Algerian and Moroccan diasporas with family links on either side of the closed border—could, in principle, begin to erode the rigidity of the current impasse without requiring either government to abandon its fundamental position on sovereignty.

The realization of such measures hinges heavily on domestic political conditions in both countries that extend beyond the strict scope of bilateral diplomacy: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the internal balance between reformist factions and factions 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 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

Algeria’s relationship with 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 opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s *sole* long-term political and economic program: the Algerian state’s actions respond to a genuinely broad portfolio of domestic and regional priorities independent of Rabat, ranging 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 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 future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and untapped potential stands as the most vivid evidence that prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs that neither society can indefinitely afford.

The analytical task, then, is not to arbitrate which side 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 responds, predictably and uniformly, by blaming the other—but 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 question of Western Sahara, 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 of 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 border.