In the picture
Al-Maghrib in Arabic, Morocco’s official name
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Morocco occupies a unique position in the geopolitical landscape of the early twenty-first century. Situated at the crossroads of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Africa, and Europe, the kingdom consistently exerts influence disproportionate to its material weight. With roughly 37 million inhabitants and a middle-income economy, Rabat has leveraged monarchical continuity, strategic geography, and adroit diplomacy to position itself as an indispensable partner for competing global powers. This report traces the interlocking dynamics that define Moroccan statecraft across four concentric layers: domestic foundations, territorial disputes and EU relations, the Maghreb and the Middle East, and continental ambitions.
Domestically, Mohammed VI combines religious, executive, legislative, and military authority within a hybrid regime that has weathered both the 2011 Arab Spring and the more recent GenZ 212 protests through selective concessions and narrative management. This institutional resilience enables Morocco’s economic repositioning: a $7 billion port investment program centered on Tanger Med, the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline, renewable energy targets of 52% installed capacity by 2030, and continental-scale rail expansion collectively underpin its bid to serve as a logistics and clean-energy hub between Africa and Europe. An infrastructure investment gap exceeding $37 billion, uncertain hydrogen markets, and modest growth in Mediterranean traffic nonetheless limit the pace of this transformation.
The Western Sahara conflict remains the focal point of Moroccan foreign policy. UN Security Council Resolution 2797 (October 2025), which endorses genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty as the most realistic basis for a settlement, represents the most significant diplomatic advance since the 1975 Green March, effectively removing the independence referendum from the immediate agenda. Morocco’s relationship with Spain and the EU exemplifies its broader approach of calculated coercion within structural interdependence: the instrumentalization of migration flows and customs restrictions secured Spain’s formal endorsement of the autonomy plan in 2022, while Brussels has progressively shifted toward pragmatism—aligning with Resolution 2797 in January 2026—even as the Court of Justice restricts trade agreements that incorporate Western Saharan resources without Sahrawi consent.
Regionally, the Morocco–Algeria rivalry is the primary driver of instability in the Maghreb. The 2021 diplomatic rupture, an ongoing arms race—with Algeria’s defense budget set to reach $25 billion in 2025—and divergent alignments (Morocco with the United States and Israel; Algeria with Russia and China) have stalled regional integration. The most likely trajectory for 2026–2031 combines high international recognition of Morocco’s position with a continued diplomatic rupture. Mauritania functions as a conditional but manageable partner, granting Morocco controlled access to the Sahel without full alignment. Morocco’s normalization with Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords has deepened military and intelligence cooperation, formalized in a joint work plan in January 2026, though the role of broker for broader Arab normalization is increasingly being assumed by the UAE.
At the continental level, Morocco’s return to the African Union in 2017—combined with its status as the second-largest African investor on the continent, the OCP Group’s fertilizer operations, and the Atlantic Initiative—reinforces both its economic footprint and its objectives regarding Western Sahara. Instability in the Sahel poses structural but manageable spillover risks, which are addressed through proactive counterterrorism, religious diplomacy, and development programs. The picture that emerges is of a kingdom that has maximized its institutional and geographic resources to exert disproportionate influence, yet whose continent-wide ambitions—hub status, territorial consolidation, and trade nexus—remain contingent on sustained financing, alignment with market demand, and the durability of Western diplomatic support. Morocco’s trajectory is therefore one of managed ascent, shaped as much by the real constraints on its ambitions as by the ambitions themselves.