On July 31, with little fanfare or consideration, France formally acknowledged Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, abandoning its decades-long help for the United Nations-mandated referendum course of to find out the territory’s last governance standing. Lengthy seen because the West’s diplomatic chief on the Western Sahara battle, France is an important nation to totally throw its weight behind Morocco’s illegal, unilateral annexation of the territory.
However it’s hardly the primary to take action. Israel did the identical in 2023, and Spain shifted its stance on the battle to align itself extra carefully with Morocco’s place the 12 months earlier than. Nevertheless it was america underneath then-President Donald Trump that opened the floodgates in 2020, recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara in change for Rabat’s normalization of relations with Israel underneath the Abraham Accords.
This formal recognition of Morocco’s de facto sovereignty over the territory—a large swath of primarily desert that’s dwelling to a mere 600,000 inhabitants—might not at first look seem to have international ramifications. However it’ll certainly have reverberations world wide, eroding the rule of worldwide regulation that prohibits the acquisition of territory by pressure in addition to the popularity of such an unlawful act by different states. For occupying powers, together with Russia and Israel, it supplies invaluable precedent in addition to encouragement that, eventually, their “would possibly” can even sooner or later “make proper,” as they observe how even states that profess dedication to the rules-based worldwide order abandon it for his or her short-term political and financial pursuits.
