Since 1991, the United Nations has led a series of fruitless efforts to resolve the standoff over Western Sahara. A swath of desert about the size of the entire United Kingdom, Western Sahara is claimed both by the Polisario Front—a rebel group that the UN recognizes as the legitimate representative of the region’s inhabitants—and by its northern neighbor, Morocco, which wants to cement its de facto control over what it considers its “southern provinces.” By now, the dispute may seem frozen—or, worse yet, that might is beating right: over the past five years, Morocco has bypassed the UN and secured extralegal bilateral endorsements of its sovereignty from France, Spain, and most consequentially, the United States. But recent events in Azerbaijan, Sudan, and Israel show how suddenly so-called frozen conflicts can shift—and the contours of the Western Saharan dispute are poised to shift dangerously. The Polisario Front has started to take on Morocco more aggressively in legal forums, challenging its right to exploit Western Sahara’s resources, and Morocco and its neighbor Algeria—a key backer of the Polisario Front—have begun a dangerous arms race.

But another, potentially positive development has taken place, too. In an October 2024 briefing to the UN Security Council, the secretary-general’s Western Sahara envoy, Staffan de Mistura, issued an unexpected recommendation to resolve the 50-year conflict: partition. Partition is never an appealing policy option, least of all on a continent traumatized by the way colonial powers arbitrarily carved up communities. De Mistura’s proposal has garnered little attention from the conflict’s parties and international stakeholders. 

But it is the right solution—and perhaps the only one. Morocco and the Polisario Front, with encouragement from the United States and Algeria, should negotiate a lasting compromise with substantial advantages for each side. For Morocco, it would afford the country legal sovereignty over the northern two-thirds of the disputed territory, where its investments and settlements are overwhelmingly concentrated. And it would offer the Polisario Front control over an undeveloped, resource-rich stretch of coastal land more than ample enough to accommodate the 300,000 Western Saharans (known as Sahrawis) who currently live in refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara and the Moroccan-controlled disputed territory.

So far, de Mistura has failed to convince the two sides. In October, he vowed that, barring a shift in momentum, he would step down in April. This would likely mean an end to the envoy’s office. But there are good reasons why U.S. President Donald Trump in particular should take up this cause, including that a resolution to the crisis could afford the United States access to a treasure trove of rare earth minerals in the eastern Atlantic and an opportunity to scrap an outdated UN peacekeeping mission. The current de facto Moroccan sovereignty only prolongs Sahrawis’ exile, and an escalation would carry steep costs for all sides. As conflict between Morocco and the Polisario heats up, it could ignite into a confrontation between Morocco and Algeria, sparking—among other problems—yet another migrant crisis in Europe.

STATUS WOE

Spain controlled Western Sahara from the 1884 Berlin Conference until 1976, when it horse-traded most of the territory to Morocco during the negotiations for the Madrid Accords in exchange for phosphate proceeds from the occupied territory and other concessions. Over the past 50 years, a broad-based coalition of Western Saharans, led by the Polisario, has used both violent and peaceful resistance to reclaim the territory. Harassment and repression linked to the Moroccan reoccupation of the territory sent Sahrawis fleeing across the border into southern Algeria, where they set up refugee camps. Moroccan settlement policies and subsidies, meanwhile, encouraged Moroccans to move south into the territory; today there are several times more Moroccans than Sahrawis living in the disputed territory. The Polisario’s guerrilla war against the Moroccan occupation clocked some impressive victories until 1991, when the two parties signed a cease-fire pegged to the pledge of a referendum on self-determination.

But by then, to keep the guerrillas out, Morocco, with Israeli support, had built a 1,700-mile berm walling off territory it had no intention of giving up. Morocco’s interests in this territory are economic—it mines rich phosphate and fishing stocks there, and seeks access to oil, gas, and rare earth minerals—as well as political. The initial occupation distracted and unified a divided Moroccan public and the ideal of a “Greater Morocco” recalled the kingdom’s historical grandeur.

In reality, few of the rebellious nomadic pastoralists native to the territory ever acquiesced to Moroccan imperial rule. But since 2007, a status quo has set in that favors Morocco. That year, Morocco presented the UN Security Council with a vague three-page “autonomy plan” for Western Sahara that, in fact, simply asserted Rabat’s sovereignty over the disputed territory. In response, the Polisario continued to insist on Sahrawis’ right to a referendum on self-determination, which they were promised in the 1991 cease-fire. Other actors, including U.S., UN, and EU diplomats, have come to believe the referendum idea is a nonstarter: Morocco refuses to hold one, and it is unclear who would be eligible to vote in it.

Conflict between Morocco and Algeria would be a higher-stakes problem.

In recent years, U.S. support has emboldened the government in Rabat to be less and less compromising. Trump’s first administration initially pressured Morocco to negotiate with the Polisario Front, in part to axe a costly UN peacekeeping mission. But Trump’s desire to accomplish the Abraham Accords led him to back down in December 2020; in exchange for Morocco normalizing its diplomatic relations with Israel, he issued a proclamation declaring Morocco as sovereign over the entirety of Western Sahara. This inflammatory move was a leading cause of the cease-fire’s collapse. Instead of walking back Trump’s decision, President Joe Biden let the United States’ partiality toward Moroccan sovereignty stand while also making progress toward a rapprochement with Algeria, which continues to insist on Sahrawis’ right to self-determination while fretting over what it perceives as new threats posed by the Moroccan-Israeli alliance.

This status quo appears to benefit Morocco. But in reality, it poses problems for both sides. Over the past decade, Rabat has poured billions of dollars into industrial phosphate facilities, a major port, and renewable energy projects in the portion of the disputed territory it controls, even as legal challenges in the European Court of Justice as well as energy company shareholders’ ethical concerns hamper its ability to exploit the territory’s resources. For Sahrawis, the cost is even higher. More than half of the total Sahrawi population remains stuck in refugee camps, yearning for a homeland that, by now, many young Sahrawis have never even set foot in.

The escalation of tensions would be even worse. Since 2020, the Polisario has renewed its attacks on Moroccan military positions, and Moroccan drone strikes have displaced thousands of Sahrawi civilians living in the Polisario-controlled area. Morocco and Algeria have both doubled their defense spending in recent years amid rising tensions and, in a few alarming incidents, have attacked one another’s civilians. The Moroccan army is powered by sophisticated weapons and intelligence technologies it has acquired from France, Israel, and the United States. The Polisario—a contingent of tens of thousands of fighters armed with a smattering of Cold War–era weaponry donated by Libya as well as some armored cars and infantry vehicles captured from Moroccan and Mauritanian forces—may seem ill positioned to secure meaningful military victories. But guerrilla fighters have defeated much more powerful armies, including in Algeria, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. In addition, clashes between Morocco and the Polisario could trigger a confrontation between Morocco and Algeria, a far higher-stakes problem. Should UN efforts to forge a political resolution collapse, as they may in a matter of months, it would be in the interest of the Polisario—which has nothing left to lose—to foment such a scenario.

SPLIT SHOT

Against this backdrop, partition is the clearest path for getting both parties what they want. As outlined by de Mistura, the UN envoy, partition would revive a 1976 border agreement cutting east to west across the disputed territory. Morocco could convert its de facto, nonlegal sovereignty over roughly two-thirds of the territory into legal possession. The Polisario could gain recognition of an independent state and facilitate the long-overdue return of refugees.

Legality is of particular advantage to Morocco. In recent years, the lack of a clear legal framework has posed serious setbacks for Rabat’s goals in the territory. Spurred by mounting legal uncertainty, in 2017 Glencore—one of the world’s largest natural resource firms—withdrew oil exploration activities from two large geographical lease areas, known as blocks, in Western Sahara. The following year, U.S. oil company Kosmos Energy terminated its operations in the disputed territory after international watchdogs convinced key investors, including the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, its largest shareholder, to divest. The business environment in Western Sahara has become only more fraught: in October 2024, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU trade deals with Morocco breached the rights of Sahrawis to self-determination, multiplying the obstacles faced by companies that wish to operate in the disputed territory.

De Mistura’s unexpected reintroduction of the partition idea surprised many seasoned diplomats. One former UN diplomat told me it was “courageous” but “desperate.” Because the conflict’s geopolitical stakes appear to rank relatively low, the option has garnered little attention. One benefit of a partition agreement, however, is that it would be a relatively simple, UN-led process. And “whatever the two parties agreed to would likely be rendered legal internationally by the Security Council,” Jacob Mundy, a scholar who studies the application of international law in the Western Sahara case, told me. “It would meet the criteria of a mutually agreed political solution that provides for self-determination,” he said. “In peacemaking, what everyone agrees to becomes the law.”

Any agreement would necessarily depend on hammering out consensus on particularly thorny issues, including the contours of the territorial division and cooperation agreements. For instance, the Dakhla peninsula, the crown jewel of Moroccan investment in the disputed territory, falls just south of the 1976 dividing line. Its windswept beaches welcome growing numbers of tourists (in 2024, Ryanair launched new low-cost flights to Dakhla), resorts, and a number of new foreign consulates. But the Polisario could renounce its claim to Dakhla in exchange for other concessions more meaningful to its own projects and ambitions. These could include offshore oil and gas rights or territory east of the Moroccan-built berm that is currently under Polisario control but falls north of the dividing line.

Cooperation agreements regarding resources, infrastructure, and defense would also need to be worked out. Morocco might trade a portion of its proceeds from phosphates, which it exploits profitably north of the dividing line, in exchange for gaining fishing rights south of the dividing line. The two parties would need to agree on who can construct and access trans-Saharan roads cutting through the territory—both new Moroccan-built ones and those that are already planned, such as Algeria’s proposed road linking Tindouf, near its border with the territory, to Zouerate in northern Mauritania. These projects are currently spurred by spite and acquisitiveness, but if the core territorial dispute over Western Sahara were resolved, they could bring much-needed economic benefits and connectivity to numerous countries in the region.

GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS

Algeria is reportedly pushing for a partition plan. It should now convince the Polisario leadership to do the same. The Polisario Front wants a referendum on the status of the entire territory. But its leaders are no doubt aware that the group’s power has steadily declined over 50 years of exile; in recent years, it has lost backing from key African allies such as Ghana and Kenya, too. Although the group may be able to draw out and damage the Moroccan army if conflict escalates, it cannot win back the whole territory outright. A compromise on territorial claims should not be a hard sell to the Sahrawi population: the Polisario has a responsibility to its members to deliver the best possible deal, not keep them mired in a permanent state of war and exile. Some Polisario leaders have told me they could be willing to engage on a partition proposal, but their president has not yet allowed them to. Interest from Algeria and other leaders has perhaps been too discreet.

The Polisario could exercise its legal right to self-determination by putting a partition proposal to a referendum in the refugee camps. The Polisario Front will have to make clear that a partition deal would not be temporary arrangement that paves the way for clawing back more territory or eventually reuniting the divided parts. This would be a permanent, binding agreement renouncing their claim to the full territory in exchange for a delimited territory south and/or east of the dividing line.

The harder part of the equation is persuading Morocco to negotiate. But although Morocco is used to getting its way in the Western Sahara, it actually has little to lose from partition. Rabat need not lose face: Morocco’s ruling elites will recall that King Hassan II signed off on the 1976 agreement limiting the country’s claims to the northern region of the territory. The deal would also relieve the need for costly military deployments and open up new investment opportunities for international partners and resource companies.

The United States has much to gain from a negotiated partition.

Over the past four years, Washington’s rapprochement with Algiers has boosted U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. For instance, Algeria ended a bid to join the BRICS and stepped in as an alternative energy provider to Europe amid Russia’s withdrawal due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

There is more for the United States to gain from these warming relations. Major U.S. oil companies including Exxon, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum are exploring potential new energy projects in Algeria. There are also untapped opportunities for American weapons manufacturers to do deals in a country that has doubled its weapons spending since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although Algiers would likely not make energy cooperation and weapons sales entirely contingent upon progress resolving the Western Saharan dispute, it would probably be even more motivated to cooperate on mutually beneficial interests if Washington used its close relationship with Rabat to persuade the latter to negotiate.

In the near term, even a transactional U.S. president such as Trump has much to gain from a negotiated partition. If Washington played a role in brokering a UN-backed compromise, the United States would be well positioned to win access to the underwater Tropic Seamount deposit of rare earth minerals off the Western Saharan coast, which is currently tied up in legal limbo. Visits by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Canary Islands and Morocco last November suggest that China may already be eyeing the deposit. A further sweetener for the second-term Trump administration, should it persuade Morocco to come to the table, is the chance to axe a costly UN peacekeeping mission that has grown aimless and obsolete.

Given that the UN recently shuttered similarly fruitless peacekeeping missions to Mali and Sudan, and its missions to Somalia and Iraq are in the crosshairs, the Western Sahara mission will likely wind down soon enough. But its withdrawal would further raise the risk that conflict will escalate in northwestern Africa. If new outbreaks of local or larger regional violence do indeed occur, the likelihood of any side achieving a zero-sum game victory becomes even more remote. What’s far more likely is that the parties would end up exactly where they are now—in a stalemate where the best they can hope for is some kind of compromise on territory, but with more and needless deaths on their hands.

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