Since the autumn of 2025, a quiet refrain has spread through certain capitals and newsrooms: that of an imminent reconciliation between Algeria and Morocco. US envoy Massad Boulos has shuttled repeatedly between Algiers and Rabat, King Mohammed VI extended his hand to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2797, and some European think tanks have even gone so far as to invoke the Franco-German precedent.
This reading rests on a fundamental misunderstanding. It confuses a de-escalation desired by outside parties with the real conditions for reconciliation. Those conditions are not met today, and nothing suggests they will be in the foreseeable future.
A deep rupture, not a passing diplomatic incident
The severing of relations on August 24, 2021 was not an outburst of anger. It was the culmination of a series of acts Algiers regarded as hostile: the Moroccan diplomatic note at the United Nations invoking a so-called "right to self-determination" for Kabylie, statements by Israel's foreign minister targeting Algeria from Moroccan soil, the Pegasus spyware affair, and the support attributed to organizations Algeria classifies as terrorist.
These grievances strike at what a state holds most sensitive: its territorial integrity and its internal security. An attack on national unity is not erased by a summit or a handshake before the cameras. As long as Rabat has neither acknowledged nor corrected these acts, talk of reconciliation amounts to asking Algiers to erase the cause while keeping the consequence.
Two irreconcilable visions of the Maghreb
At a deeper level, the rupture confirmed the clash between two doctrines. Algeria defends the inviolability of borders inherited from decolonization, the sovereignty of states, and the right of peoples to self-determination. These are not tactical positions: they have been the foundations of its diplomacy since 1962, inherited from its own war of liberation.
Morocco, for its part, has built part of its national project on territorial claims, from Western Sahara to the recurring references, in some circles, to a so-called "Eastern Sahara." The Sahrawi question is not a bilateral dispute to be settled between two capitals: it is a decolonization issue registered at the United Nations, to which Algeria is not a party but whose principle it defends. Asking Algeria to abandon it for the sake of good neighborliness means asking it to renounce its state doctrine.
Resolution 2797 unlocked nothing; it hardened positions
Advocates of reconciliation present UN Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted on October 31, 2025, which makes the Moroccan autonomy plan the basis for a political settlement, as a turning point that eased the regional climate. The opposite is true. For Algiers, a text that favors a unilateral solution at the expense of self-determination does not close the file: it compounds it. The outstretched hand that followed looks less like a peace offer than an invitation to endorse a fait accompli.
Reconciliation requires a minimum of convergence on the issues that caused the rupture, and on the most important of them, the gap has never been wider.
The Rabat–Tel Aviv security axis: a structural red line
Since normalization in December 2020, Morocco has forged military, security, and technological cooperation with Israel, formalized as early as November 2021. For Algeria, whose support for the Palestinian cause is a pillar of its diplomatic identity, the presence of a strategic partner of Israel on its western border is no minor detail: it is a transformation of its security environment.
No reconciliation is conceivable as long as this partnership, which extends to intelligence, surveillance, and drones, remains a pillar of Moroccan policy. And Rabat has never hinted that it might reconsider it.
Algiers does not need this reconciliation
This is the central argument that proponents of de-escalation overlook: reconciliation is negotiated between two parties who each have an interest in it. Five years after the rupture, Algeria has shown that it can do without it.
Algerian gas continues to reach Spain without transiting through Moroccan territory. The shutdown of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline moved Morocco from the status of a transit country to that of an importer dependent on Spanish infrastructure. The closure of Algerian airspace has imposed lasting costs on Royal Air Maroc. Meanwhile, Algiers has consolidated its energy diplomacy, strengthened its defense capabilities, and expanded its influence in the Sahel, up to its recent rapprochement with Bamako.
In other words, the balance of power that emerged from 2021 favors Algeria. Reopening the game without anything in return would mean handing back to Rabat, free of charge, the levers it lost: gas transit, air corridors, geographic depth. No rational power offers such a gift.
A mediation serving other agendas
Finally, one must look at who is pushing for this reconciliation, and why. The American mediation follows a logic of anchoring the Maghreb in a Western security architecture, competing with Russia and China in Africa, and consolidating the Abraham Accords. These are understandable goals from Washington's perspective, but they are not Algeria's.
Algeria has always defended non-alignment and the sovereignty of its decisions. Accepting a reconciliation whose timing, framework, and terms are set from outside would contradict this founding principle. Regional peace is a legitimate goal; a peace dictated by other people's agendas is not peace.
Conclusion: the status quo is not a failure, it is a position
Relations between Algeria and Morocco are not at war. They are frozen, and this freeze is the product of a deliberate decision: to break without fighting, to impose costs without escalation. This choice has preserved regional stability while protecting national interests.
Reconciliation will only become conceivable once its causes have disappeared: the challenge to Algeria's national unity, the deadlock imposed on the Sahrawi people, and the establishment of a hostile security apparatus on the western border. None of these conditions is met today.
Until then, the question is not when Algeria will reconcile with Morocco. It is whether Morocco is ready to change the policies that made the rupture necessary. As long as the answer is no, reconciliation will remain what it is today: a wish formulated elsewhere, for interests other than Algeria's.
Belgacem Merbah
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