The rivalry between Morocco and Algeria now reaches beyond Western Sahara to the routes that will link West Africa to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Behind the ports and pipelines lies a deeper contest: who will organise the continent’s economic interdependence, and who will keep the right to decide.
Morocco, Algeria and the new geography of African power
There is a paradox at the heart of the new rivalry between Morocco and Algeria. Two countries with long coastlines of their own are competing to offer a route to the sea to others that have none. The contest is being played out hundreds of kilometres from their capitals, in a region where roads can matter as much as armies and where a port still under construction has already become an instrument of diplomacy.
For almost half a century the competition between Rabat and Algiers had one dominant theatre: Western Sahara. That conflict remains unresolved, but it would be a mistake to read the whole of either country’s African policy through it. The map of their interests has widened. The question is no longer only who exercises authority over a territory, but who is able to build the economic relationships on which other territories will come to depend.
Morocco grasped years ago that its reach into Africa could not rest on diplomacy alone. Banks, telecoms, fertilisers, insurance, aviation and business partnerships gradually built a commercial presence capable of outlasting changes of government and shifts in political rhetoric. Algeria, for its part, has held on to a different set of instruments: energy resources, gas infrastructure, territorial proximity and a long political and security relationship with the states of the central Sahara.
The two strategies reflect different ideas of what influence is. One seeks to multiply commercial ties outward from the Atlantic. The other aims to exploit the geographical continuity of the Sahara and its connections to the Mediterranean. Neither can be explained simply as a response to the other.
A state cannot withdraw from its geography
The upheaval in the Sahel has made that competition urgent. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger formally left the Economic Community of West African States on 29 January 2025, having set up a regional alliance of their own. Leaving the organisation did not end their economic dependence on their neighbours. Indeed, Ecowas itself chose to keep arrangements for the movement of people and goods in place on a provisional basis. It was an acknowledgement of something hard to dispute: a state can withdraw from an organisation, but it cannot withdraw from its geography. Political sovereignty allows a country to choose its alliances. Geography obliges it to negotiate its access.
In November 2023 Morocco launched an initiative to give Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad access to the Atlantic Ocean through transport and communications infrastructure. All four countries went on to take part in the diplomatic process, and in September 2025 their foreign ministers publicly reaffirmed their commitment to it. Those declarations marked political progress, but they were not yet the same thing as corridors that are fully operational, financed and secure.
The distinction matters. In the diplomacy of infrastructure, announcing a road is easier than building it; and building it may in turn prove easier than guaranteeing that it works for decades.
The Moroccan proposal has an economic logic that is easy to follow. Landlocked countries bear additional costs in reaching international markets. Their goods must cross borders, customs posts and transport networks run by other states. Every delay makes imports dearer, blunts the competitiveness of exports and feeds through into the price of essentials. For Rabat, turning the Atlantic coast into a trading platform for the Sahel would open new markets and strengthen economic ties over the long term. The port of Dakhla Atlantique, still being built, occupies an important place in that calculation, together with the overland links needed to reach the African interior.
But Dakhla lies in Western Sahara, a territory whose status remains the subject of international dispute. That introduces a political dimension which no purely logistical account should be allowed to obscure. The commercial viability of a corridor does not dispose of the questions of legitimacy, international law and political acceptance that may come with it.
Two pipelines, one ambition
Algeria views this expansion from a different geographical vantage point. Its potential influence depends not on the Atlantic but on the unbroken stretch of land running from North Africa through Niger to Nigeria. The Trans-Saharan gas pipeline project is intended to carry Nigerian gas across Niger into the Algerian network, from where it could reach European markets.
June 2026 brought a concrete step forward: the authorities of Algeria, Nigeria and Niger approved the updated feasibility study and announced the start of work on the Algerian section. Sonatrach confirmed the official launch of construction on 4 June. It was a tangible advance, though it meant neither that the whole pipeline had been built nor that its financing had been secured in full.
On the other side stands the Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic pipeline, conceived to connect a string of countries along the West African coast and to develop regional energy markets. In July 2026 the member states of Ecowas signed an intergovernmental agreement that strengthened its institutional framework. The fundamental decisions on investment and financing, however, were still outstanding.
The two projects are usually presented as rivals, and in a sense they are: both mobilise capital, diplomacy, political backing and expectations about future gas markets. But it would be too simple to treat them as interchangeable. Their routes, the countries they cross, local consumption needs, technical demands and security risks all differ considerably. What they share is an ambition: to convert geographical position into bargaining power.
History offers plenty of examples of countries that have mistaken that bargaining power for a permanent guarantee of strength. An oil pipeline can generate revenue, but vulnerabilities too. A port can attract investment while leaving its users dependent on decisions taken beyond their borders. A road can foster trade and, at the same time, make it easier for political events in one country to paralyse the economy next door.
That is reason enough to be wary of a word much favoured in grand regional announcements: integration. Governments tend to utter it as though it were beneficial by definition. Yet to integrate economies is to establish relationships of dependence, and such relationships are never balanced as a matter of course. It matters who finances the infrastructure, who holds the concessions, who sets the tariffs, who controls the customs posts and who bears the cost when the routes stop working. The difference between co-operation and subordination does not always show up in ministerial communiqués. More often it is written into the contracts.
Sahel geopolitics is not an empty chessboard
It would be equally mistaken to reduce Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad to mere pieces on a Maghrebi chessboard. Their governments have interests of their own. They are looking for commercial alternatives, diplomatic recognition and the ability to negotiate with a range of partners. For them, the competition between Morocco and Algeria may offer opportunities to diversify, though it also carries the risk of being caught up in rivalries that are not theirs.
The Alliance of Sahel States, formed by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, also expresses a desire for political autonomy from the regional structures that came before. But autonomy proclaimed requires material means. Replacing a diplomatic alliance is relatively quick; replacing a commercial, financial and logistical network is far harder.
Nor is the region a vacant space awaiting initiatives from the Maghreb. Russia has expanded its security ties with the Sahel’s military governments. China maintains commercial and infrastructure interests. Turkey and the Gulf states are cultivating economic, military and diplomatic relationships of various kinds. Europe remains a market and a source of finance, although its capacity to exert influence is undergoing a profound political reappraisal.
Against that backdrop, the Moroccan-Algerian rivalry is one of several overlapping contests. A single Sahelian government may seek security co-operation from Russia, funding from a Gulf partner, port access through West Africa and energy collaboration with Algeria. Such a spread of relationships is not necessarily a sign of incoherence. It may be a deliberate strategy for avoiding dependence on any one actor.
The corridors and the people they are meant to serve
Yet all this talk of grand corridors risks forgetting those who are supposed to benefit from them. In May 2026 the United Nations estimated that 24.3 million people would need humanitarian assistance and protection that year across the part of the Sahel covered by its regional response. The combination of violence, displacement, climate shocks and economic hardship poses an uncomfortable question: what is a continental piece of infrastructure worth if the people living along its route cannot use it in safety?
For a family in Burkina Faso, the significance of a trade corridor may be measured in the price of rice, fuel or medicines. For a Malian farmer, in the chance to move a harvest without losing the proceeds to middlemen and checkpoints. For a young person in Niger, in whether the new energy networks also deliver electricity, jobs and opportunities in their own community.
Such consequences take up little room at signing ceremonies. They are nonetheless what distinguishes development from the mere movement of resources.
The Sahel has no coast, yet it could shift the balance of the Mediterranean
Europe ought to be watching this transformation with an attention that goes beyond irregular migration and counter-terrorism. The stability of African supply chains, energy security, Mediterranean trade and the future industrial relationship between the two shores all depend in part on the connections being debated today.
Brussels cannot go on reading the Sahel solely as a security problem lying somewhere beyond its southern frontier. That outlook reduces entire societies to potential threats and hands the economic initiative to actors who understood sooner the importance of building material relationships. The real challenge is to develop infrastructure capable of serving several partners at once, rather than turning every road and every pipeline into an extension of national rivalries.
Strategic interdependence: the power to connect
This is where an idea that deserves to sit at the centre of the debate comes in: strategic interdependence.
For decades, international power was explained largely in terms of the possession of territory, military capability and control over resources. Those factors remain essential. But the ability to organise the connections between territories is becoming steadily more important. A country can wield influence without directly controlling a resource, provided it plays a decisive part in financing, processing or transporting it.
That power comes, however, with a fundamental limitation. The more indispensable a corridor aspires to be, the greater its exposure to the crises of the countries that use it. Interdependence makes it possible to influence others, but only at the price of depending on them.
Morocco needs the countries of the Sahel to find real advantages in its Atlantic routes. Algeria needs its relations with Niger and Nigeria to yield conditions stable enough to sustain its energy projects. The Sahelian states need both options – alongside their traditional corridors to West African ports – to widen their freedom of choice.
The decisive test will not be who manages to announce the greatest number of projects. It will be who succeeds in financing them, building them, maintaining them and making them useful to the economies they are meant to connect.
And there is a further possibility that narratives of rivalry tend to leave out: that the Sahel needs several corridors, not one. A network of alternatives may do more for its autonomy than reliance on a single outlet to the sea. Competition can accelerate investment, but it can also duplicate costs, fragment markets and subject economic projects to political conflicts that have nothing to do with their returns.
For a long time the rivalry between Morocco and Algeria was drawn on a map of borders. It is now unfolding on another map as well: that of roads, power lines, ports, railways and pipelines. The first expresses the power to control a space. The second, the power to connect economies.
The two maps will remain superimposed. And the most important question for the future of the Sahel may not be which country manages to become its indispensable corridor, but whether its own states can secure enough connections not to depend on any of them.
For the true measure of sovereignty is not only the right to choose one’s allies, but the ability not to become their prisoner.
