In the Maghreb, the Great Powers Are the Instruments

This series classifies states by the mechanisms that actually produce dependency, sorting them as Captured, Leaning, Hedging, Contested, Reversal, Vacuum-Filling, or Inverted Patron and Client. Morocco and Algeria are neighbours with severed relations, opposite postures, and a shared border with the same two powers. They do not land in the same place, and the contrast is the most useful thing about reading them together.

Morocco: Hedging

Morocco holds about 50 billion metric tons of phosphate rock reserves against a world total near 73 billion, close to 68 percent, worked by the state-owned OCP Group from mine to fertiliser export (U.S. Geological Survey, "Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026," 2026; OCP Group, "Eurobond Prospectus," 2025). That inverts the usual question. Most cases in this series ask what leverage an outside power holds over a state. The phosphate position asks what leverage the state holds over everyone else, including both powers at once. Every category in the scheme assumes the country is the object of influence, and Morocco is partly a subject of it.

The American security relationship is the deepest Morocco holds with any power, and it is formalised rather than transactional. Washington designated Morocco a Major Non-NATO Ally in 2004, and Morocco is now the largest purchaser of US military equipment in Africa, with $8.545 billion in active Foreign Military Sales cases (U.S. Department of State, "U.S. Security Cooperation with Morocco," 2025). African Lion, US Africa Command’s largest annual exercise, ran its 2026 edition with roughly 5,000 personnel in Morocco alone (U.S. Africa Command, "African Lion 26," 2026). Washington also recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in December 2020, held the pen on Security Council Resolution 2797 in October 2025, and convened talks in Madrid and Washington in February 2026 that put Algerian and Moroccan representatives in the same room for the first time since relations were severed in 2021 (United Nations Security Council, "Resolution 2797," 2025).

Chinese engagement is large in value and shallow in structure. Chinese firms have committed roughly six billion dollars to Moroccan automotive since the pandemic, with announced battery and component projects reported above ten billion, concentrated around Tangier and Kenitra (Rhodium Group figures as reported in North Africa Post, "China’s Growing Investment in Morocco," 2026). Gotion Power Morocco is building the first gigafactory on the continent near Kenitra. Reporting in 2025 described a first phase of 20 gigawatt hours; the African Development Bank’s July 2026 release describes 10, which suggests the plan has been scaled back (Just Auto, "Gotion to Commence Construction of Morocco Gigafactory," 2025; Washington Post, "Morocco Secures $114 Million," 2026). COBCO, a joint venture between the Moroccan fund Al Mada and CNGR, began producing cathode precursors at Jorf Lasfar in June 2025 at a facility costing about 1.8 billion euros (Electrive, "COBCO Starts EV Battery Material Production," 2025). In phosphates, OCP contracted Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries for 205 million dollars of cargo-handling equipment at the Port of Safi (Morocco World News, "OCP Group Signs $205 Million Equipment Deal," 2025).

None of that is capture and little of it is leaning. There is no port concession, no majority foreign ownership of export infrastructure, and no sovereign debt structure of the kind that converts distress into control. ZPMC at Safi is a vendor contract. The battery projects are greenfield manufacturing with domestic equity participation, and the one disclosed financing term runs the other way: the African Development Bank approved a loan of 100 million euros, about 114 million dollars, to the Gotion project in July 2026 (Washington Post, 2026). The question worth asking is not how much Chinese money is present but whether any of it produces operational or financial control. On the public record it does not.

What the capital does produce is exposure to a third power. Morocco exported more than 26 billion euros to the European Union in 2025, its largest trading partner by a wide margin, and Tanger Med handled 11.1 million twenty-foot equivalent units, more than any other Mediterranean port (Tanger Med Port Authority, "Port Activity Report in 2025," 2026). Chinese capital is in Kenitra because goods of Moroccan origin enter the European market on preferential terms, not because of any Moroccan tilt toward Beijing. Brussels has begun to say so: the trade commissioner has used the word transshipment and stated that Chinese investors in Morocco must meet rules of origin requiring sufficient industrial transformation (as reported in Yabiladi, "EU Fears Chinese Investments Turning Morocco into Export Gateway," 2026). The legal basis is itself unstable, since the Court of Justice annulled the extension of tariff preferences to Western Sahara in October 2024 and the Council reconstructed them provisionally a year later (Court of Justice of the European Union, Joined Cases C-779/21 P and C-799/21 P, 2024; Council of the European Union, "Council Decision (EU) 2025/2022," 2025). Morocco is therefore Hedging, but the hedge is not held between Washington and Beijing. It is held between an American security guarantee and a European market, with Chinese capital arbitraging the gap between them.

Algeria: Leaning, twice, and toward neither pole

Algeria’s dominant external security relationship is with neither Washington nor Beijing, and it is moving. Russia supplied roughly 73 percent of Algerian arms between 2018 and 2022, making Algeria Moscow’s third largest customer worldwide (Zoubir, "Algeria-Russia Ties: Beyond Military Cooperation?," 2024). Between 2020 and 2024 the Russian share fell to 48 percent while China rose to 19 and Germany to 14, with Russian deliveries to Algeria down 81 percent across the two periods and Chinese armed drones among the transfers recorded (SIPRI, "Recent Trends in International Arms Transfers in the Middle East and North Africa," 2025). That is substitution rather than supplement. Russia’s post-2022 production constraints mean the patron cannot deliver at prior volumes, and Beijing is taking the share. On this scheme it is the beginning of a reversal, though not between the two powers the series tracks: the movement runs from Moscow toward Beijing, with Washington absent from the sequence entirely.

Energy runs the leverage in the opposite direction. Algeria is Africa’s largest gas exporter and a principal supplier to southern Europe, hydrocarbons account for more than 90 percent of export revenue, and the energy minister reported roughly 31 billion dollars over the first eight months of 2025. Algeria also held a Security Council seat for 2024 and 2025. That is independent leverage of a kind most Leaning and Captured cases lack, and it rests on a narrowing base. The IMF projects an elevated fiscal deficit and international reserves falling to roughly 3.2 months of imports by 2030 absent policy change (International Monetary Fund, "Algeria: 2025 Article IV Consultation," 2025). Domestic consumption absorbs about 70 percent of national production and output at ageing fields is declining, which is why the hydrocarbons agency ALNAFT is preparing a 2026 licensing round on frontier acreage (Prospect, "Algeria to Launch Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline in 2026," 2026). The Trans-Saharan pipeline should be read against that constraint rather than as evidence of abundance. It does not expand Algerian production. It monetises Nigerian gas through Algerian infrastructure, which moves Algeria from producer toward transit state, and a transit state’s leverage rests on the supply behind it and the security of the corridor it carries, neither of which it controls.

China’s position is real, sectorally concentrated, and closest to what this series elsewhere calls deniable capture. Algeria’s national technology stack has been delivered substantially by Huawei, supported by a joint artificial intelligence laboratory, and the Dzair portal now runs 52 public services across the civil registry, justice, health, and land registry, with digital identity and an electronic wallet built in (iAfrica, "Algeria Reviews National AI Strategy Progress," 2026). No comparable Western presence exists in that layer, and it would be costly and slow to displace. The boundary is less clean than a telecommunications reading suggests: Sonatrach is working alongside Chinese partners to inspect and upgrade roughly 3,576 kilometres of pipeline feeding the Medgaz link to Spain and the Transmed corridor to Italy (Prospect, 2026). That is contractor work rather than ownership and does not meet the Leaning threshold on energy, but it places Chinese firms inside the maintenance of the export system on which Algerian leverage over Europe depends.

The multilateral picture is easily misread. Algeria applied to join BRICS in 2023 and did not obtain membership. It obtained the bank instead, depositing its instrument of accession to the New Development Bank on 19 May 2025 to become its ninth member (New Development Bank, "Algeria Officially Becomes Member Country," 2025). Algiers took the financing channel, headquartered in Shanghai, without the political bloc. The classification that follows is Leaning, twice over and toward two different powers: Russia in the security relationship, where the share is falling, and China in the technology layer, where it is rising. Toward the United States there is effectively nothing to classify. The movement actually underway in Algerian foreign policy is a withdrawal from France, a power that is neither pole of this series, and it is more useful to record that plainly than to resolve it into the scheme.

What they are really doing is watching each other

One factor shapes both and appears in few other cases: each is the other’s primary strategic constraint. Relations have been severed since 2021, the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline is closed, Western Sahara structures both states’ room to manoeuvre, and Algeria declined to participate in the vote on Resolution 2797. Moroccan alignment with Washington and Algerian alignment with Moscow are not only, or even mainly, responses to what those powers offer. They are positions taken against each other, in which the external powers function as instruments of a bilateral rivalry rather than as poles exerting pull.

That rivalry has just acquired its clearest infrastructural expression. Algeria broke ground on its 1,210 kilometre section of the 4,128 kilometre Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline on 4 June 2026, run by Sonatrach (France 24, "Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline: An African Dream," 2026; Pipeline Technology Journal, "How 4,128 Km of New Steel Could Reshape Europe’s Energy Map," 2026). Six weeks later, on 19 July, ECOWAS heads of state signed the intergovernmental agreement governing the rival Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic line, roughly 25 billion dollars and still without a final investment decision (Morocco World News, "Continental Significance and Discontents," 2026). Both target about 30 billion cubic metres a year into a European market phasing out Russian gas by 2027, and each route carries the other’s strongest objection. The Atlantic line terminates in territory where the Court of Justice has held that the consent of the people conditions the validity of agreements covering it. The Saharan line runs through the Sahel, which is why Algeria’s restoration of diplomatic relations with Mali on 11 July matters more to a pipeline than it looks. Neither corridor is financed at the scale required, and the actors that will decide between them are European and American lenders rather than either capital.

Limitations this piece could not establish

• Chinese arms transfers to Algeria since 2024. SIPRI establishes the 2020 to 2024 shares but not what has been contracted since Russian supply constraints hardened. Whether the Chinese share keeps rising is the open question behind the Algerian classification.
• Whether Chinese involvement in Sonatrach’s pipeline maintenance extends to financing, equity, or long-term service concessions. Only the contractor role is sourced. Ownership or financing terms would move Algeria from a technology-layer case to an energy one.
• The cost of the Trans-Saharan pipeline. Pipeline Technology Journal puts it at 10 to 13 billion dollars; France 24 puts it at 25 billion, the figure usually attached to the rival Atlantic line. The discrepancy is unresolved and no figure is asserted above.

Notes & References

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