Morocco Tests Spanish Sovereignty

By Joshua S. Treviño

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

The seemingly abrupt crisis in the Spanish city of Ceuta, perched on the North African littoral athwart the Straits of Gibraltar, is at once both alarming in the moment and portentous for the future. That future involves not just Spain, but the entirety of the West — of which the United States is an intrinsic part.

 

At this writing, the fast-moving invasion of Ceuta — we should call it what it is — has seen an estimated sixty thousand young men erupt into the city of approximately eighty thousand residents. They are, for the most part, coming in via a low-lying entry near the Mediterranean shore, poorly secured and now wholly breached. Fifty-seven individuals have died, presumably claimed by the sea or exposure; the number will probably climb. Within Ceuta itself, there are scattered reports of confrontations between Spanish residents and the new neighbors who may shortly outnumber them. Whatever the state of the streets, and even if all sixty thousand migrants are shortly expelled, the message is sent: this Spanish city, populated by Spanish citizens and part of Spanish sovereign territory for the past four and a half centuries, is no longer fully defended and possessed by Spain.

 

As you read this, perhaps the immediate crisis is ended — but all this remains true.

 

The question arises as to who, exactly, possesses the power to override Spanish sovereignty in this fashion we have just witnessed. It is not “the migrants” who have arrived in a flood, and who possess no political identity unto themselves. It is those who positively directed them — that is to say, agents of the Moroccan state. This is empirically confirmed by various media outlets, including the New York Times, which reports that the invaders could have been transported and directed by those agents. Deniability here is a feature: There is no directive nor policy from Rabat encouraging illegal migration into Spain, yet the apparatus of the state, in its police and functionaries, all tend toward the same end.

 

What Morocco has done is comparable to what Americans saw in late 2021, when several thousand Haitians suddenly appeared on the north bank of the Rio Grande at Del Rio, Texas. There too we saw reports of local officialdom urging and even moving Haitians from points within Mexico to crossings into the United States. Whether achieved through quiet direction by the state’s own hierarchy, like Henry II asking to be rid of a troublesome priest, or by human-trafficking cartels that function as state proxies, the fundamental responsible party is the state. A state that cannot account for the rapid assembly and movement of sixty thousand people is not a state. Morocco is a state in full. The question now is whether Spain is as well.

 

Further informing the picture of likely Moroccan-state aggression is the record of coercive Moroccan irredentism since its 1956 independence. The following year saw Moroccan forces invade and besiege Spanish possessions at both Ifni and in the Spanish Sahara, resulting, by 1958, in a Spanish retreat that resulted in the full cession of a strip of the Sahara, and all of Ifni, by 1969. Morocco then invaded neighboring Algeria between 1963 and 1964 in a futile effort to annex some of its bordering territory — an effort that eventually drew in Cuban forces in one of their first combat deployments to Africa. Morocco then invaded the remaining Spanish Sahara in the so-called Green March of 1975, resulting in a wholesale Spanish handover of the territory and the inception of a low-grade war with many of the Sahrawis that continues to this day.

 

From the outset of all this, Morocco laid claim to the Spanish Plazas de Soberanía on the North African coast, including the populated cities of Ceuta and Melilla. In other words, the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.

 

It was not until Moroccan forces attempted in 2002 to forcibly occupy one of the Plazas de Soberanía, the uninhabited Isla Perejil, not far off Ceuta, that Spain decisively pushed back against the thus-far one-way ratchet of Moroccan territorial acquisition from Spain. That seven-day episode was resolved bloodlessly when Spanish forces retook the island from its minuscule Moroccan garrison; however, Morocco has not relinquished any of its claims. Since then, the tactics have shifted, away from the naked-aggression approaches at Ifni in 1957, Tindouf in 1963, or Perejil in 2002 and toward the Green March model of 1975, in which unarmed populations with state backing and direction are mobilized to deluge the territory of competing sovereigns, and render that sovereignty null by their entry and presence. Prior to the ongoing Ceuta crisis, the most-recent example came in the 2021 crisis in the same city, in which the Moroccan state facilitated the entry of approximately eight thousand migrants. That, of course, was a minor prelude to what we see now.

 

Those familiar with hybrid warfare and its manifestations will recognize this situation for what it is: a form of warfare, in which the population as such is weaponized, and an invasion as certain as if it were carried out by a uniformed army. This characterization is not hyperbole. In the American context, and specifically in Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution, invasion is classically understood as requiring two elements: entry into a sovereign and enmity toward that sovereign. It is on this basis, for example, that various U.S. state governments, including Texas, have declared that the border crisis of the Biden years constituted an invasion. The federal government in President Trump’s second term has also characterized the same crisis as an invasion. The involvement of the sending state — in the U.S. case, the Mexican regime with its robust cartel ties, and in the Spanish case, the Kingdom of Morocco’s direct engagement — is central to the characterization. The Spanish legal and constitutional context is obviously different, but the principles of governance are fundamentally the same. The goal of the individual migrant may be a better life, enrichment, or something else, but the goal of the state sending him is the weakening of sovereignty and, in the Moroccan case, sovereignty’s eventual transfer.

 

To that end, the Moroccan state has been strategically consistent, directionally engaged, and operationally savvy for generations. The same cannot be said for Spanish political leadership, which has veered wildly from the sagacious to the positively malign across the past fifty years. To the extent that the wounded and theatrical regime of Pedro Sánchez, enmeshed in scandal and reliant upon separatists elsewhere in Spain for his own tenuous fingernail’s grasp upon power, represents an opportunity to press a weakened Spanish state for territorial concession, the Moroccans will take it. They see the political moment within Spain, and they also see the broader currents afflicting Europe. It is improbable that they are not aware that the European left, not least under Britain’s Labour regime, is presently eager to find overseas territories to concede. To that end, Spanish leadership ought to expect that this Ceuta crisis will be followed by offers, putatively friendly and constructive, to assist in the administration of Ceuta’s borders, and perhaps beyond. The concession here, which may solve a temporary budget or administrative problem for the Spanish government, will be merely the end of a wedge: In the fullness of time, de facto will become de jure.

 

Sánchez’s government, having succeeded in plunging Spain into diplomatic isolation — at this writing, the French are sending forces to the Pyrenees crossings, the Italians are suspending visa-free movement from Spain, and the communicative apparatus of both the United States and Israel are mostly jeering — cannot be counted upon to refuse such a gesture. Having failed to defend Spain’s national territory in a moment of profound crisis, it is unlikely to secure its integrity across the long run. This is the tragedy of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities of nearly half a millennium, in that they may be lost by a government that is both unpopular and fleeting to one that is iron in its vision and its pursuit.

 

A competent Spanish regime would impose costs. We know the working template because we see it at work in the United States. Borders must be militarily secured, and internal defense must be a well-funded priority. Remittances to sending states, whether Mexico or Morocco, must be placed under direct threat. Visas, especially by governing elites and their families, must be visibly curtailed. Market access must be predicated upon security cooperation. Deportations must be prioritized, and sending states compelled to accept them. These are realities in the United States now, to a greater or lesser degree. They will not be in Spain so long as a government of the left persists (though a general election is coming within the year). More broadly, if the European project is to mean anything, the European Union ought to be imposing exactly the same costs upon an external power mounting an invasion of member-state territory. “The terrible ifs accumulate,” wrote Churchill, but they point toward sound policy if it is desired.

 

The European powers, including but not limited to Spain, are going to have to decide what precisely their non-European geographic possessions are, and what they are for. These enclaves are broadly regarded as colonial relics, but this is inaccurate and frequently unjust to their citizenry. Mayotte is French, the Falklands are British, Greenland is Danish, and Ceuta is Spanish: This being so, each of those states has a positive responsibility to retain the adequate defense by arms for their people and possessions. It is a choice as to which side of the Melian Dialogue a nation wishes to occupy. Spain has for the moment failed in this duty. The failure is not fatal, but it will be in time. It need not continue to fail. The Spanish government is unequal to its task: Spain the nation is not.

 

Finally, in this moment, statecraft comes to the fore beyond mere material calculus. In the great House of Commons debate of September 1939 on war or peace, Leo Amery exhorted his parliamentary colleague to “Speak for England!” Someone must speak for Spain, a kingdom of equal dignity, now. Spain’s prime minister will not. The king, who properly ought to fly to Ceuta to share in the suffering of his people, has at this writing yet to move.

 

Spain, immersed in over a thousand years of champions, needs another. The question is who.