By Jim Geraghty
Monday, August 03, 2026
Most of the commentary on Ceuta that you’ll find on
platforms like X reiterates the same four points.
·
If we hadn’t reelected Trump, this is what
America would look like.
·
This is what you get when you elect socialists
like Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
·
The Moroccans attempting to cross the border are
overwhelmingly military-age males, so this isn’t migration, it’s an invasion.
·
The 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints is more than a xenophobic
tirade, it’s a prediction of our future.
All those arguments are true to varying degrees. Most
notably, in February the Sánchez government said it would offer amnesty, expecting to legalize an estimated half
million immigrants who had arrived illegally in recent years. More than 1.3
million applied for the amnesty. Under the laws of Europe’s Schengen area, if you’re a Spanish citizen, you
can travel or work in 28 other countries. (Our
Andrew Stuttaford, back on July 3: “This amnesty, the seventh in 40 years,
will only encourage more arrivals. Needless to say, it is a mistake.”)
But there are also a couple of wrinkles in the rush to
Ceuta that are getting overlooked, although not by John Gustavsson or Josh Treviño, both writing for National Review Online.
On July 20, Prime Minister Sánchez visited Algeria:
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro
Sanchez said in Algiers on Monday that he sought to deepen ties with Algeria,
as the countries mend relations after a dispute over Western Sahara.
Sanchez told reporters that the
visit, a first in four years, held “particular importance” for Spain, which
views Algeria as “not only a neighboring country but also a strategic partner.”
. . .
Ties between Algiers and Madrid
deteriorated in 2022 when Spain backed Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western
Sahara, reversing its decades-long neutral stance on the conflict over its
former colony.
The governments of Algeria and Morocco do not get along
and have not gotten along for a long time. They both want to be
the big dog in northwest Africa, and any gain by Algeria is seen as a loss for
Morocco, and vice versa. Algeria cut ties with Morocco in 2021, and the land border
between those two countries has been closed since 1994.
Against this backdrop, the two
countries began to prepare for the possibility that their dispute might evolve
into armed conflict. Both sides ramped up military spending. Morocco bought
Israel’s anti-drone Skylock Dome system in November and its Harop drones in
December. In February 2022, it additionally acquired Barak MX, a modular
Israeli-made system that can knock down both missiles and drones. Finally, in
April 2023, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of eighteen U.S. HIMARS
multiple rocket launchers, along with other military equipment, to Morocco.
Algeria rushed to keep pace with
these purchases. In November 2022, the Algerian parliament approved a
staggering increase in the 2023 military budget to around $23 billion, up from
around $11 billion the previous year. In late 2022, local media indicated that
the authorities were preparing to buy Su-57 stealth jets, SU-34 bombers and
Su-30 fighters, in addition to new air defence systems, such as the S-400, from
Russia. To diversify its weapons sources, Algeria turned to Türkiye to buy Anka
S+ drones and to China to acquire Halcon drones, to give two examples.
Do tens of thousands of people spontaneously decide, all
by themselves, to rush a fenced border? No, they do not.
From the New York Times (emphasis added):
Like so many others in Morocco,
Mohammed Ahmidho saw on his social media feeds early Thursday that the heavily
guarded border his country shared with the Spanish territory of Ceuta was open.
Soon enough, he joined a crowd in
the tens of thousands, many of whom were astonished to see Moroccan police
urge them, as he recalled, to “come to Spain.”
It is still unclear why so many
people came to Ceuta. Many of the Moroccans who wandered around Ceuta on Friday
wondered if the doors hadn’t opened because of some unknown plan by Morocco,
which has been accused of using immigrant flows in the past for political
pressure.
“I don’t know why they let us
through,” said Ajoub el-Arrot, 24, who said he heard about the open border on
social media. “Maybe they had some political reason. They opened the border and
let everyone go by.”
He added, “When there are
political problems, Morocco opens the doors and tells us to go.”
Douae Tabit, 19, who also said
she heard about the unchecked crossing on social media, said it went “viral”
and passed by word of mouth, attracting people from all around Morocco. Fluent
in English, French and Spanish, she said she worked as a nurse and photographer
and spontaneously decided to take advantage of the opportunity.
Moroccan police do not just randomly encourage people to
cross into Spain without documentation.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that less than two weeks
after Sánchez went to Algeria and declared that country a “strategic partner,”
the Moroccan police started encouraging tens of thousands of Moroccans to
attempt to cross the border into Ceuta? Me neither. Yes, Sánchez’s amnesty
policies are a factor in this, but what happened here is that the Moroccan
government, irked that Sánchez is trying to build a better relationship with
Algeria, sent a signal to the Spanish prime minister that it can make life for
him, his government, and the people of Ceuta miserable, any time it wants.
In the combined fiscal years 2024–2025, the U.S.
government sent $112 million in foreign aid to Morocco. According to ForeignAssistance.gov, the U.S. has sent $1.4 million so
far this fiscal year, although that data may be incomplete.
One last point: Andrew Stuttaford notices with irritation that the National
Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2027,
which passed the House nearly unanimously a few weeks ago, states:
The Committee notes that the
Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan
territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.
And:
The Committee supports efforts by
the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain
on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.
“The wording of the committee’s report has no legal
status, but it was, at the very least, careless,” Andrew concludes. “Making
matters worse, it didn’t pass unnoticed in either Spain or Morocco.”
Was someone in our government, irritated with Spain over
the amount of its NATO spending, attempting to stick a thumb in the eye of the
Spanish government?
By the way, for all the legitimate gripes about Spain and
its contribution to NATO, let us observe that the Spanish government has
increased its defense spending by 70 percent in the last decade; its investment of 32 percent on equipment is above the 20
percent required by NATO and actually a bit higher than the U.S. level at 29.7
percent. Spain spent $40 billion on defense in 2025; we all love the Poles, but Poland spent about $46 billion.
The reason Spain’s defense spending as a share of gross domestic product seems
so much lower is that Spain has a GDP just above $2 trillion, while Poland — now in the top 20
economies in the world — has a GDP of around $1 trillion.
The Cyberattacks That President Trump Doesn’t Want to
Acknowledge
Considering the importance of what it does, the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is
surprisingly low-profile. It could use a CBS prime-time drama or two. Then
again, the agency may well like it that way; like offensive lineman, you
usually hear about the more obscure federal law enforcement agencies only when
something goes wrong.
Efforts to hack into critical infrastructure are
widespread: in 2024, Check Point Research documented 1,162 cyberattacks on U.S. utilities, a 75
percent year-over-year increase. Given those numbers, perhaps it’s good that we
hear about CISA so rarely. But the agency regularly puts out new alerts about
foreign cyber threats. (Keep in mind that “approximately 50 to 85 percent of critical infrastructure is privately
owned, depending on the sector, from large corporations to small and
medium-sized businesses.” So it’s up to the private company to make sure its
cyber defenses are up to the task.) China and Russia may take the gold and
silver in the cyber-threat Olympics, but the Iranians
consistently edge out the North Koreans for the bronze.
In February 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned
six officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic
Command for a November 2023 attack on the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pa.
CISA put out alerts regarding “malicious cyber activities
conducted by advanced persistent threat cyber actors affiliated with the
Iranian Government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” or similar Iranian
threats in August 2024, October 2024, and December 2024.
Also in 2024, President Trump’s campaign said it had been targeted by “an Iranian military
intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking
official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a
former senior advisor.’”
In mid-March, the U.S. Justice Department “announced the seizure of four
domains as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt hacking and transnational
repression schemes conducted by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of
Intelligence and Security.” Later that month, “cyber criminals linked to Iran accessed
FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account.”
Then, on July 30, the FBI put out a new public service announcement:
The Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency are issuing this Public
Service Announcement to warn critical infrastructure asset owners and operators
that malicious cyber actors are conducting cyber-attacks targeting Operational
Technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable
Logic Controllers , specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series. Since July 27
2026, Water and Wastewater Sector utility companies in at least seven states
have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water
operations.
Minnesota and Michigan have been identified as two of
those states.
Now, the most recent PSAs did not specifically state that
the Iranians were doing this. But we know from past attacks like the one in
Aliquippa, Pa., that this is the Iranian modus operandi.
Anyway, here’s our president on Friday:
Today, I just want to mention
that we heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I
don’t think so. I think — I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly
incompetent. There was a cyberattack of 30 water plants, and I would blame it
on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to
say, oh, it’s Iran. Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than
worrying about Minnesota. This month it was announced that inflation is
dropping at the fastest rate in more than six years. Walmart, Sam’s Club, Giant
Eagle and others are slashing prices by hundreds of grocery stores.
And then later in that same appearance:
I don’t think — no, I think that
Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it, Minnesota, because they’re
grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was
an Iranian cyberattack. I think that Minnesota ought to get its act together.
It’s one of the worst-run states. JD will tell you. He found tremendous
corruption in Minnesota.
And how about the attacks on water systems in those six
other states, Mr. President? Do you think “the governor’s behind it” for all of
those, too? You think Tim Walz is the criminal mastermind behind all of
these cyberattacks?
Our critical systems are under attack, and our rambling,
erratic, living-in-his-own-world president does not want to acknowledge it. If
he did publicly recognize that Iran is trying to harm Americans through their
water systems, the public might be rather upset by the latest cancellation of a massive military response against the
Iranian regime.
Oh, and under this administration, CISA has gotten significantly smaller:
At the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s top cyber defense body
protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 CISA personnel — or nearly
one-third of the agency’s workforce — had left or been removed from active
service by mid-2025.
Some were terminated, while
others resigned or took administrative leave. Others had contracts that were
not renewed or their programs were shut down. Altogether, staffing lingered at
around 2,500, down from approximately 3,400 a year earlier.
Hey, didn’t our president just give a big prime-time speech about how
“the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes [us], like
levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign
interference”? If you’re so worried about foreign hacking and exploitation, why
are you dramatically cutting the number of staff at the federal agency designed
to fight foreign hacking and exploitation?
ADDENDUM: Out in Ohio, Republican Senator Bernie
Moreno writes of his son-in
law, Republican Congressman Max Miller:
If there are any basic standards
of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should
not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek
professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I
believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.
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