The case for an invasion of Morocco

A thought experiment following recent events at Ceuta

In the final days of July 2026, roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people — overwhelmingly young Moroccan men — poured across the land and sea approaches into the Spanish city of Ceuta. Spanish authorities recorded the largest single surge in the North African enclave’s modern history, briefly swelling the population of a city of some 84,000 by more than half.

This horde, a half-naked rabble, had been seemingly loaded up into trucks and told to go to the border with little in the way of preparation. Some (though by no means all) of the initial wave appear to have eventually returned after realising there was nothing for them once the initial rush subsided, while the initial chaotic scenes equally served to encourage more prepared migrants from Morocco and further afield to make more genuine attempts of their own.

Spanish officials, including even the famously weak and treasonous Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, described this mass incursion as a violation of territorial integrity. Migrants themselves reported that Moroccan police waved them forward rather than stopping them, and social media videos of open crossings spread rapidly inside Morocco. Far from being a merely spontaneous reaction to a recent Spanish court ruling on maritime returns, this was clearly the deliberate opening of a pressure valve by the Moroccan state against Spanish territory it has long coveted. It had clearly secured at the very least tacit US-Israeli backing, after protracted lobbying of the US government. Signs of this diplomatic tête-à-tête include King Mohammed VI naming a road after Donald Trump, and the description of Ceuta and Melilla as ‘Moroccan territory’ by close allies of Marco Rubio in a budget report from the House of Representatives. The basic pattern of Morocco’s behaviour here echoes earlier, smaller surges, but the scale and facilitation make this recent episode an act of nothing other than state-sponsored aggression on European sovereign territory.

Such conduct is completely unacceptable. Furthermore, these actions should only be understood in relation to Morocco’s standing claim that Ceuta and Melilla are ‘occupied’ Moroccan soil — a claim which is historically false and strategically intolerable. These claims are backed, again, by US-Israel, partly to punish Sánchez for a lack of cooperation on NATO spending and diplomatic posturing against Israel’s wars. Sánchez had also injured his international standing further by angering European partners over the Spanish government’s actively malignant immigration policy; as a consequence, the immediate response of many European countries (led by Italy) to the incursion was to criticise, rather than to support, Spain. However, as the situation stands in Cueta — it would be unwise to leave the Spaniards in the dirt. These two cities have been under continuous Iberian sovereignty for centuries and (as many observers have pointed out) for longer than the modern Moroccan state has existed.

Ceuta was seized by Portugal in 1415 as the opening move of Iberian expansion into North Africa. After the Iberian Union it passed under Spanish control; when Portugal regained independence in 1640 the city itself chose to remain with the Spanish Crown, a decision confirmed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. Melilla was taken by Castile in 1497, five years after the fall of Granada, in a largely uncontested occupation of a ruined settlement. Nineteenth-century treaties fixed the present land borders: the Treaty of Wad-Ras in 1860 expanded Ceuta’s perimeter after the Hispano-Moroccan War, while subsequent agreements in 1861-62 and later demarcations settled Melilla’s limits. Other smaller nearby holdings which the Spanish call plazas de soberanía — namely Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, the Alhucemas Islands, the Chafarinas — were secured in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Kingdom of Morocco, as a sovereign entity recognised by Spain, dates from the end of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1956. It has never exercised sovereignty over either city or the islets, and neither has any predecessor state unless one is willing to go back half a millennium into history. Moroccan maps that erase these borders represent post-colonial banana republic irredentism of the worst kind.

It must also be noted that the deeper historical character of the North African shore facing Spain is as far removed from that of a peaceful trading partner as one could possibly imagine. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the Barbary corsairs — operating from ports that included Moroccan ones, most notoriously the independent corsair republic of Salé-Rabat, formed by expelled Moriscos and various other renegades — raided European shipping and coasts as far as Iceland, Britain and Ireland.

Estimates of Europeans captured and enslaved under this regime run from several hundred thousand to more than a million from 1500 to 1800. Captives were sold in slave markets, with this trade providing a major revenue source for local rulers, who took a share of the prizes. Morocco’s Alawī sultans actively encouraged the corsairs as a source of income. European powers paid tribute for safe passage or fought repeated campaigns — indeed, the United States fought its first overseas wars against the Barbary states. The French conquest of Algiers in 1830 largely ended the system. In a very real way, from Carthage to Al-Andalus and beyond, the position of the Maghreb in relation to Europe is an excellent barometer of civilisational health, with the pacification of North Africa correlating well with the ascent of European power.

The Spanish-Moroccan frontier is, for what it’s worth, probably the starkest ethnocultural divide within the European Space. On a genetic level, Spaniards, like all Europeans, are considerably more closely related to Turks than to Moroccans on standard autosomal measures, with Anatolian Turks sitting within a broader West Eurasian continuum, and Moroccans by contrast forming a distinct North African cluster dominated by isolated Maghrebi ancestry plus sub-Saharan African admixture.

Contemporary data on Moroccan populations inside Europe demonstrate just how practical this gulf is.

In Spain, Moroccan nationals accounted for 7.65% of all suspects in sexual crimes according to 2024 Interior Ministry figures, despite comprising only around 1-2% of the resident population. For crimes in general, even when age- and sex-adjusted, Moroccan adults commit crime at more than double the native Spanish rate. Africans as a group — of whom in Spain Moroccans form by far the largest contingent — show particularly elevated involvement in violent and property offences.

This is by no means confined to Spain. In the Netherlands, official statistics for 2023 record a suspect rate of 2.8% among people of Moroccan origin against 0.6% for those of native Dutch origin. Parallel patterns of Maghrebi over-representation appear in the available French and Belgian data too. Morocco produced Ridouan Taghi, one of the most notorious gangsters in Dutch history — whose gang had become powerful enough to be able to murder a nationally prominent crime reporter and investigator, Peter R de Vries, as well as the lawyer and brother of a witness during Taghi’s own ‘megatrial’. The vicious riots in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands by Moroccan diasporics prompted by the success of their home country’s team (itself largely comprised of Moroccans born in Europe) during the World Cup laid bare a hardly concealed contempt for their host nations.

Moroccans are also a highly welfare-dependent population. Moroccans constitute nearly half of all foreign recipients of Spain’s equivalent of Universal Credit, the Ingreso Mínimo Vital, making up around 70,000 of 140,000 foreign claimants despite being only one large nationality among many. In the Netherlands, official figures show first-generation Moroccan migrants receiving social assistance (bijstand) at a rate of 20.4%, against a national average of 4.2% and roughly 2.3% for those of native Dutch origin. Unemployment among Moroccan immigrants in Spain stands at 27%, more than three times the native rate of 8%. Similar patterns appear across other European countries with substantial Moroccan populations.

Let us then consider what could be done.

Military action taken in response to a foreign state’s attempt to annex sovereign territory should obviously not be verboten. Examining how things stand today, we already see that Spain’s military advantages are decisive for a limited, high-intensity campaign focused on the northern littoral. Despite being underfunded in comparison to other European powers, Spain has a modern navy and air force, and a defence budget several times that of Morocco’s (around $30-35 billion versus $6 billion). Morocco lacks undersea or high-end air assets, and its navy remains modest. Its main advantages lie in the fact that it has more active personnel and main battle tanks, and would have all the obvious benefits of home-ground logistics, as well as recent US and Israeli equipment upgrades.

A Spanish-led coalition of the willing drawing on other European contributions for logistics and air cover could secure the northern coastal strip, neutralise the border pressure points at Ceuta and Melilla, and establish control of key ports such as Tangier while avoiding a deep inland occupation of the Atlas or the desert. This would be closer to a reinforced version of historical Spanish actions in the Rif and the plazas than a continental war of attrition.

Morocco, of course, has its unholy alliance with US-Israel which will need to be reckoned with. It has been a participant in Abraham Accords normalisation with Israel since 2020, and as thanks has been the recipient of explicit American recognition of its claim to Western Sahara. Yet Israel is also heavily engaged on its home front and near abroad for the foreseeable future; the United States, even under administrations friendly to Morocco, one hopes, would have limited appetite for direct confrontation with a NATO ally over North African enclaves that are unambiguously Spanish under international practice (and is itself bogged down, for the foreseeable future, in its war on the behalf of Israel against Iran).

European resolve to back Spain would test how far Washington is prepared to go in defence of Israel’s preferred North African client against actual European territorial integrity. A short, decisive Spanish operation that presents a fait accompli before full diplomatic mobilisation would maximise the chance of success.

None of this, of course, is feasible at the current moment under the present Spanish government. Pedro Sánchez’s mass regularisation programme, opened in 2026, drew more than a million applications and forms part of a broader pattern of treasonous policies enacted by establishment politicians across Europe — of whom Sánchez is quite possibly the worst of all — and symptomatic of the deeper issue of Europe’s postwar settlement that subordinates itself to the religiously fanatic defence of Human Rights. It goes without saying that Sánchez should be removed from office and thrown in prison by a patriotic government which institutes a new constitution entirely.

The end state should be a permanent reduction of the Moroccan threat. At minimum, Spain or the European coalition manages the critical port city of Tangier as an international zone; the city was already jointly governed by several European states until 1956 to preserve its neutrality and important commercial position (and recent large-scale Moroccan infrastructure investment in the port and a nearby industrial complex has only increased its value should it be seized). Slightly more ambitiously, it connects a coastal security zone between it and Ceuta.

More ambitiously still, a band extending south and west to Rabat and Casablanca can be secured and opened to European settlement. The resulting territory would function as a sunshine paradise for Europeans, an economic zone for large-scale solar generation feeding European grids, and restore Tangier to its natural place as a cosmopolitan centre of commerce, banking, and bohemianism. Morocco would retain full independence, of course, but stripped of the capacity to threaten the Strait or to serve as a demographic launching pad ever again, and should be squeezed from the south by an independent Western Sahara and from the east by a European-aligned Rif Berber state.

In this grander vision, territorial holdings taken from coastal Morocco could be narrowly national (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, British zones) or, as there is already precedent, a joint pan-European administration, or some combination of the two. The British aspect is of particular interest, owing to Britain’s existing holding in Gibraltar. I can already hear the howls of BR dismay at the idea that Britain would defend Spanish interests in this region, to which I say: consider the bigger picture and the bigger prize. And to the Spanish, of course, I would urge them to consider giving some Moroccan territory to Britain in exchange for Gibraltar if the territorial integrity of Iberia is so important to them.

It should go without saying that Moroccan populations resident in Spain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe will need to be carefully managed over the course of this operation. Their massive criminal elements in Europe will almost inevitably descend into riotous violence, and for the public’s safety they should ideally be interned.

In the medium term, the necessary solution would likely be to expel the bulk of the Moroccan population currently resident in Europe. While sending them ‘back’ to Rump Morocco is logical on the face of it (and would hardly be the worst outcome), there may in fact be a stronger case for sending them instead to a truly weak state such as the Central African Republic rather than a reconstituted Moroccan homeland that they would serve to demographically buttress. But then again, a hypothetical Rifian client state could also absorb the many Rifians among the Moroccan diaspora as well. Fully untangling this interesting knot of questions related to remigration policy is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article to consider in full. But rest assured, dear reader, the author is no neoconservative nor warmonger, and has instead dedicated this article to the realm of mere thought experiment. What the wider rectification of Europe’s century of humiliation will look like is yet to be determined.

Morocco, if the shoe were truly on the other foot, would be among the lower-hanging fruits whose conquest could herald a new age of expansionist remigratory colonialism — even if only after Spain and Europe have first recovered the political will and freedom of action that the postwar, US-enforced postcolonial order currently restrains. A lightning strike against this alien and hostile country, a mere ten miles across the Strait of Gibraltar, to secure the northern littoral and impose a durable settlement is in fact feasible. Europe — and Spain most of all — has spent decades absorbing the consequences of Moroccan behaviour. It may be time to impose some small costs in the opposite direction.

---

This article was written by Strategic Advisor, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?