Pinned to President Trump’s Truth Social account for the past week is a note of thanks to King Mohammed VI: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco—Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”
The highway, now named the President Donald Trump Highway, is a real project. The Tiznit-Dakhla expressway runs 1,055 km down the Atlantic coast at a cost of roughly $1 billion, through Laâyoune to Dakhla, where a deep-water port is being built. It could also help give the landlocked Sahel states (Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger) a route to an ocean.
While EIR is generally in favor of infrastructure investment, the difficulty here is what this project has been made to mean. Laâyoune and Dakhla lie in Western Sahara, a UN-designated non-self-governing territory whose referendum on self-determination, promised in a 1991 ceasefire, has never been held; more than 170,000 Sahrawi refugees remain in camps at Tindouf. Naming the road for Donald Trump appears to be a payment for other services: his administration recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara on December 10, 2020, the first Western government to do so, as the price of Morocco normalizing relations with Israel. (Rabat itself appears to have said nothing about the naming.)