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.
This would not be the only notable naming in Morocco. During ceremonies to mark his 27th year on the throne, as the crossings into Ceuta began some 42 km away, King Mohammed VI presided over the swearing-in of the year’s graduating class of military and paramilitary officers—and gave the class a name: “Laâyoune,” after the capital of Western Sahara. A highway reportedly named for the president who recognized the claim, and an officer corps named for the city that represents it.
On July 27, Middle East Forum fellow Amine Ayoub—author of the April Ynet article urging Israel to help Morocco “reclaim its north,” meaning Ceuta and Melilla—wrote in the same paper that the expressway “is not a vanity project. It is a deliberate instrument of state power.” With the Dakhla port it forms “an economic and administrative shield,” he wrote: “not merely a transport corridor” but “a practical tool of counter-subversion and long-term denial.” Netanyahu’s 2023 recognition of Moroccan sovereignty “completed this strategic triangle"—Washington, Jerusalem, Rabat—he writes.
While this news service sees great infrastructure as a necessary condition for long-term peace, Ayoub looks at this project as war by other means—a way to claim territory by asphalt rather than troops.
