North African states are turning long-standing diplomatic relationships into new opportunities for leverage, using migration flows, energy supplies, and security partnerships as bargaining chips. These new tactics and strategies are reshaping regional diplomacy. Two factors are guiding this shift: the narrowing scope of Western involvement and a growing sense within the region of its own agency. Western engagement is moving away from formal alliances with broad agendas in favor of narrowly scoped goals of cooperation on migration and shared security priorities, while concurrently, North African governments have become more sensitive to issues of perceived sovereignty.
The late July 2025 trip to North Africa of United States Special Advisor for Africa Massad Boulos highlighted these concurrent factors: limited US interest in the region and the growing regional impulse to protect national sovereignty. This move toward a more tactical form of engagement represents a shift from earlier diplomatic patterns. However effective this approach may be in the short term, though, it risks sacrificing strategic depth — the ability to build durable relationships, gain trust, and manage future crises.
Transaction first, transformation later
Diplomatic initiatives in North Africa are increasingly organized around discrete and reciprocal deals. Transactionalism, meaning the inclination for focused, deal-based, short-term, and instrumental interactions, has always been an element of broader relationship-based diplomatic engagement, but today it is becoming the primary driver. A decade or so ago, regional diplomatic initiatives were more comprehensive and more in line with the traditional practice of diplomacy, which includes a political or geopolitical vision. But as Western priorities gradually narrowed following the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and shifting international dynamics, North African leaders concluded that comprehensive alignment offered limited benefits for stability and regime survival. That lesson resonated more powerfully with each Western retrenchment as well as with every global crisis that diverted Western partners’ attention away from the region.
Over the past decade, North African governments have come to prioritize quick wins and pragmatism within a “sovereignty first” framework. Narrowly scoped deals with global partners and with each other now account for the bulk of foreign policy engagements. These deals have been less embedded in a comprehensive political settlement or vision. The European Union’s partnerships with North Africa in the last decade have focused on migration, and more recently on energy. This allows for immediate gain without alignment or reform. Expanded partnership options reinforce this shift. Russia and China offer infrastructure investment, military cooperation, and trade relationships, giving North African states alternatives that strengthen their bargaining position with traditional Western partners.
Cases in point
Transactionalism has been the dominant feature of Morocco’s most important diplomatic initiatives in recent years, including the normalization of relations with Israel and partnerships with EU and Gulf states. Even the country’s Western Sahara strategy is a transactional attempt to advance a specific goal: to shift the framework of the long-running dispute from an international legal issue to a local administrative one. Since 2020, Morocco’s approach to Western Sahara has secured either support, recognition, or alignment with its preferred autonomy settlement from 116 countries. This is up sharply from 37 countries in 2010 due in large part to agreements providing access to and investment in fertilizer plants, banking, education exchanges, and other incentives, thereby shifting international dynamics around the dispute.
However, Morocco’s gains remain fragile. Many of the supporting states have limited global influence, and the transactional basis of their support creates inherent instability — what was secured through deals can be undone through different deals. And finally, Morocco’s at times heavy-handed tactics in obtaining this support have tested relationships with key allies.
Even Algeria, with its long history of ideologically driven foreign policy, is increasingly pursuing practical diplomacy. While the country has long prioritized energy exports over political alignment with Europe, its foreign policy has become more sophisticated and confident under new leadership. Algeria has evolved from exporting energy while avoiding political entanglement to proactively using energy diplomacy for geopolitical leverage. This could complicate EU calculations with a trusted energy supplier.
Before 2021, Tunisia showed that democratic legitimacy could strengthen deal-making. However, the democratic breakdown in Tunis has changed this dynamic, and transactions have largely displaced principled goals. Context determines where these strategies substitute for institutional reform. Now, marked by acute economic crisis, donors and regional actors prioritize budget support and economic stabilization, often in exchange for border policing and migration control. These external accommodations and the choices of regional governments have reinforced each other by creating patterns that serve both sides’ needs without wading into deeper institutional challenges.
Egypt adopts a hybrid approach. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi combines practical deals with efforts to maintain regional leadership. Cairo engaged in bilateral migration agreements with Europe and asset sales to the United Arab Emirates to relieve its fiscal burden. At the same time, it is championing the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum as an example of a principled initiative with pragmatism. The leadership uses the forum to promote regional energy cooperation while pursuing immediate economic interests. While the forum has yet to advance Cairo’s goal of creating a coordination mechanism to build infrastructure to transport Eastern Med gas to European markets, Egypt uses it to reinforce its role as a regional diplomatic actor, even as it deals with serious domestic vulnerabilities. Egypt shows that the diplomatic approach of combining immediate pragmatism with longer-term institutional strategies is still preferrable to abandoning principled ambition.
Diplomatic recalibration
Building on sovereignty-first policies, North African states are experimenting with implementation. Domestic public sentiment that reflects heightened sensitivity to sovereignty issues and expectations of policies that reinforce autonomy and national independence supports this trend. But rather than representing a fully formed strategy, this is an ongoing process of trial and error. North African states are testing various methods of asserting agency, which explains why outcomes vary significantly across countries and issues.
North African states have capitalized on their understanding of Western partners’ vulnerabilities and dependencies, particularly with the issues of gas supply, migration control, and regional access, and are using them as leverage. Morocco’s role in security cooperation and border management allows it to influence EU and US positions on priority issues such as the Western Sahara and regional leadership. In 2015, Morocco suspended judicial cooperation with EU institutions when faced with an EU court ruling on the Western Sahara that denied Morocco’s sovereignty claims. The suspension of cooperation affected European institutions’ access to intelligence crucial to dealing with extremist threats as the continent was facing a wave of terrorist attacks. Tunisia, despite its institutional constraints, maintains negotiating space because of its geography and Europe’s political investment in curbing migration. European partners were reluctant to pressure President Kais Saied’s authoritarian turn for fear it could generate instability and drive migration toward Europe. During the 2023 Lampedusa immigration crisis, more than 12,000 Tunisians arrived in Italy after the president’s xenophobic remarks and crackdown on irregular migrants. The EU responded by announcing millions of euros for the implementation of its agreement with Tunisia, including budget support, despite human rights concerns.
Development assistance and trade incentives no longer afford Western partners the same leverage. North African countries increasingly challenge their traditional donors when political interests diverge. In 2021, Morocco allowed 8,000 undocumented migrants to cross into Spain, including unaccompanied minors. The incident was widely seen as an aggressive retaliation following a diplomatic dispute. Morocco had learned that Spain admitted the president of the Sahraoui Arab Republic’s government-in-exile and leader of Polisario forces for medical treatment, which Morocco saw as a betrayal. This incident demonstrates how even economically weaker states can create leverage.
Migration specifically illustrates concerns about how instability is reshaping relationships with Europe. Rather than the passive, donor-led partnerships, North African governments are experimenting with recalibrating approaches that better serve their priorities and allow them more equal footing. These asymmetric dependencies underscore the region’s growing diplomatic sophistication.
Trade-offs
The changes to North African diplomacy over the past 15 years have so far shown mixed results. The dominant pragmatic aspect of migration deals has reduced European political pressure on North African governments to reform. However, it has not resolved underlying migration drivers or made it easier for North African countries to effectively police their borders. Morocco’s Western Sahara strategy achieved unprecedented bilateral recognition but has not resolved the core issue at the United Nations. Algeria’s energy influence peaked during the crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but Algiers has not used it to advance its foreign policy agenda, and the leverage is subject to energy market volatility.
The new diplomatic trend may be effective at managing crises and addressing short-term goals but it offers few structural solutions. It sacrifices the foundations of long-term institutional development. Its dangers lie in the erosion of deeper ties that, to be sure, have been problematic at times but also have historically allowed partners to assist and press each other to mutual benefit.
Intissar Fakir is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute.
Photo by Lucas Neves/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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