How Algeria’s long-term strategy shapes its rivalry with Morocco
Algeria’s strategic rivalry with Morocco: a defining feature of north african geopolitics
The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands out as one of the most enduringly conflictual bilateral ties in the contemporary world, with consequences that ripple across regional stability. Since gaining independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, the two nations have navigated a complex interplay of cautious cooperation and open hostility. This dynamic has been punctuated by border disputes, diplomatic ruptures, closed borders, and a cold-war-style rivalry for regional dominance that has persisted across generations of leaders on both sides of the Zouj Bghal border crossing. The central question this analysis explores is whether opposing Morocco has become, in practice, Algeria’s long-term national strategy — a guiding principle shaping its foreign policy, military posture, regional diplomacy, and even elements of its domestic legitimacy.
While the Algerian state is far too complex to be reduced to a single obsession — it is, after all, a nation of 32 million people with a hydrocarbon-dependent economy, a young and often frustrated population, persistent governance challenges, and security threats along five distinct borders unrelated to Rabat — the opposite claim is equally unsustainable. Morocco cannot be dismissed as an incidental factor in Algeria’s strategic calculus.
The position taken here is more nuanced: opposition to Morocco has evolved into one of the most durable, institutionalized, and costly principles driving Algeria’s regional policy, without entirely exhausting the country’s broader strategic horizon. This rivalry did not emerge overnight; it is rooted in historical grievances, conflicting national narratives, and competing visions of regional leadership that have hardened over decades.
Historical roots: from colonial borders to the sands war
The seeds of the Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algeria’s independence itself. The French colonial administration, over more than a century, redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan borderlands separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing territories such as Tindouf, Béchar, and the Figuig region — areas historically administered or claimed by Rabat. Morocco gained independence in 1956, six years before Algeria, and Moroccan nationalists, including a young Hassan II, initially supported Algeria’s liberation struggle as a pan-Maghreb cause, offering sanctuary, weapons supply lines, and diplomatic backing to the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the 1954–1962 war.
Rabat expected an independent and grateful Algeria to negotiate the return of territories lost to colonization. This expectation collided head-on with the post-independence Algerian leadership’s doctrine, adopted under Ahmed Ben Bella, that colonial-era borders were sacrosanct and non-negotiable — a principle later enshrined continent-wide by the 1964 Cairo resolution of the Organization of African Unity on the inviolability of colonial borders.
This clash culminated in the brief but foundational Sands War of October 1963, fought in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors. Although a ceasefire was brokered within weeks through the intervention of the Organization of African Unity and Ethiopian arbitration, the conflict left a residue of strategic mistrust that never fully dissipated. For Algeria’s revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests. For the Moroccan palace, it confirmed the image of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state, closely tied to the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had once hosted its liberation movement. These two narratives, though partisan, have proven remarkably durable, resurfacing during every subsequent crisis.
Academic perspectives: rival providers of regional security
Academic literature on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges, with some variations in emphasis, toward a broadly similar diagnosis. Comparative studies on regional security provision in the Maghreb have characterized both states as competing “regional security providers,” whose overlapping leadership claims generate structural friction independent of any specific dispute (Boukhars, 2019). Historians of French Algeria have situated the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: the works of Stora frame the 130 years of colonial occupation and the independence war as central to the formation of Algerian political identity, fostering a foreign policy culture that is markedly sovereigntist and anti-interventionist, far more suspicious of external engagement — including Moroccan — than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory (Stora, 2020; Stora, 2021). Studies of the 2019 Hirak movement similarly emphasize that the movement’s core demands were domestic and institutional — centered on transparency and accountability of the ruling elite — even as external threat narratives were later mobilized by the state in the movement’s aftermath (Souiah, 2021).
Taken together, this body of research does not support a monocausal reading in which Morocco explains all of Algeria’s foreign policy. Yet it consistently identifies rivalry as a structuring — not peripheral — feature of the regional order, rooted in colonial and revolutionary experiences that shaped the two states in fundamentally different ways.
The Amazigh identity dimension: a shared heritage weaponized
A less frequently examined but analytically significant layer of the rivalry involves competing claims over Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco are home to large Amazighophone populations — concentrated in Kabylia, the Aurès, and M’Zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco. Both states have, at varying paces and degrees of sincerity, granted constitutional recognition to Tamazight, Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016. Yet the political meaning attached to Amazigh identity diverges sharply between the two capitals, and this divergence has periodically seeped into the broader rivalry.
In Algeria, the Kabyle Amazigh movement has at times articulated autonomy demands that the central government has treated as a security issue. Algerian authorities have occasionally accused Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a tool of destabilization, a charge Rabat has consistently denied. In Morocco, by contrast, the palace has integrated cultural Amazigh recognition — including the 2001 creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and the 2011 constitutional reforms — into an inclusive national narrative centered on the monarchy, rather than framing it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational legacy, rooted in the pre-Arab-Islamic Amazigh substratum of both societies, has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry rather than serving, as it could, as the basis for cross-border cultural cooperation.
The Western Sahara dispute: the institutional backbone of rivalry
If the Sands War forged the psychological architecture of the rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute has provided its enduring institutional content. Spain’s withdrawal from its Saharan colony in 1975, precipitated by Morocco’s mobilization of some 350,000 unarmed civilians in the Green March, triggered a conflict that has structured bilateral relations for half a century. Morocco has since annexed and administered most of the territory, proposing an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty as the only realistic basis for resolution. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition over Western Sahara, has hosted since 1976 the government-in-exile and refugee camps of the Polisario Front, provided diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and championed the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic within African Union and United Nations forums.
The narratives of each side are total and mutually exclusive. Algiers frames its stance as the application of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter and consistent with its own anti-colonial genealogy. Rabat, along with a growing number of external observers, contends that Algeria is a de facto party to the dispute rather than a neutral sponsor of Sahrawi self-determination, pointing to the Polisario leadership’s location, financing, and institutional dependence on Algerian territory — a charge Algiers consistently denies. The dispute has proven strategically self-sustaining: because sovereignty over Western Sahara is presented by Rabat as a matter of territorial integrity — the most sacred national cause — and by Algiers as a decolonization principle, neither government has the domestic leeway to compromise without appearing to betray a foundational commitment. Over five decades, this mutual entrapment has transformed a regional territorial dispute into a fixed coordinate around which nearly all other dimensions of the bilateral relationship, and much of Algeria’s broader foreign policy, now revolve.
The diplomatic tide began to shift after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of a trilateral normalization agreement with Israel, and has accelerated as an increasing number of European and African governments — notably France, given its long-awaited strategic treaty with Morocco — have moved toward explicit or implicit support for the autonomy plan. Algeria has interpreted this trend as evidence of encirclement rather than a reason for recalibration, a perception that has, if anything, hardened its posture.
Foreign policy through the Morocco lens
Algerian diplomacy since the 1970s has exhibited a recurring pattern: initiatives pursued ostensibly for their own sake — African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation — often serve as instruments to contain Moroccan influence. Several arenas illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity.
- African Union: Algeria played a pivotal role in the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to the Organization of African Unity in 1984, a move that triggered Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco rejoined the African Union in January 2017 — substituting its “empty chair” strategy with direct diplomatic engagement — Algeria intensified its own continental outreach, courting Sahelian and sub-Saharan capitals in what amounted to a renewed competition for African recognition of the rival Sahrawi positions.
- Normalization with Israel: Morocco’s December 2020 decision to normalize ties with Israel, secured in exchange for U.S. recognition of its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a new axis of confrontation. Algeria, whose foreign policy identity has long integrated solidarity with the Palestinian cause as an ideological principle, interpreted the move as a strategic repositioning that brought Israeli security and intelligence presence to its western flank. Algerian authorities, along with much of the state-aligned press, subsequently promoted the notion of an “anti-Algerian axis” coordinating Rabat, Washington, and Tel Aviv — a framing that, while likely overestimating Algeria’s centrality in Israeli strategic calculations, has concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning.
- Breakdown and escalation, 2021: In August 2021, Algeria formally severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, citing what it termed hostile acts, then closed its airspace to Moroccan civilian and military aircraft, permanently suspended the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline that had for a quarter-century carried Algerian gas across Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure in place since 1994. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sands War, illustrating how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policies on infrastructure, energy, and airspace.
- Recomposition of 2026: Morocco’s foundational participation in the U.S.-sponsored “Board of Peace” initiative in January 2026 — as a founding member, top financial contributor, and first Arab country to commit troops — further widened the diplomatic gulf with Algiers. This move reinforced Morocco’s positioning as what one analysis termed the Arab pivot of an emergent regional order anchored in Washington. Algeria, which has cultivated deeper defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly with China, now finds itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical fault line that closely — though not exclusively — overlaps with the long-standing Algerian-Moroccan rivalry.
Domestic politics and the instrumentalization of external rivalry
A substantial body of political science argues that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often derive benefits from external threat narratives — a dynamic sometimes referred to as diversionary conflict theory. Algerian political history offers recurring illustrations. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s, sparked by the annulment of 1991–1992 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front and resulting in an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 deaths, the militarized establishment consolidated an opaque and unaccountable form of power — a configuration critics and opposition voices have long described through the contested but persistent trope of “le pouvoir” or the “mafia of generals” — a governing arrangement in which military, security, and economic interests are closely intertwined and largely shielded from electoral accountability. This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco foremost among them, to bolster internal cohesion and deflect attention from governance failures.
The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth presidential term, posed the most serious domestic challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, intergenerational, and focused on domestic demands — ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections, and accountable governance — rather than foreign policy grievances. Yet the state’s response to the legitimacy crisis exposed by the Hirak included, alongside real institutional adjustments, a perceptible intensification of external threat rhetoric. Accusations of foreign interference — often Moroccan and, after 2020, Israeli — occupied a prominent place in official and state-aligned media discourse. This pattern repeated itself during the 2021 diplomatic rupture, which followed a period of persistent social tension and slow political transition under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
It would be reductive to claim that Algerian governance is organized *exclusively* around this diversionary logic. The state continues to invest heavily in housing, food and energy subsidies, higher education expansion, and industrial diversification efforts, reflecting real domestic development priorities independent of the Moroccan rivalry. Yet the recurring coincidence between moments of domestic political tension and the intensification of anti-Moroccan mobilization in official discourse is difficult to dismiss as coincidental, and constitutes one of the clearest mechanisms by which external rivalry has become embedded in public policy.
The economic cost of enduring confrontation
Nowhere is the price of prolonged rivalry more measurable than in the economic sphere. The Arab Maghreb Union, founded with great fanfare in 1989 by Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, aimed for a common market, coordinated infrastructure, and ultimately a customs union modeled loosely on the European model. Instead, it has remained moribund for over three decades, its ministerial councils largely inactive and its founding ambitions unfulfilled. Intra-Maghreb trade remains among the lowest levels of regional economic integration in the world; various estimates place formal trade between Algeria and Morocco at less than three percent of each country’s total trade — a stark contrast with the commercial intensity typically observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.
The closure of the land border since 1994 — originally imposed by Morocco following a terrorist attack in Marrakech that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failures, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings — entrenched this separation, giving rise instead to a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor formal employment for either state. The 2021 permanent suspension of the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline terminated a decades-old functional bilateral economic interdependence — one of the few to survive previous diplomatic freezes — in favor of parallel and mutually exclusive energy corridors: Algeria rerouted its gas exports via the Medgaz pipeline directly to Spain, while Morocco promoted the ambitious Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic pipeline project designed to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and, by implication, Algerian leverage over regional transit (Chtatou, 2025, 14 October).
By comparison, regional groupings with far less obvious economic complementarity than that uniting Algeria and Morocco — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southern African Development Community, or even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council — have achieved markedly higher levels of intra-regional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment over comparable periods. This underscores that Maghreb stagnation stems from a political constraint rather than structural or geographical inevitability. Regional economists have long argued that a truly cooperative Maghreb could unlock substantial welfare gains through integrated transport corridors linking Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis; expanded intra-regional trade leveraging Algeria’s hydrocarbon wealth and Morocco’s manufacturing and agricultural exports; coordinated renewable energy infrastructure exploiting shared Saharan solar potential; deeper regional capital markets; a significantly expanded tourism market; and a collective bargaining position substantially strengthened vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. Instead, both governments have pursued largely parallel and non-complementary development strategies — duplicated port and logistics infrastructure, competing Sahelian and African outreach, defense spending largely oriented toward mutual deterrence — imposing what regional economists have termed one of the world’s most considerable unexploited integration dividends.
Military competition and the security dilemma
The material expression of rivalry is nowhere more visible than in defense budgets. Algeria has maintained one of Africa’s highest military expenditures for more than a decade, officially justified by instability along its borders with Libya, Mali, and Niger, and broader Sahel insecurity following the collapse of state authority in northern Mali after 2012 and the subsequent proliferation of jihadist and separatist armed groups. Algerian authorities consistently frame these expenditures as defensive and regionally oriented rather than specifically directed against Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has pursued parallel and substantial military modernization, diversifying acquisitions among U.S., European, and — since the 2020 normalization — Israeli suppliers. It has acquired advanced air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, and unmanned aerial systems, while deepening security and intelligence cooperation with Washington through the annual African Lion exercises, now among the largest multinational military drills on the continent.
Even when each state’s security calculus responds to genuinely distinct threats unrelated to Morocco — Algeria’s southern and eastern borders, Morocco’s Atlantic and Saharan posture — modernization efforts by each side are nearly always interpreted by the other through the lens of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defensive acquisitions are perceived as threatening, triggering reciprocal escalation. The closure of Algerian airspace to Moroccan aircraft since 2021, and periodic reports of reinforced troop deployments and fortifications along the closed land border, illustrate how quotidian management of the relationship has become militarized, despite the absence of open conflict since 1963.
Competing models of regional leadership
Beyond security and diplomacy, Morocco and Algeria have in recent years articulated genuinely distinct development and geopolitical visions for their own regional leadership, though these remain trapped in implicit competition. Morocco has pursued a strategy centered on economic diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and Atlantic-facing infrastructure: expansion of Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promotion of the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and the recent launch of the African Atlantic States Initiative aimed at giving landlocked Sahelian states — many now governed by juntas estranged from Paris and, in several cases, from ECOWAS — access to the Atlantic via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistics bridge between landlocked Sahel and global markets.
Algeria, leveraging its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and long-cultivated identity of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity rooted in the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in Mali’s internal conflicts (notwithstanding the 2024 breakdown of the Algiers Accords process with Bamako’s military government), and a foreign policy identity anchored in sovereigntist and anti-interventionist principles. These strategies are not, in the abstract, mutually exclusive; a truly cooperative Maghreb could in principle accommodate both a Moroccan Atlantic corridor and an Algerian Sahelian mediation role. In practice, however, each initiative is systematically read by the other capital as an attempt at regional encirclement, and the diplomatic energy that could otherwise support complementary regional development is instead devoted to mutual containment.
Public diplomacy and the media battle
The rivalry is not confined to formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions; it also plays out through sustained competition for international public opinion and media narratives. Both governments maintain extensive networks of aligned media, foreign lobbying arrangements, and academic and think-tank outreach designed to shape how the Western Sahara dispute and the bilateral relationship more broadly are perceived abroad, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Morocco’s diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with U.S. and European policymakers, journalists, and parliamentarians, efforts that bore significant fruit with the 2020 U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the broader diplomatic momentum favoring the autonomy plan. Algeria’s diplomacy has responded in kind, mobilizing its own networks — including sympathetic voices within pro-Polisario advocacy circles, segments of the European left, and the liberation solidarity networks inherited from the FLN’s revolutionary past — to contest Moroccan sovereignty claims and publicize human rights allegations in Moroccan-administered Western Sahara.
This competition has occasionally spilled into unrelated state friction. Diplomatic tensions between Algeria and France over historical memory, migration, and the 2024 detention of Algerian-French dissidents occurred within a context in which Algiers explicitly linked French policy choices to what it perceives as a pro-Rabat bias within the French political and media establishment, illustrating how the Moroccan rivalry has come to color even relationships, like that with France, that possess their own long-standing and independent bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments a priori unrelated — a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup — are systematically interpreted by both capitals through the interpretive grid of rivalry, confirming the finding that runs through this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely foreign to this rivalry.
Is opposing Morocco Algeria’s sole long-term strategy? An assessment
Having traced the rivalry across multiple interconnected domains, a more precise verdict on the opening question becomes possible. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s *sole* long-term national program does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability within an ongoing post-Hirak transition; reducing dependence on an economy still heavily reliant on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; addressing acute demographic and youth employment pressures in a country where the majority of the population is under 35; ensuring food and water security amid recurrent droughts; modernizing aging infrastructure; and managing a particularly complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has no direct bearing on the Moroccan dossier.
Yet the nuanced counter-thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most durable, consistently invoked, and decisive principles shaping Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionate to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests. Few other bilateral relationships so consistently and visibly shape Algerian alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, African Union positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (abandonment of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, redirection of export corridors), and domestic political discourse as does the Moroccan file. The rivalry functions less as one interest among others, on equal footing in the competition for political attention, than as a persistent filter through which a wide range of otherwise unrelated domains come to be interpreted, and frequently distorted.
The opportunity cost of this configuration is considerable and increasingly well documented. North Africa remains one of the world’s least economically integrated regions, despite possessing precisely the kind of complementary economic endowments — Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan manufacturing, logistics, and market access — that elsewhere in the world have powered successful regional integration projects. The persistence of confrontation, rather than the underlying Western Sahara territorial dispute itself, appears as the most immediate obstacle to regional cooperation, since the dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as was largely the case during the 1988–1994 period and in more partial ways until hostility resumed in the 2020s.
Rivalry or renewal? Prospects for the Maghreb
The trajectory of the North African regional order over the coming decade will largely hinge on Algeria and Morocco’s ability to build functional cooperation mechanisms that do not require the prior resolution of the Western Sahara dispute — a resolution that, given hardened and mutually incompatible positions, appears unlikely in the short term regardless of shifts in international recognition patterns. Confidence-building measures akin to those that have periodically eased other prolonged regional disputes elsewhere in the world — technical dialogue on shared Sahelian threats such as terrorism, arms trafficking, and organized crime; gradual sectoral economic exchanges insulated from broader diplomatic freezes; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the sizeable Algerian and Moroccan diasporas with family ties across the closed border — could, in principle, begin to erode the rigidity of the current impasse without requiring either government to abandon its core sovereignty position.
The realization of such measures depends heavily on domestic political conditions in both countries that extend beyond the strict bilateral diplomacy framework: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the internal balance between reformist factions and factions attached to the status quo within its security establishment; the pace and solidity of Morocco’s ongoing diplomatic consolidation around its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, which reduces incentives for Rabat to offer concessions that might be perceived domestically as superfluous; and the broader realignment of external alignments — American, European, Russian, Chinese, and Gulf — that increasingly overlays and hardens the underlying bilateral dispute in places.
Conclusion: beyond the rivalry?
The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands as one of the most defining — and costly — features of contemporary North African geopolitics. It would be inaccurate and analytically reductive to conclude that opposing Morocco represents the *sole* long-term political and economic program of Algeria. The Algerian state pursues a genuinely broad range of domestic and regional priorities independent of Rabat, from Sahelian security to hydrocarbon diversification to demographic management. Yet it would be equally erroneous to treat this rivalry as a marginal or merely episodic feature of Algerian policy. Across diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, and defense planning, opposition to Morocco has become one of the most constant, institutionalized, and costly threads of Algerian state action since 1962 — a pattern that has hardened rather than softened through successive crises of 2020–2021 and 2026. Whether this pattern continues to dominate the North African landscape or gives way to pragmatic, sectoral cooperation will determine not only the future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb — a region whose considerable and untapped potential offers the clearest proof that prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs that neither society can indefinitely afford.
The analytical task is therefore not to arbitrate which side bears the greater responsibility for the impasse — a question that falls outside the scope of dispassionate analysis and to which each society’s internal discourse responds predictably and uniformly by assigning blame to the other — but to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the facts: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sands War and the unresolved Western Sahara question, into a self-sustaining organizing logic capable of absorbing and reconfiguring almost every adjacent domain it touches, from Amazigh cultural politics to Sahelian diplomacy to hydrocarbon infrastructure. Taking the measure of this logic, and the considerable margin of maneuver each government possesses to loosen its grip, constitutes the necessary prerequisite to any future in which the shared geography of the Maghreb becomes an asset rather than, as it has been for the past half-century, a perpetually contested border.
