When roughly 60,000 migrants surged into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, much of the American right-wing reacted with predictable horror. President Donald Trump has likened the scenes to an invasion. He suggested that the Spanish government “doesn’t know what to do” due to “bad management.”
Trump was seconded by Vice President JD Vance who called the images from Spain “an unfortunate reminder of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.” And the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder decried an alleged absence of resolve in Madrid to fight illegal migration.
Such outrage is a masterclass in bad faith.
True, the Spanish government was caught flatfooted before such a massive invasion. To be fair, given the scale, it’s not far-fetched to suggest that many governments would be likewise unprepared. More serious was an apparent failure to heed the warnings of Spain’s own national intelligence about the possible invasion, as reported by the generally socialist-friendly radio station Cadena Ser . It is entirely legitimate to question the government’s performance, to scrutinize what went wrong, and to take action to remedy the failures.
However, the crisis was quickly defused. The Moroccans who crossed the border in Ceuta were swiftly, in less than 48 hours, returned to their homeland by the decisive action of Spanish security forces, without ever crossing the Gibraltar Strait to the mainland Spain. There were no reported incidents affecting the safety and property of Ceuta residents. Rather than the “absence of resolve” that the U.S. ambassador complained about, it was an apt demonstration of resolve.
Further, the critics often link the events in Ceuta to the massive regularization of illegal immigrants—around a million of them—by the socialist government of Pedro Sanchez. But that conflation doesn’t make sense. That regularization applied only to residents in Spain prior to December 31, 2025. Most of them are Latin Americans, closely tied to Spain by virtue of shared language, religion, and culture. It didn’t affect EU borders in any way.
But there is more to it as far as the United States specifically is involved. Just weeks prior to the incident, nearly every Republican in the House of Representatives voted to actively undermine Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla.
This audacious move was tucked into the fiscal year 2027 appropriations bill for national security. The House voted to allocate $40 million to Morocco, including $20 million for security and $20 million in military financing. The accompanying report by the Committee on Appropriations explicitly called into question Spain’s sovereignty over its North African enclaves. The report supported the Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “efforts to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.”
The vote was almost unanimous among Republicans. Only libertarian Thomas Massie (R-KY) had the principle to vote against it. In essence, the party voted to legitimize Morocco’s territorial claims, providing diplomatic fuel to the very pressure campaign that has now manifested as a border crisis.
Not everybody on the right was on the same page. Ann Coulter, an influential conservative figure, backed Massie . “Why does the Congress say Spain should be ‘negotiating’ with Morocco over ‘the future’ of Ceuta,” she wondered, adding rhetorically, “Should we be negotiating with Mexico over the future of Texas?”. Ceuta, after all, has been part of the Spanish kingdom since 1580.
The real reason of this vindictive policy is not the migrants and the overwrought claims about the imminent collapse of the Western civilization. It is about Madrid’s foreign policy. Pedro Sanchez’s government has infuriated the U.S. establishment by opposing the illegal Iran war and refusing to grant the United States airspace for strikes on Tehran.
Spain, a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, also demanded the suspension of the EU-Israel trade agreement, which gives Israel preferential access to the EU market. Morocco, by contrast, joined the Abraham Accords , a scheme to “normalize” relations between Israel and Arab countries promoted in Trump’s first term.
Madrid’s independent policy has infuriated Trump, who repeatedly demanded a halt in all trade with Spain (a nonsensical demand that would imply stopping all U.S. trade with the EU as a whole). Hawkish pundits like Michael Rubin and commentators in Israeli media started looking into other ways to punish Madrid.
Earlier this year, Rubin suggested in a paper for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute that the United States should actively support Moroccan claims over Ceuta and Melilla as retribution for Spanish defiance. This is not fringe speculation; it is the ideological blueprint that has now been translated into legislative action.
Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv, however, engineered the migrant surge. Morocco has long used migration as a geopolitical cudgel to pressure Madrid.
The current incident was triggered instead by Sanchez’s visit last month to Algeria , Morocco’s regional rival, for the first time in four years. Relations between Madrid and Algiers soured after Sanchez in 2022, in an abrupt and unilateral manner, broke the national consensus on Western Sahara to back Moroccan claims over the territory. Sanchez even sacrificed his own foreign minister to appease Morocco.
Algeria—a principal backer of the Polisario Front, the movement for self-determination of Western Sahara—responded by freezing the friendship treaty with Spain.
Sanchez’s visit to restore these relations—Algeria is Spain’s top natural gas supplier —provided a clear political backdrop and a moment of leverage for Rabat. It turned out that even the earlier concessions on Western Sahara failed to prevent the weaponization of migration by Morocco to blackmail Spain.
Nevertheless, whatever its disagreements with Madrid’s current foreign policy, the United States has no right to question the territorial integrity of Spain,. There is simply no U.S. national interest involved in this.
The right’s outrage over Ceuta is a smokescreen. Neoconservatives and MAGA activists alike feign horror at Spain’s “porous borders.” Yet their own House majority voted to legitimize Moroccan claims on Spanish territory. They are not defending Western civilization. They are punishing a NATO ally for refusing to bend to U.S.-Israeli regional hegemony. By undermining Spain’s sovereignty, they have become co-architects of the very crisis they now exploit. Meanwhile, their concern for international law—and U.S. national interest—remains conspicuously absent.
The post Ceuta: How Washington Manufactured Outrage Over a Crisis It Helped Create appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .
Ceuta: How Washington Manufactured Outrage Over a Crisis It Helped Create
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.