🇺🇸 x 🇪🇭 On March 11, Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Rick Scott introduced S.4063, known as the Polisario Front Terrorist Designation Act of 2026. The text proposes sanctions against the Polisario Front if it cooperates with organizations linked to Iran. In the House, meanwhile, H.R. 4119, introduced by Joe Wilson in June 2025, which takes that cooperation as a given and calls for the direct designation of the Polisario as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, remains active.

The problem is that if the link with Iran and Hezbollah already exists (as Wilson's bill claims), what is the point of proposing sanctions only if it happens in the future? The coexistence of both texts reveals that even their own proponents are not certain about the facts they invoke.

The Global Monitoring Center, a New York-based organization, formally pointed this out in a letter addressed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dated March 14. The document warns that legislating on terrorism based on allegations not verified by any international body risks turning counter-terrorism mechanisms into instruments of political pressure.

There is a detail in H.R. 4119: the waiver clause that allows the president to lift any sanctions if the Polisario moves towards accepting the Moroccan autonomy plan of 2007. Thus, the sanctions (allegedly motivated by security reasons) are conditioned on a specific political surrender.

Several former Cruz collaborators currently work representing Moroccan positions in Washington. All of this is framed within two priorities of the Trump administration: the consolidation of the Abraham Accords and the construction of an anti-Iranian axis in which Morocco occupies an increasingly central place.

The objective would be to "associate the Polisario with the demonized image of Iran and designate it as a terrorist group, which would turn Algeria into a state sponsor of terrorism." According to former Algerian minister Rahabi, these coordinated initiatives can only be interpreted as instruments of pressure from an administration seeking to compensate for its stalemate in the conflict with Iran. "Bogged down in an open confrontation with Iran that exceeds its forecasts, Trump manifestly seeks to reposition himself as a man of peace," he writes.

Meanwhile, Western Sahara remains legally what it has always been: a Non-Self-Governing Territory under international law, with Spain as the de jure administering power and Morocco as the de facto occupying power. MINURSO has been on the ground since 1991 supervising a referendum process that never gets completed. Designating one of the parties to that process as a terrorist organization would solve nothing. It would definitively sink it.

That is, depending on what the real objective is.