His Majesty’s Plunder: The Royal Machine Behind The Trump Highway and Western Sahara’s Phosphate Wealth

His Majesty’s Plunder: The Royal Machine Behind The Trump Highway and Western Sahara’s Phosphate Wealth The Cradle’s N. Africa Correspondent There is a machine in the Sahara you can see from space. A conveyor belt, the longest on earth, nearly one hundred kilometers of steel from a mine called Bou Craa to the Atlantic. For half a century it has moved phosphate out of occupied Western Sahara, through wars, ceasefires, and a promised referendum that never came. The richest layer of the deposit is already gone, sold before the Sahrawis could ever vote on it. And the electricity that keeps the belt running is sold to the state by a wind farm belonging to the king. On 26 July, US President Donald Trump announced that the highway running past this machine now carries his name. The announcement arrived as a four-minute Truth Social video, narrated by an obvious AI voice praising his “historic courage.” Rabat, six days on, has not said the name out loud. It does not need to. The name was never the payment. The road is. It is 1,055 kilometers of settlement poured across Africa’s last colony, the kind of road empires have always built and named for themselves. It connects the mine, the port, an Israeli-held offshore block, and the duty-free fertilizer now sailing for New Orleans under an emergency Washington manufactured itself. Follow it far enough and the asphalt runs from phosphate to palace. An occupation, bought in installments Every payment has a paper trail, and this one begins five years before the name. The convention that built the road was signed in the presence of Moroccan King Mohammed VI in El-Aaiun (also known as Laayoune) in 2015, on the 40th anniversary of the Green March, at a cost of 10 billion Moroccan dirhams (MAD) – or around $1.074 billion. Morocco poured its annexation in asphalt, as empires always have, long before Washington blessed it. What arrived in December 2020 was not the road. It was the signature. Morocco became the fourth Arab state to normalize relations with the occupation state, and in exchange the US recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the whole of Western Sahara. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, negotiated the deal and supplied the doctrine, likening the Sahara recognition to Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. One occupation legitimized on the template of another. The architect said it so no analyst has to. Tel Aviv paid its own installment in July 2023, when Netanyahu sent Mohammed VI a letter recognizing the Moroccan claim. A senior Moroccan official explained what the letter was for – Rabat expects the recognition to encourage Israeli investment in the territory. Recognition as prospectus. This is trans-Zionism as designed: the occupation state sets the template, Washington executes, the client kingdom collects. What the road runs past South of El-Aaiun, the machine comes back into view. The Bou Craa mine feeds its conveyor belt to the harbor at El-Aaiun, where bulk vessels have carried the territory’s wealth abroad since 1975. According to thefigures of the world’s largest phosphate and fertilizer producer, Morocco’s OCP Group, Bou Craa delivers around a fifth of the company’s exports from just eight percent of its extracted vol