Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his subsequent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, observers are once again concerned that the United States may be preparing to recognize key Russian territorial claims. It appears that the Trump administration may recognize the Ukrainian region of Crimea, illegally occupied since 2014, as part of Russia and accept Russian control of nearly all areas in the Donbas region, occupied since the 2022 Russian invasion.
It would not be the first time in recent years that the U.S. has formally recognized the illegal annexation of territories seized by military force — and been virtually alone in the international community in doing so.
The illegality of such territorial expansion was a founding principle of the United Nations and is embedded in that body’s charter. Indeed, the whole U.N. system grew out of a recognition of the need to prevent the kind of carnage that resulted from invasions and annexations of neighboring countries by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan during World War II. The defense of this bedrock international legal principle in the name of collective security was what the administration of George Bush Sr. used to justify the 1991 Gulf War following Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. While there was serious debate about whether war was necessary to force an Iraqi withdrawal, there was nevertheless a broad international consensus regarding the unacceptability of Iraq’s takeover of that oil-rich sheikhdom, a sovereign U.N. member state.
In contrast to Trump’s apparent appeasement of Putin’s irredentist demands, the Biden administration firmly supported Ukraine’s territorial integrity by citing what the former president referred to as the “rules-based international order.” Biden, echoed by other U.S. officials, repeatedly stressed the illegitimacy of any nation unilaterally changing international boundaries and expanding territories by military means. As a joint statement from G7 foreign ministers put it, “Any use of force to change borders is strictly prohibited under international law.”
However, when it came to two important U.S. allies — Israel and Morocco — the Biden administration and leaders of both parties demonstrated little regard for this key international principle. Indeed, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. has not only tolerated similar illegal conquests by these allies but has been virtually alone in the international community in formally supporting them.
For example, in 2019, during Trump’s first term, the U.S. became the first and only country to formally recognize Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, which the Israelis invaded in 1967 and have occupied ever since. The Biden administration essentially upheld Trump’s unilateral decision.
Following their initial conquest, Israeli forces engaged in the ethnic cleansing of as many as 130,000 Syrians, more than 95% of the region’s population. The Druze inhabitants of the five remaining villages have suffered under years of Israeli military occupation and largely remain loyal to Syria. When Israel tried to impose its laws on the region in 1981, the Syrian Druze engaged in a successful nonviolent resistance campaign, blocking Israeli efforts to force them to carry Israeli ID cards, conscript them into the Israeli military and otherwise incorporate them into Israel.
In response to Israel’s annexation announcement, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted, with the support of the Reagan administration, resolution 497, which declared that “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect” and called on Israel to rescind its action. The Reagan administration also suspended a military cooperation agreement with Israel in protest.
Israel’s refusal to abide by resolution 497 led to a second resolution, calling for action by the international community to enforce it — but that resolution was met by a U.S. veto. Subsequent U.S. administrations have similarly blocked any international efforts to enforce the ban on expanding territory by force when it has involved Israel. In December 2024, following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, when Israel broke the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria negotiated by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and invaded an even larger swath of Syrian territory, the Biden administration was virtually alone in the international community in defending the action.
For decades, the Israeli government has been building settlements in the fertile highlands and growing the Golan Heights’ Jewish population to some 31,000 people, in violation of international law and a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions that prohibit occupying powers from settling civilians in territories seized by military force. Again, successive U.S. administrations have blocked the U.N. from challenging this ongoing violation of international humanitarian law.
Despite this, the U.S. was unwilling to take the dangerous precedent of formally recognizing the annexation until Trump’s 2019 announcement. The international reaction to Trump’s decision was overwhelmingly negative. “The recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, occupied territory, would be contrary to international law, in particular the obligation for states not to recognize an illegal situation,” the French foreign ministry said. The German government condemned the “unilateral steps” taken by Washington, observing that, “If national borders should be changed, it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved.”
There were also objections from State Department veterans. Tamara Cofman Wittes, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, noted in a tweet that the decision “yanks the rug out from under U.S. policy opposing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, as well as U.S. views on other disputed territories.”
“If Washington stops upholding the core international principle opposing the acquisition of territory by force, we should expect more states to seize territory they covet from their neighbors,” Wittes and Ilan Goldenberg, another former State Department official, wrote for Politico in 2019.
In the Golan itself, protests immediately broke out following Trump’s announcement, in the face of a strong show of force by Israeli occupation troops. Israeli repression against Druze in occupied Syrian territories has continued, casting doubt on the sincerity of Israel’s claims that its recent bombings of Damascus and other targets were motivated by concern for Druze in Syria. While the accession of Islamists to power in Damascus and the attacks on Druze in the Sweida region have further divided the Druze community, there is still strong opposition among the Golan Druze to remaining under Israeli occupation.
When the Biden administration came into office in 2021, it did not reaffirm Trump’s recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation, but it failed to reverse it. Despite efforts within the State Department and pressure on Biden from congressional liberals to put the U.S. back within the international consensus on the illegality of expanding territory by force, the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Department tweeted, “U.S. policy regarding the Golan has not changed, and reports to the contrary are false.”
U.S. government maps under Biden continued to show that part of southwestern Syria as part of Israel and Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that Israeli control of the Golan Heights “remains of real importance to Israel’s security.” His defense of the ongoing occupation came despite a growing awareness among Israeli strategic analysts that holding the high ground overlooking Israel’s Galilee region is of far less importance in an era when the principal threats to Israel’s security come in the form of suicide bombers and long-range missiles. For example, Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s former defense minister and former chief of staff of the Israeli military, observed in a 2004 interview, “From the point of view of military requirements, we could reach an agreement with Syria by giving up the Golan Heights. The army could defend Israel’s borders wherever they are.”
Biden’s decision to block U.N. efforts addressing the Golan and to increase military aid and strategic cooperation with Israel, backed by bipartisan leaders in Congress, stands in sharp contrast with Reagan’s negative reaction to Israel’s initial decision. Indeed, the fact that a Democratic administration’s position regarding the expansion of territory by force was to the right of the Reagan administration — notorious for its disregard for international law in other cases — reveals how U.S. foreign policy has become increasingly hostile to what were recognized as bedrock international legal norms.
U.S. support for Israeli control of conquered Syrian territory has been a gift to the Russians. In a debate on Ukraine in September 2023, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield vowed to “work to uphold the principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter, including respect for the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all member states,” but, when asked about the status of the Golan Heights, she replied that the U.S. had not changed its recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied territory. This gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov an excuse to cite U.S. double standards as he dismissed U.S. opposition to Russia’s annexation of the Donbas, noting that the U.S. does not really “respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all U.N. member states” due to its recognition of the Israeli conquest of the Golan.
U.S. support for Israeli expansionism does not only apply to Syria. Palestinian negotiators have long expressed a willingness to accept Palestinian statehood on just 22% of historic Palestine — the territories conquered by Israel in 1967, which are recognized by the international community as under foreign belligerent occupation. Successive U.S. administrations, however, have insisted that this was asking too much and that the Palestinians had to settle for even less. For example, the percentage of West Bank territory that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was expected to give up in the proposal that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton put forward at the 2000 Camp David summit was comparable to what Trump is proposing Ukraine surrender. While Democrats have rejected such territorial concessions for Ukraine, Clinton and close to 90% of Congressional Democrats joined Republicans in criticizing Arafat for not surrendering virtually all of greater East Jerusalem (the boundaries of which the Israelis had unilaterally expanded to include large settlement blocs extending deep into the West Bank), the Jordan Valley and other lands to Israel in a manner which would have divided the West Bank into four noncontiguous cantons.
This “generous offer,” as successive U.S. presidents and congressional leaders have called it, would have given Israel control of a Palestinian state’s water resources and airspace, as well as the movement of people and goods between them. Foreshadowing Trump’s criticisms of Zelenskyy, U.S. political leaders of both parties insisted that Arafat’s refusal to hand over those lands to a foreign occupier constituted evidence that he was not actually interested in peace.
In 1980, Israel formally annexed occupied East Jerusalem and a large swath of West Bank land surrounding it, areas it had illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. No fewer than seven U.N. Security Council resolutions condemned the move, also declaring it “null and void.” The U.S. has blocked enforcement of these resolutions under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which requires the U.N. to take action to “restore international peace and security.”
Since the 1990s, U.S. government reports have treated occupied greater East Jerusalem as part of Israel and, in 2018, with strong bipartisan support, the U.S. became the first major country to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Both political parties have long insisted that the multiethnic and multifaith city remain as Israel’s “undivided” capital, disregarding the fact that Jerusalem has been the center of Palestinian political, commercial, religious and cultural life for centuries. In 2019, the Trump administration also closed down the U.S. Consulate in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, which had existed since the Mandate period in the 1930s, insisting that Palestinians go through the U.S. Embassy. Biden refused to reopen it.
Elsewhere, the U.S. does not just expect people to be willing to give up part of their territory conquered by foreign invaders, but to surrender their entire country.
In 2020, in the final weeks of his first administration, Trump made the U.S. the first country to formally recognize Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, which Morocco invaded in 1975 just prior to the territory’s scheduled independence from Spain, and in direct defiance of a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice and a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions. In return for Trump’s move, Morocco gave in to U.S. pressure to recognize Israel, joining four other Arab states in violating the long-standing Arab League position of not establishing formal diplomatic relations until Israel withdrew from occupied Arab territories.
Again, while Biden did not formally endorse Trump’s decision, he allowed it to stand. U.S. government maps under Biden began depicting Western Sahara — formally known as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) — as part of Morocco, with nothing delineating the two. Reports by the State Department and other federal agencies, which until then had treated Western Sahara as a separate entity, began including the territory as part of Morocco. While the administration claimed it still supported the U.N.-led peace process, its recognition emboldened the Moroccans to take an even harder line against allowing a referendum in the territory as an act of self-determination, as demanded by the U.N., arguing that U.S. recognition essentially resolved the issue.
At the time of the Moroccan takeover of the former Spanish colony in 1975, the U.N. Security Council unanimously called on Moroccan forces to immediately withdraw from the territory and allow the people of Western Sahara to determine their own destiny. However, both France and the U.S. prevented the Security Council from enforcing its mandate.
This didn’t stop 84 countries, at various points in time, from recognizing the SADR, which governs roughly 40% of the Western Saharan population (primarily in refugee camps in western Algeria). Western Sahara has been a full member state of the African Union since 1981. The U.S., therefore, has effectively recognized the forcible takeover of one sovereign African nation by another.
Trump’s decision was denounced from the highest echelons of U.S. diplomacy and politics. The two Americans who had served in the role of the U.N. secretary-general’s personal envoy to Western Sahara, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Ross, criticized Trump’s move as entirely inconsistent with both the search for peace and foundational American values. John Bolton, the former national security adviser, and other former senior U.S. officials also criticized the move.
Yet the Biden administration rejected bipartisan calls by congressional leaders to reverse Trump’s decision. In Congress, even some of Israel’s strongest supporters — Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe, a Republican, and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, a Democrat, for example — criticized the dangerous precedent Trump set in recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, one of the very few times since the signing of the U.N. Charter that any government has formally recognized one country’s attempt to expand its territory through the forceful annexation of another.
With the then-incoming Biden presidency promising to reverse many of the debacles of the Trump administration’s more impetuous foreign policy decisions, expectations were high that rescinding recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara would be a quick and easy step toward rectifying the situation. That Trump’s Western Sahara proclamation came after he lost the 2020 election, and had been the duplicitous cost of Moroccan recognition of Israel, only seemed to reaffirm the illegitimacy of the decision, which came not long after Morocco agreed to billions of dollars in arms purchases from the U.S. However, much to the disappointment of bipartisan congressional leaders, career State Department officials, major U.S. allies, North Africa scholars and human rights organizations, the Biden administration refused to reverse the decision.
The Biden administration, as it did in the case of Israel, effectively took the position that the expansion of territory by force is not necessarily illegal after all and can be an acceptable form of statecraft, seemingly countering the raison d’etre of the U.N. and the principal mission of the Security Council, which is to maintain international peace and security by such measures as preventing or reversing wars of aggression and territorial conquest regardless of the irredentist beliefs of the aggressor. The U.S. position on the Moroccan invasion and occupation of Western Sahara starkly contrasts with the U.S. reaction to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Iraqis — like the Moroccans — put forward dubious historical claims that their small southern neighbor was historically part of their national territory but had been amputated from the motherland by colonial machinations. From Iraq’s point of view, the annexation of Kuwait was correcting a historical injustice, similar to how the conquest of Spanish Sahara is framed in Morocco. In the case of the Gulf, the U.S. did not recognize the takeover or insist that the Kuwaitis engage in an endless and fruitless “peace process,” but rather insisted that Iraq immediately end its occupation, and then went to war less than six months later to liberate Kuwait in the name of upholding the U.N. Charter.
Trump’s formal recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the occupied territory even included the roughly 20% of Western Sahara that Morocco has never occupied and that is still under the control of the SADR. Meanwhile, only the government of Israel has joined the U.S. in formally recognizing Western Sahara as part of Morocco. Even the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, notorious for their violations of international legal norms and their support for Morocco’s occupation, refused to go as far as Trump and Biden in insisting that the annexation was somehow legitimate.
Despite paying lip service to a moribund U.N.-sponsored peace process, the U.S. effectively agrees with the Moroccan monarchy that independence should not be an option for the local population, known as Sahrawis, who possess a distinct history, dialect and culture. Unlike the Syrians and Palestinians, the Western Saharans are unified under a single recognized leadership — the Polisario Front, which governs the SADR. Despite claims by the Moroccan monarchy and its supporters to the contrary, the Polisario Front has never engaged in or supported terrorism. In addition, it has never questioned Morocco’s right to exist and have regular, free, competitive elections, so Washington does not have the excuses often used to justify Israel’s occupations, which deny the Palestinians and Syrians the right to reclaim their occupied territory.
The Moroccan regime — emboldened by the U.S. recognition — insists that independence is completely off the table and is at most willing to offer a limited degree of “autonomy” under Moroccan rule, though its provisions are vague and it would effectively allow the king unlimited power to rule over the territory should he choose to utilize it. Indeed, promises of regional autonomy by centralized authoritarian states have never succeeded, as the cases of Eritrea, Kosovo and Hong Kong illustrate. (Eritrea and Kosovo eventually won their independence, but only after devastating wars.) Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other reputable human rights organizations have documented widespread suppression of peaceful pro-independence activists by Moroccan occupation forces, including torture, beatings, detention without trial and extrajudicial killings. In 2022, Freedom House ranked Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara as second only to Assad’s Syria in its suppression of political rights.
As a result, not only does Morocco’s U.S.-backed “autonomy” plan fail to allow the Sahrawis a genuine measure of self-determination, but the ongoing repression raises serious questions regarding what it would look like in practice.
Michael McFaul, who served on Obama’s National Security Council and as U.S. ambassador to Russia, and is a leading advocate for U.S. support for Ukraine, acknowledged in 2022 that the Biden administration’s “stance against annexation in Ukraine would be strengthened if they annulled Trump’s support for Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara.” Biden refused to do so, however, providing another gift to the Kremlin and its apologists.
There are certainly parts of the world where populations have a reasonable desire for political independence, but their right to self-determination is not formally recognized because they are seen as being within the sovereign territory of a nation-state. Whatever the historical injustices that may have forced national minorities to live within the recognized borders of other states prior to the adoption of the U.N. Charter in 1945, the international community largely accepts that the people of such nations as Tibet, Chechnya and Kurdistan do not have a right to independence under international law. The U.S. and most Western nations made an exception for Kosovo, which, while legally part of Serbia, the West nevertheless actively supported in its independence struggle. Another exception was South Sudan, whose secession was also facilitated by Western nations.
By contrast, Western Sahara is officially designated by the U.N. as a “non-self-governing territory” (that is, a colony) and therefore has the right to self-determination, which by definition must include the option for independence. The fact that Washington nevertheless insists that it can be swallowed up by its northern neighbor under Morocco’s dubious “autonomy” plan underscores a bipartisan willingness to flaunt international law on even this most fundamental principle.
No nation can legitimately argue that such a foundational international legal principle as the prohibition against expanding territory by force can be ignored simply because the transgressor is a strategic ally. One either supports such principles or does not. While Russia is undeniably violating international law in its invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea and Donbas, it is important to recognize that this is not the reason Washington opposes it, since both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated they do not actually support the prohibition of such territorial expansionism per se.
A major argument against the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory is that it would set a dangerous precedent in terms of international law. But as a result of Trump’s earlier recognition of Moroccan and Israeli conquests and Biden’s refusal to reverse them, it would not be a new precedent at all. This bolsters the argument of those who, even while acknowledging the illegality of Russian aggression and the horrors Moscow has inflicted on Ukraine, question whether the prospect of reclaiming the roughly 20% of its land occupied by Russia is worth the human and material costs of continuing to support a bloody war of attrition, one which may ultimately prove unsuccessful.
The leading counterargument is that territorial concessions, even with security guarantees, could nevertheless encourage future Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Baltic republics and other nations. But Israel and Morocco also have expansionist ambitions beyond their current territorial conquests, and this did not prevent recognition by Washington of their initial annexations and ongoing occupations.
Morocco still claims large swaths of western Algeria, which it tried to conquer in the 1963 Sand War. Moroccan government maps still fail to clearly demarcate much of the border with Algeria. Similarly, Morocco initially refused to recognize an independent Mauritania upon its independence in 1960 and has claimed parts of northern Mali as well. Istiqlal, Morocco’s powerful conservative, pro-monarchist party, still supports this vision of Le Grand Maroc, or Greater Morocco.
Likewise, top Israeli officials have openly called for the annexation of the entire West Bank and support Trump’s plan for a U.S.-Israeli takeover of the Gaza Strip to level what’s left of the enclave to build a Mediterranean resort. There are even some far-right parties in the current Israeli government that support Israel taking over the East Bank, in what is now western Jordan, as well.
While an argument could be made that the geopolitical implications of further Russian expansionism are greater than those of further Moroccan or Israeli expansionism, this would appear to be primarily because most of the world’s more powerful nations are simply more concerned about the fate of Europeans than they are of Africans or Middle Easterners, not the intrinsic illegality or the human suffering that would result.
Ultimately, it will be up to the Ukrainians to decide whether to keep fighting for the return of all their territory. The Palestinians and Western Saharans have been struggling for decades to reclaim their lands. It is doubtful that the Ukrainians would quit either. All three populations are engaged in existential struggles, and as long as their resistance honors international humanitarian law, such as avoiding civilian casualties, it would be wrong to criticize them for their determination to continue their resistance.
For decades, U.S. administrations of both parties have insisted that the Palestinians, Syrians and Western Saharans under occupation are ultimately responsible for their fate and bear primary responsibility for ending the conflict with their occupiers. Now, in similar fashion, Trump claims that Zelenskyy was responsible for starting the war and, when it comes to ending the conflict, says, “It’s really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done.”
Given the asymmetrical power dynamic, however, the Ukrainians, Syrians, Palestinians and Western Saharans all need international support to win. And the failure of some governments in the Global South to support Ukraine is in large part a result of their perception that U.S. support for Ukraine is based more on geopolitical rivalry than concern for international law.
Similarly, it is doubtful that many U.S. officials are actually concerned about Russian war crimes, given their defense in recent years of war crimes by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and other allies. While Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine are indeed very serious and very real, U.S. political leaders have rarely expressed concern about civilian lives as a matter of moral or legal principle. For example, while praising the International Criminal Court for its indictments of Russian leaders, American officials have condemned and even sanctioned ICC officials for their indictments of Israeli leaders. They simply don’t believe war criminals should be held accountable if they are U.S. allies.
This doesn’t mean the U.S. (or any other government) has to be morally consistent before doing the right thing. And this doesn’t mean the U.S. can’t sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reasons. However, there is little question that recognition of Israel’s and Morocco’s illegal annexations seriously damages the credibility of U.S. efforts to gain allies in support of the Ukrainian war effort, particularly in the Global South. In my own travels in Africa, South Asia and elsewhere since the Russian invasion, when I have defended U.S. policy toward Ukraine, both cab drivers and cabinet officials would bring up U.S. recognition of the Israeli and/or Moroccan annexations to make the case that the West’s opposition to Russian irredentism is about geopolitics, not international law.
The fact that the Moroccan and Israeli occupations are not recognized by any other countries but the U.S. (and the occupying powers themselves) puts Washington in a singularly weak position to lead the international community in taking a stand against Russia’s illegal irredentist ambitions. And it underscores the fact that while Trump’s willingness to recognize Russia’s annexations may be a departure from Biden’s policy with respect to Ukraine, when it comes to supporting territorial expansion by force, it in fact makes U.S. policy more consistent.
We may, unfortunately, be seeing a return to the “great power” politics of an earlier era, in which the powerful believe they have the right to divide up the lands of weaker nations in order to advance their interests. What is at stake, then, is not just the rights of the people of Palestine, the Golan, Western Sahara and Ukraine, but the entire post-World War II international legal system.
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