US Seeks To End MINURSO Peacekeeping In Western Sahara
Throughout the year, Washington had repeatedly signaled that drawing down or streamlining MINURSO’s mandate, among other missions, was under consideration.
By Adil Faouzi
Marrakech – Washington is working to end the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz confirmed last week in an interview with the Financial Times.
His remarks followed a US draft resolution on Western Sahara, dated October 20 and now circulating at the Security Council. The zero draft would rename the mission and wind down its military role on a fixed timetable.
The text calls for changing the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) into the United Nations Mission for Western Sahara (MINUSO), dropping the reference to a referendum.
The draft directs a cut of at least 50% in authorized uniformed personnel by January 31, 2027. The peacekeeping mandate would “terminate on 30 April 2027,” after which the operation would continue as a special political mission until October 31, 2027.
The draft also carries Morocco’s position on the substance of the dispute. It affirms that “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only feasible solution,” and it welcomes “President Trump’s leadership on conflict resolution in Western Sahara.”
It records three rounds of direct talks in Washington and Madrid between Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria, and Mauritania, while deploring “the failure of one party to engage substantively.”
The proposal condemns a May 5 attack on the town of Es-Smara, points to worsening conditions in the Tindouf refugee camps, and calls on the UN refugee agency to register the camp population within six months.
The diplomatic shifts have coincided with movement on the ground. Captain Asa D. Kim, the American chief of staff of MINURSO’s military component, has ended his duties and left Laayoune, according to a UN source cited in the Moroccan press. His departure came as the Security Council weighed the mission’s future ahead of the October 31 expiry of its mandate.
The US position hardened over the year. In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department pledged in its strategic plan for 2026-2030 to “wind down costly and ineffective peacekeeping and special political missions,” without naming MINURSO.
Waltz drew the connection to Western Sahara in March, telling a congressional field hearing on UN reform that the US was reviewing “the peacekeeping force in Western Sahara that has been there for 50 years.”
MINURSO was in fact established in 1991, making it approximately 35 years old in 2026.
In April, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Washington had tied “the renewal of the peacekeeping force” to “an actual political process using the Moroccan autonomy plan as the basis for talks,” arguing that missions “should solve problems, not exist indefinitely.” He also confirmed that Washington was pursuing the downsizing or closure of missions considered to have outlived their purposes.
Other officials pressed the same case. In September, Jeffrey Bartos, US representative for UN management and reform, told the Security Council the US “must be willing to terminate missions that fail to adapt.”
In an interview with Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal that month, Waltz criticized peacekeeping operations that had remained deployed for several decades and argued aging missions “freeze conflicts rather than resolving them.”
According to Africa Intelligence, Rubio’s State Department convened experts from the International Crisis Group and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in early October for consultations to weigh whether to abolish or revise the mission before the impending vote.
The argument against MINURSO had circulated well before. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) wrote in October 2024 that “MINURSO has failed,” describing a mission that had cost donor nations hundreds of millions of dollars and faulting Secretary-General António Guterres for keeping “zombie agencies and missions” alive.
He returned to the theme in March 2025, writing that “thirty-four years and billions of dollars later, MINURSO has not even conducted a census.” He branded such operations “self-licking ice cream cones” and pushed for a rule of “10 years or out, with no extensions.”
The draft has not been adopted. The Security Council can still modify, approve, or reject it before MINURSO’s mandate expires on October 31.
