The US calls it “expensive” and “obsolete”

The United States contributes approximately one fifth of the budget ordinary UN, which amounted to $820 million in 2025. Therefore, it requires structural reforms, including a possible 25% reduction in the number of peacekeepers and new regulations.

The goal, according to the Americans, is optimize costs and link deployments to results tangible political consequences, that is, ensuring that these operations continue “indefinitely” without the desired results. This decision goes beyond the purely technical, it is subordinated to political results.

At a US Congressional hearing in New York on March 20, UN Ambassador Mike Waltzdeclared that Washington is reviewing several UN missions, with special attention to MINURSO, which has been operating since 1991. He also noted that the UN budget is had quadrupled in 25 yearswithout a comparable increase in global security and peace.

“We are considering a strategic review of the force peacekeeping in Western Saharawhich has been deployed for 50 years,” Waltz said at the meeting, which focused on the overall reform of UN peacekeeping operations in the context of US military operations against Iran.

Specifically, Waltz believes that in this way it prevents peacekeeping forces deployed for decades from being used as a pretext to postpone a true political resolution.

The peace mission in the Sahara

Precisely, after resolution 2797, approved on October 31, 2025 in the Security Council, the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterresmust present in April “a strategic review regarding the future mandate of MINURSO, taking into account the outcome of the negotiations” between the parties, and the political and security situation.

That is, it could influence the decisions of the next phase of UN intervention in Western Sahara. The ground has been prepared for months, at the same time as Morocco pressed to recognize his plan of autonomy as a solution to the conflict they have been waging for five decades.

In this way, a delegation of the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces (FAR) has recently traveled to New York, as reported by Yabiladi. The conversations with senior United Nations officials focused mainly on the future of MINURSO and the situation of the buffer zones east of the wall that separates Western Sahara in the south with Mauritania, a territory that the Polisario Front considers “liberated” against Rabat, which is trying to impose its control.

Thus, for example, after the breakdown of the ceasefire in November 2020, Morocco paved the road that leads to the Guerguerat border, the entrance to Mauritania. One more attempt by the Maghreb country to take over the sovereignty of the entire Sahrawi territory.

Furthermore, the United States wants to carry out the reduction of these missions in the midst of the ongoing negotiations between Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria and Mauritania, promoted by Donald Trump, who intends to resolve the dispute in the month of May. The last round of consultations was held at the residence of the United States ambassador in Madrid at the end of January, but at least there were two other meetings in the United States.

The Moroccan royal palace plans to present a proposal before the strategic review of MINURSO, which will specify the political representation of the Saharawi refugees currently living in the Tindouf camps, in Algeria.

With this scenario, Moroccan media assume that the functional reorganization of MINURSO will focus on coordination and diplomatic support. “A more agile format, focused on coordination, diplomatic support and facilitation, rather than peacekeeping,” he details. Le360.

Analysis to influence in favor of Morocco

Analyzes from neoconservative American think tanks close to Trump’s hardline on the current stalemate in the UN process to resolve the Sahara issue are accumulating and show notable similarities. At the center of their arguments are not only the Polisario Front and its protector, Algeria, but in particular MINURSO.

In Michael Rubin’s most recent analysis in the think tank Middle East Forum, defends that the mere existence of the Polisario Front constitutes a violation of human rights.

“It is time to end the fiction that the Polisario Front represents the Sahrawi people and let one of the last vestiges of the Cold War definitively belong to history,” says Rubin.

Known for his criticism of MINURSO, he unequivocally demands the end of its mission. “MINURSO clearly represents a multibillion-dollar failure: this 34-year-old UN entity has yet to achieve the first step of its mission, namely, organize a referendum”writes in the same text.

For her part, Sarah Zaaimi, senior resident researcher for the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs, makes the same argument. He considers that “they have been at the forefront of promoting peace and security, boosting the economic and human potential of the region through the ideas we publish, the solutions we generate and the communities we influence.”

For these Trumpist analysts close to Morocco, the mission “has not fulfilled its mandate” and over the years has only served “to perpetuate a state of paralysis.”

LA MINURSO was initially established in 1991 through Security Council Resolution 690 to prepare a referendum in which the people of Western Sahara would choose between independence and integration with Morocco, in addition to supervising the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front.

Subsequently, in 2016, the Security Council approved Resolution 2285, which called for the parties to the conflict to continue showing their political sense in order to begin a more intense and important phase of negotiations.