What if north africa

The Israelis would love to sell gas to Europe, but the pipeline to Europe they envision may not be economically feasible. The destabilization of the United Kingdom and the prospect of German political polarization are deeply troubling and a strategic setback for the United States. If Washington has a true partner in this world, it has been London. Meanwhile, a successful, democratic Germany is a bedrock of European stability and prosperity.

Extremism in North Africa seems to be an afterthought. It should not be. Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia all have terrorism problems that have affected Europe in frightening ways. In the s, Algerian extremists bombed the Paris metro and hijacked an Air France flight in an attempt to force the crew to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower.

More recent terrorist attacks in Europe have been homegrown affairs, but that does not mean that Europe is safe from North African extremism. In Tunisia in , extremists killed European tourists on a beach and in a museum. That is why the French have thrown their lot in with would-be Libyan strongman Gen. Khalifa Haftar—he promises to kill a lot of bad guys. Algeria and Libya are huge countries that border Chad, Mali, and Niger, which are themselves confronting extremist violence.

The prospect of groups linking up or merging in this region is a significant security challenge for Europeans. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older.

This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. University of Pittsburgh Library System. The migrant experience also unifies the continent. This is as much about sources of influence and power after independence, countries like Egypt and Algeria looked to the Middle East for a model of an Islamic nation, or north to Europe for economic partnerships as it is about the racism that exists here as it does everywhere else in the world.

Perhaps the glue that most strongly connects north Africa to the rest of the continent is colonial history. These Africans fought side by side in the second world war and the traces of this are still present in the collective memory of these countries.

The British used soldiers from Egypt, as well as many from the other former colonies including Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. In , Algiers hosted the Pan-African culture festival. Deserts are notoriously shape shifting. Viewed one way, they are hostile and intimidating environments—impassable as a snake pit.

For centuries, Arab traders crisscrossed the Sahara, east to west, spreading Islam from Lamu to Timbuktu. Arabic vocabulary married Bantu languages to form Kiswahili. Egypt has shared the Nile River with Sudan and Ethiopia since the beginning of time. Today, migrants from Senegal and Ivory Coast have built diaspora communities in north Africa, and vice versa.

Recent events in Mali show that terror groups better known for violence in the Middle East migrate just as easily. The World Bank has long made this distinction in all of its data gathering and reporting—making it laborious, if not impossible to construct an accurate picture of social, political and economic activity across Africa as a whole.

I made this pronouncement without having set foot in north Africa. Until I traveled to Morocco this year as a member of the African Leadership Network, a pan-African group whose membership lives and works in 39 countries.