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From Casablanca to the Airforce: Morocco, American Airpower, and the Strategic Atlantic: 5 (MOROCCO AND AMERICA: STORIES FROM AN ENDURING FRIENDSHIP) - Softcover

Book 5 of 6: MOROCCO AND AMERICA: STORIES FROM AN ENDURING FRIENDSHIP

El Idrissi Ph.D., Abdeslem

 
9798175458047: From Casablanca to the Airforce: Morocco, American Airpower, and the Strategic Atlantic: 5 (MOROCCO AND AMERICA: STORIES FROM AN ENDURING FRIENDSHIP)

Synopsis

What happens when wartime necessity becomes permanent military infrastructure—and independence changes the political meaning of the ground beneath it?

In From Casablanca to the Air Force: Morocco, American Airpower, and the Strategic Atlantic, Abdeslem El Idrissi, Ph.D., continues his sweeping history of Moroccan-American relations by tracing one of its most consequential and least widely understood chapters: the rise of American airpower in Morocco and the struggle to reconcile Cold War strategy with Moroccan sovereignty.

The story begins with the legacy of Operation Torch and the Second World War, when American forces first established a large military presence in Morocco. As the wartime alliance gave way to the Cold War, Morocco's location between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Africa acquired new strategic importance. The creation of the independent United States Air Force, the growth of Strategic Air Command, and the demands of long-range aviation transformed wartime airfields into an extensive network of American military installations.

From the presidential aircraft known as the Sacred Cow and the birth of the modern Air Force to the construction of bases at Nouasseur, Sidi Slimane, Ben Guerir, Boulhaut, and Port Lyautey, the book reveals how American global strategy became embedded in the Moroccan landscape.

But the bases had been established while Morocco remained under the French Protectorate.

When Mohammed V returned from exile and Morocco recovered independence in 1956, the runways remained—but the political ground beneath them had changed. The new Moroccan government insisted that foreign military presence could no longer rest upon arrangements made through France. What followed was a complex diplomatic negotiation involving Mohammed V, Crown Prince Moulay Hassan—later King Hassan II—Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, American military leaders, Moroccan officials, and the wider pressures of decolonization and the Cold War.

Drawing on diplomatic records, official military histories, and the documentary foundations established in the earlier volumes of the series, El Idrissi reconstructs not only strategy and diplomacy but also the human world surrounding the bases: American servicemen and families, Moroccan workers, engineers, communities, and institutions transformed by the arrival of a new kind of military power.

The result is a history of airpower, sovereignty, negotiation, and adaptation—showing how a military presence created under colonial circumstances was ultimately transformed into a relationship between sovereign states.

From Casablanca to the Air Force is Volume V of Morocco and America: Stories from the Oldest Enduring Friendship in U.S. Foreign Relations, commemorating 250 Years of Moroccan-American Friendship, 1777–2027.

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