Ignored and uninvited: the UK reveals the insignificance of the military regime in Algiers
In a composed but pointed appearance before the House of Lords’ international relations committee (full audition published by Reuters here), UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy laid out the UK’s position on Palestinian state recognition: Britain, he affirmed, does not answer to symbolic gestures or external pressure. While acknowledging recent recognitions by Ireland, Norway, and Spain, Lammy emphasized that these actions, though symbolically resonant, had achieved little on the ground. For the UK, recognition must be part of a credible path to a viable two-state solution, not a hollow political move. David Lammy, confirmed that the UK, France, and Saudi Arabia, are in active talks over the recognition of a Palestinian state in June 2025. A high-level summit in June 2025, co-presided by Paris and Riyadh and agreed upon during the Arab League summit in Cairo on March 4, 2025, will be a turning point in the Middle East. If France and the UK, both permanent members of the UN Security Council, follow through, it would mark a historic shift, with global consequences.
In the eyes of global diplomacy, Algeria is no longer a player, it’s a relic. And this uncomfortable truth terrifies the military regime of Algiers, because it reveals something deeper, more corrosive, and far more dangerous than opposition: the terror of irrelevance. David Lammy didn’t need to criticize Algeria; his silence was a masterclass in exposure by omission, a brutal demonstration that the regime is not feared, not consulted, not even noticed.
One immediate consequence is particularly embarrassing for the military regime of Algiers. While real diplomatic negotiations are being conducted by global heavyweights, the Algerian regime has spent months feeding its population a propaganda campaign glorifying its rotational seat on the UN Security Council, a procedural formality, not a diplomatic achievement. Even more absurdly, it has paraded its one-month rotating presidency in January 2025 as if it were a strategic triumph, when in truth, it’s little more than a glorified calendar-keeping duty. Most humiliating of all is President Tebboune’s now-infamous proclamation at the 2022 Arab League summit in Algiers: “Leave it to me, I’ll take care of it, it’s my personal affair.” Today, that statement stands exposed in all its emptiness. Not only is Tebboune absent from the table, he’s not even mentioned.
This silence is more than diplomatic exclusion, it’s a brutal reminder of how far Algeria has fallen from its former stature. During its revolutionary heyday in the 1960s and 70s, Algeria stood as a principled leader among Non-Aligned and Global South nations. It fought apartheid, supported decolonization, and earned moral authority on the world stage. Before being hijacked by the military regime of Algiers, Algeria was at the right time, in the right place, for the right cause. That triad, a just cause, the right moment, and the right geopolitical positioning, endowed the Algerian liberation movement, and the nascent Algerian state, with rare historical legitimacy. That legitimacy was so powerful that it became something the illegitimate could not resist hijacking. Ever since, the military regime of Algiers has clung to that inherited capital, compulsively recycling a legacy that has long curdled into hollow nostalgia. Today, it latches onto causes like Palestine, and desperately tries to equate the Polisario with the Palestinian struggle, not out of strategic vision, but as political cosplay, hoping the residue of past glory still grants it relevance. But the world has moved on. It is fast, fluid, and complex. It rewards adaptability, not inertia. David Lammy’s omission is not merely a diplomatic slight, it is a humiliating confirmation: a regime once central to anti-colonial solidarity has become a museum piece, trapped in its own mythology, unable to adjust to the world as it truly is, and clings to outdated slogans from a past era it can no longer resurrect.
Abderrahmane Fares.
