Panel Title: North Africa: A Forgotten Front During the First World War ? Panel Organizer: Dr. Odile Moreau (Universite Montpellier III, Courriel) Paper Title: United States-Moroccan Relations During the Great War: Ambiguities and Aspirations, 1914-1919 Most accounts of U.S.-Moroccan relations focus on the period of the Second World War and after. Most endeavor to delineate and explain the U.S.’s role in Morocco’s achievement of national independence. None of these works discuss the quality and complexities of the U.S.-Moroccan relationship during the early years of the French and Spanish Protectorates (1912-1925) when all of the involved parties had to make difficult adjustments in their changing relationships with each other while, at the same time, coping with the exigencies imposed on them by the First World War and the peace settlements which followed it. Before the war the United States steadfastly resisted French and Spanish Protectorate authorities’ efforts to strip it of its extraterritorial privileges and to impose their exclusive control over the economies of their protectorates. During the last year of the war, U.S.-French relations were further disquieted by President Wilson’s public support of the right of self-determination for colonial peoples. Such indications of resistance to French control, particularly the call for self-determination, did not go unnoticed by many in Moroccan government and society who saw in them a promise of assistance in their own struggle against the Protectorate regime. These hopes for assistance from the U.S. persisted throughout the interwar period despite American refusals to become involved in any official and formal way in efforts to realize Wilson’s lofty ideals. Using published and unpublished archival materials from the United States, France and Morocco, along with private memoirs, and press reports, this paper will describe and discuss the evolution of American relations with Morocco during the early years of the protectorates, with particular emphasis on the period of the Great War, and its significance for U.S. Moroccan relations during the decades that followed.