Why hasn’t North Africa being More Geopolitically Powerful in the 21st Century?

Because there is no “north african” political union nor will to make it happen and those countries are all relatively poorer

Since WWII, most of the countries that got wealthy did so by joining the globalized trade system. The vast and insatiable demand for consumer goods and the overgrowing pool of investment capital provided almost everything a country needed to become rich. All you needed was hands attached to starving mouths willing to work, and the global trade system will provide you the money to build factories and the customers to buy the output of your factory. This system was a faster and more reliable way to wealth than any other system throughout history, so in relative terms, if you didn’t participate, you were poor and couldn’t compete with those inside.

The best part is the system was self-sustaining; the US started by pouring capital and demand into Western Europe, which became wealthy enough to invest and buy consumer goods, and then Japan in the 50s, the Asian Tiger Economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan in the 60s to 80s, China from the 80s, and Eastern Europe in the 90s after the Wall came down, to modern day where almost all nations in the world are somewhat connected into global trade. Each subsequent power would move up the value added chain as wages rose and living standards improved, themselves investing in countries lower down the ladder that took over the grunt work, and then buying up the output.

The countries that couldn’t or didn’t join the system as it grew happened for one of three reasons: before the fall of the Soviet Union, you basically had to have geopolitical value to the US. Europe and the Pacific rim were both important places to American containment strategy, so them becoming rich and interconnected with an American led system had strategic value. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no real barrier to entry so the ones that couldn’t participate in global trade were those who a) did not have enough political stability to attract investment, or b) deliberately excluded themselves from the system due to fear or anger at America and the American-led order.

And North Africa had both of those last two in spades. The mostly Islamic nations in the region view the American-led order as a continuation of the millennia of animosity with Christian, colonialist Europe, and the fact that Israel is friendly with the system pretty much guaranteed they weren’t gonna be friends. You combine that with relatively unstable autocratic governments (how that interplays with their geography, religion and history is probably more complicated), and global capital has no reason to invest in the area, which leaves it a backwater.