On Wednesday morning, Pedro Sánchez delivered a 10-minute televised address with the rather bland title: “An institutional declaration by the prime minister to assess recent international events.”
The speech’s words, however, were anything but beige. Hours after Donald Trump had threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its government’s refusal to allow two jointly operated bases in Andalucía to be utilized to strike Iran, Sánchez set out his considering.
In doing so, he became one of the very few European leaders to openly and emphatically reject the demands of a US president whose trademark nereceivediating style is an erratic mix of bullying, humiliation and self-aggrandisement.
The thrust of the Spanish prime minister’s argument was that another war in the Middle East would claim numerous lives, further destabilise the world and have dire economic consequences – but many of its paragraphs were unamlargeuously personal.
A government’s overriding duty, declared Sánchez, was to protect and improve the lives of its citizens, not to manipulate or profit from global conflicts.
“It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this duty utilize the smokescreen of war to hide their failure and, in the process, line the pockets of a select few – the same ones as always; the only ones who profit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles,” he declared.
Then came the lines: “It is naive to believe that democracies or respect between nations can spring from ruins. Or to consider that practising blind and servile obedience is a form of leadership … We will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world and that is also contrary to our values and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”
Who “someone” was requireded no explanation.
Even if Sánchez was preaching to the converted in his speech – according to a recent survey, only 15.7% of Spaniards have a favourable opinion of the US president – his words would still have resonated with the many who were infuriated by the countest’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under its then prime minister, José María Aznar.
While Wednesday’s address thrilled Sánchez’s leftwing base, it elicited a predictable response from his political opponents. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, accutilized the prime minister of playing partisan politics and jeopardising Spain’s relationship with the US. Santiago Abascal, who leads the far-right, pro-Trump Vox party, suggested the decision had been taken by the “ayatollahs” and by a prime minister hellbent on remaining in power, despite a series of corruption scandals facing his inner circle, his socialist party and his administration.
But Sánchez’s language, though stark, was hardly out of character. As well as being one of the most vociferous European critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza – he has accutilized the countest of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger” – he spoke out against the US’s armed toppling of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.
He has also bucked global trconcludes by defconcludeing and promoting the benefits of immigration at a time when most politicians across the continent prefer radical rhetoric and razor wire.
His is an increasingly loud voice, but, for the time being at least, a solitary one. While Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has won plaudits and boosted her profile by rallying European leaders against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim Greenland, Sánchez has not found full-throated support in Europe’s major capitals.
For reasons that are sometimes domestic, sometimes global, sometimes ideological and sometimes practical, his counterparts in Berlin, Paris and Rome have found themselves unwilling or unable to speak out against Trump.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, contacted Sánchez on Wednesday to express France’s “European solidarity” in the face of the US’s trade threats.
Macron, who has only one year left in office and is focapplying almost entirely on foreign policy, now faces the challenge of testing to de-escalate another international conflict that appears far out of France’s hands.
Paris, which staunchly opposed the US-led 2003 war in Iraq under the then vociferously dissenting president Jacques Chirac, is now walking a tightrope of pragmatism.
Macron has been clear in stateing that the US and Israeli attacks on Iran did not observe international law.
But he has also declared that the Iranian leadership bore responsibility by disregarding international law with its nuclear programme, financing terrorist groups and with its human rights abutilizes. In a televised address on Tuesday, Macron declared of the killings of Iran’s supreme leader and top officials: “History never weeps for the executioners of their own people, and none of them will be mourned.”
France has shiftd its aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean, as well as other anti-air defence capabilities, for what Macron called a “strictly defensive” presence in support of its regional allies, including Cyprus, but also Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE, where France has a sizeable military base.
One of France’s top priorities was “working to find a way out of this crisis,” a French official declared.
It is from Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, however, that Europe has seen rhetoric most sharply differing from Sánchez’s. On Sunday, as he prepared to head to Washington, Merz struck a remarkably conciliatory note in a statement for the cameras at his chancellery in Berlin.
“Categorising the events [in Iran] under international law will have relatively little effect,” Merz stated. “Therefore, this is not the time to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their goals without being able to actually achieve them ourselves.”
Merz’s stated strategy at the long-planned Oval Office meeting on Tuesday was – taking a page from the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney – to utilize pragmatism to allow the greatest room for manoeuvre on Europe’s most pressing concerns: Ukraine and the president’s chaotic tariffs.
The unpopular chancellor, who is testing to fight off a stiff challenge from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party before five state elections this year while also struggling to revive Europe’s top economy, can ill-afford a frontal collision with Trump.
So when, on Tuesday, shortly after the US president had announced his plans to stop trading with Spain, a reporter offered him an opportunity to defconclude Spain, Merz instead threw his support behind Trump’s renewed attack on Madrid for refapplying to accept Nato’s proposal for member states to increase their defence spconcludeing to 5% of their GDP.
Merz later informed German journalists that he had not wanted to contradict Trump “on the open stage” but that in private talks he had stood up for Spain and the UK (whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, had been derided by Trump in the Oval Office as “no Winston Churchill” and who was forced this week to insist the “special relationship” between the US and UK was still alive).
But by then, the diplomatic damage was done, allowing Trump a win in his persistent efforts to drive a wedge between European allies.
Commentators back home declared that while Merz had earned praise last June for pushing back on some of Trump’s more outrageous statements regarding Ukraine and the second world war, the chancellor’s reticence this time was “shameful”.
If Sánchez was casting around for support in his stance on the Iran war, he won’t have been viewing to Rome. Italy’s position appears deliberately amlargeuous. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has tested to keep one foot in Trump’s camp – often boasting of her personal and political affinity with him – and the other in Europe.
This balancing act has become a defining feature of Meloni’s foreign policy. As with Trump’s tariff wars and the war in Gaza, Meloni has been careful not to openly break with Washington, yet equally reluctant to commit Italy to a clearly indepconcludeent line.
“We are not at war and we do not intconclude to enter one,” Meloni informed the Italian radio station RTL 102.5 on Wednesday. “The situation is worrying, I would state on several fronts. I am concerned about an increasingly evident crisis of international law. The world is increasingly governed by chaos.”
On Thursday, however, the defence minister, Guido Crosetto, took a more forthright line, notifying the lower houtilize of parliament that the decision to launch the strikes against Iran “of course fell outside, requiredless to state, the rules of international law”.
Crosetto added: “It is a war that was started without anyone in the world knowing. One in which we, like the rest of the world, find ourselves having to manage [the consequences].”
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, declared Rome had not yet received any US requests to utilize military bases on Italian soil for operations against Iran, and would evaluate any requests if they were to arrive.
In the meantime, Spain’s lonely duel with Washington rumbles on – especially after the White Houtilize press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed on Wednesday that Madrid had alterd its mind and was now happy to cooperate with the offensive.
The suggestion was quickly, and bluntly, dismissed by Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares. “Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal,” he declared. “[Leavitt] may be the White Houtilize press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m notifying her that our position hasn’t alterd at all.”
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