On Wednesday morning, Pedro Sánchez gave a 10-minute televised speech with a rather dull title: “An institutional statement by the President of the Government to assess recent international events.”
The words of the speech, however, were anything but beige. Hours after Donald Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain over his government’s refusal to allow two jointly operated bases in Andalusia to be used to attack Iran, Sánchez outlined his thoughts.
In doing so, he became one of the few European leaders to openly and emphatically reject the demands of an American president whose signature negotiating style is an erratic mix of intimidation, humiliation and self-aggrandizement.
The thrust of the Spanish prime minister’s argument was that another war in the Middle East would claim numerous lives, further destabilize the world, and have dire economic consequences, but many of his paragraphs were unmistakably personal.
The primary duty of a government, Sánchez said, 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 use 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 benefit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles,” he said.
Then came the lines: “It is naive to believe that democracies or respect between nations can emerge from the ruins. Or to think that practicing 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 for fear of retaliation from someone.”
Who “someone” was needed no explanation.
Even if Sánchez were preaching to the converted in his speech (according to a recent poll, only 15.7% of Spaniards have a favorable opinion of the American president), his words would still have resonated with many who were enraged by the country’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under its then prime minister, José María Aznar.
While Wednesday’s speech thrilled Sánchez’s leftist base, it provoked a predictable response from his political opponents. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative Popular Party, accused the president of the Government of engaging in partisan politics and endangering Spain’s relationship with the United States. Santiago Abascal, who leads the far-right, pro-Trump Vox party, suggested the decision had been made by the “ayatollahs” and by a prime minister bent on staying in power, despite a series of corruption scandals facing his inner circle, his socialist party and his administration.
But Sánchez’s language, although crude, was not out of place. In addition to being one of the staunchest European critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza (he has accused the country of “exterminating a defenseless people” by bombing hospitals and “starving innocent boys and girls”), he spoke out against the armed overthrow of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela by the United States.
He has also defied global trends by defending and promoting the benefits of immigration at a time when most politicians across the continent prefer radical rhetoric and barbed wire.
His is an increasingly loud voice, but, at least for the moment, a lonely one. While Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has won plaudits and raised her profile by rallying European leaders against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim Greenland, Sánchez has not found full support in Europe’s major capitals.
For reasons that are sometimes internal, sometimes global, sometimes ideological and sometimes practical, his counterparts in Berlin, Paris and Rome have been unwilling or unable to speak out against Trump.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, contacted Sánchez this Wednesday to express France’s “European solidarity” in the face of US trade threats.
Macron, who has only one year left in office and is focused almost entirely on foreign policy, now faces the challenge of trying to de-escalate another international conflict that appears far beyond France’s reach.
Paris, which staunchly opposed the US-led war in Iraq in 2003 under then-dissident President Jacques Chirac, now walks a tightrope of pragmatism.
Macron has been clear that the US and Israeli attacks on Iran did not respect international law.
But he has also said that Iranian leaders bore responsibility for ignoring international law with their nuclear program, financing terrorist groups and their human rights abuses. In a televised speech Tuesday, Macron said of the assassinations of Iran’s supreme leader and senior officials: “History never mourns for the executioners of its own people, and none of them will be mourned.”
France has moved its aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean, as well as other air defense capabilities, for what Macron called a “strictly defensive” presence in support of its regional allies, including Cyprus, but also Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, where France has a sizable military base.
One of France’s top priorities was “to work to find a way out of this crisis,” a French official said.
However, it is from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Europe has seen rhetoric that differs most markedly from Sánchez’s. On Sunday, as he prepared to head to Washington, Merz struck a remarkably conciliatory note in a statement before cameras at his chancellery in Berlin.
“Categorizing events (in Iran) under international law will have relatively little effect,” Merz said. “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 achieve them ourselves.”
Merz’s stated strategy at Tuesday’s long-planned meeting in the Oval Office was — taking a page from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — to use pragmatism to allow the most room for maneuver on Europe’s most pressing concerns: Ukraine and the president’s chaotic tariffs.
The unpopular chancellor, who is trying to fight off a stiff challenge from the far-right Alternative for Germany party ahead of five state elections this year while also fighting to revive Europe’s top economy, cannot afford a head-on collision with Trump.
So when on Tuesday, shortly after the US president announced his plans to stop trading with Spain, a journalist offered him the opportunity to defend Spain, Merz instead supported Trump’s renewed attack on Madrid for refusing to accept NATO’s proposal that member states increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP.
Merz later told German journalists that he had not wanted to contradict Trump “on the open stage” but that in private conversations he had defended Spain and the United Kingdom (whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, had been derided by Trump in the Oval Office as “not Winston Churchill” and who this week was forced to insist that the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom was still alive).
But by then, the diplomatic damage had been done, allowing Trump to win in his persistent efforts to drive a wedge between European allies.
Commentators at home said that while Merz had won praise last June for rejecting some of Trump’s most outrageous statements about Ukraine and World War II, the chancellor’s reticence this time was “shameful.”
If Sánchez was looking for support for his stance on the Iran war, he would not have been looking to Rome. Italy’s position seems deliberately ambiguous. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has tried to keep one foot in Trump’s camp (often boasting of her personal and political affinity for 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, but equally reluctant to commit Italy to a clearly independent line.
“We are not at war and we have no intention of entering one,” Meloni told Italian radio station RTL 102.5 on Wednesday. “The situation is worrying, I would say on several fronts. I am concerned about an increasingly evident crisis of international law. The world is increasingly governed by chaos.”
On Thursday, however, Defense Minister Guido Crosetto took a more direct line, telling the lower house of parliament that the decision to launch attacks against Iran “of course fell outside, needless to say, the norms of international law.”
Crosetto added: “It is a war that began without anyone in the world knowing. One in which we, like the rest of the world, are forced to manage (the consequences).”
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Rome had not yet received any request from the United States to use military bases on Italian soil for operations against Iran, and that it would evaluate any request if it came.
Meanwhile, Spain’s lonely duel with Washington continues, especially after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed on Wednesday that Madrid had changed its mind and was now happy to cooperate with the offensive.
The suggestion was quickly and bluntly rejected by Spain’s Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares. “Our ‘no war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal,” he said. “(Leavitt) may be the White House press secretary, but I am the foreign minister of Spain and I tell you that our position has not changed at all.”
