Spain bets that saying no to Washington costs less than saying yes

Spain spent the spring testing how far a NATO member can defy Washington and stay inside the tent. When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, Sanchez refused to let American forces use the Rota naval base, the Moron air base, or Spanish airspace for the fight. Defence Minister Margarita Robles said neither the bases nor the skies were authorized for anything tied to the war, and 15 U.S. aircraft had to move. Sanchez called the war unjustifiable and warned that bombs do not solve the world's problems. The White House shrugged the snub off in public.

In private it did not. In late April a Pentagon note, drafted by policy chief Elbridge Colby, floated suspending Spain from the alliance and reopening the U.S. line on Britain's Falklands claim as punishment for allies who withheld basing rights. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the war had laid bare which partners show up. Sanchez brushed it aside, telling reporters his government does not work by email and would cooperate with allies only within the bounds of international law. Trump had already promised to cut trade with Spain, so the threat was less a surprise than a bill coming due.

The defiance was selective, not blanket. Sanchez stood beside Zelenskyy in Madrid in mid-March and pledged a billion euros in military aid to Ukraine for the year, with money routed through a European financing tool. Weeks later it helped kill a NATO plan to make each member spend a set share of output on Ukraine. Alongside the other big European allies and Canada, Madrid refused a metric that would have ranked them against each other.

The same logic ran through the rest of Spain's spring. It rejected the U.S. capture of Maduro as a violation of international law while still refusing to recognize his rule. With Britain and Brussels it cleared an EU treaty on Gibraltar that drops the land-border checks Spain had leveraged for years. The through-line is a country that picks its fights on principle and pays for them on its own terms.