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Patrick Lawrence for Consortium News
I saw a video the other day that reminded me: Images often lie, which is why the propagandists favor them (and why I don’t usually trust them), but there are times they go unforgettably to the point.
The one I have in mind, a video recorded at the NATO summit in The Hague last June, shows Pedro Sánchez walking past other alliance leaders until he reaches the end of the three-deep lineup, whereupon he takes his place at a conspicuous distance from the others. The Spanish prime minister wears a faint but unmistakable smile.
I watched it several times just for the fun of it. To put a caption on it, Sánchez had just rejected the Trump regime’s demand that Spain, along with the rest of Europe’s NATO members, raise its defense budget to 5 percent of GDP: 2.1 percent will do, Sánchez told Mark Rutte, Washington’s latest errand boy in Brussels.
There are other videos like this making the rounds. El Debate, a century-old Spanish newspaper that has gone entirely digital (alas, for the smell of printer’s ink), is circulating one showing Sánchez at a more recent NATO summit. He is in with the pack this time — it’s a photo op — but he’s cold-shouldered: None of the others present will speak to him.
Again the quiet smirk. Again fun to watch.
Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist primer ministro since June 2018, has distinguished himself and his nation these past few years by taking strong stands against the Zionist terror regime’s genocide in Gaza, against the West’s support of it, against wasteful defense budgets and more recently against the U.S.–Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
He is currently in an excellently public confrontation with President Donald Trump for his refusal to let the U.S. Air Force use bases on Spanish soil to service its bombing sorties over the Islamic Republic.
And here’s the thing — well, two things actually: By all appearances Sánchez revels in the isolation that befalls him due to his principled positions on the largest questions of our time.
And by all appearances this poised 54–year-old, an economist by training, shows up the rest of Europe’s purported leaders as a congeries of cowards who would not know a principled position if one were to bite them all on their backsides.
This is Europe, captured in images spanning a couple of minutes. I see two things in these videos and the demeanor of those in them — excuse me, three: what Europe is, what Europe isn’t and what Europe could be.
I gave up some time ago thinking the Europeans might make of themselves an independent pole of power, still half of the Atlantic alliance but exerting greater influence within it and thus redefining its policies and purpose.
But Europe’s post–Cold War leaders proved time and again pitifully short of the necessary gumption.
Lately the rest of the world watches as the “centrist” leaders of Core Europe — the British, French and Germans, with others following thoughtlessly along — devastate their economies in the cause of a Russophobic freakout since Trump returned to the White House, applaud the Zionists’ terror campaigns and wars, and all the while bow to the Trump regime no matter the price their own citizens will pay.
And along comes Pedro Sánchez to demonstrate I was wrong to surrender my old expectations.
When I listen to him and watch what he and the Spanish people do my mind goes to Václav Havel and “The Hope of Europe,” that noted speech he gave in Aachen 30 years ago this spring.
“One thing ends simply in order that something else may begin,” the Czech president remarked as he contemplated the Continent’s post–Wall circumstances.
Challenging the Trans-Atlantic Status Quo
Pro-Palestine protest in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Dec. 17, 2023. (Nacho JorganesFlickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sánchez is not quite so alone as he has appeared to be lately.
The Irish have well displayed their … their what? … their Irish in their outspoken support for the Palestinian cause. Last year the government more or less hounded Israel’s ambassador, an outspoken Zionist, out of the country.
Faisal Saleh, who directs Palestine Museum U.S. not far from where I write this column, is now in talks with the relevant authorities in Dublin to turn the now-abandoned Israeli embassy into a museum dedicated to Palestinian culture.
Another reason to love the Irish.
The Nordic nations also deserve mention. Several of them earlier declared their support for the rulings of the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, in November 2024.
Now the Nordic five — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland — have declared they will arrest the Israeli prime minister were he to enter their airspace.
O.K., taking someone into custody at 35,000 feet is a stretch too far. But as IRANWARinfo, a monitoring website, suggested in response to the Nordics’ announcement, “The Iran war is turning ‘legal risk’ into ‘operational risk.’”
In simple terms, the usual flight paths westward from Israel are now blocked. From IRANWARinfo on March 10:
“If the conflict pushes Netanyahu to travel more — emergency diplomacy, Washington meetings, Gulf coordination — the ICC warrant becomes an aviation planning problem as much as a legal one. Routes are shaped by alliances, not maps. The more countries publicly affirm ICC cooperation, the fewer comfortable corridors remain.”
All good. The tide turns against “the Jewish state,” as it absolutely must, just as in the United States it turns — finally, finally, finally — against the intrusions of AIPAC into America’s political processes.
But it is Sánchez who appears to have the larger picture in mind. Along with his government and his people, the Spanish leader signals repeatedly that the time has come to challenge the trans–Atlantic status quo and ultimately the world order altogether.
In the above-noted speech, Havel cast the post–Cold War era as “a time to articulate Europe’s task for the twenty-first century.” In my reading of Pedro Sánchez, this is what he has set about doing.
The first suggestions that Sánchez intended to lead Spain in a new direction came in the spring of 2024, when his cabinet voted formally to recognize (after coordinating with Ireland and Norway), an independent Palestinian state defined by the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
This anticipated by a year the U.N. General Assembly session of last autumn, when 15 nations, most of them members of the Atlantic alliance, declared formal recognitions of their own.
True, Spain and the others stood for a “two-state” solution,” but I read these declarations as a step in the right direction. Given that the Zionist regime’s open pursuit of a “Greater Israel” has since rendered the two-state formula entirely impossible, it will be interesting to see where Sánchez takes Spain on this question in the future.
While the General Assembly was still in session, Spain barred U.S. military aircraft and ships carrying weapons to Israel from using Spanish air bases and the ports of Cádiz and Seville. This made operational the total arms embargo against Israel Madrid had already mandated.
A month later Spanish prosecutors began a criminal investigation into Sidenor, the major Spanish steelmaker, for selling product to Israel Military Industries, a subsidiary of the infamous Elbit Systems. Banco Sabadell, a leading Spanish institution, subsequently froze the accounts of Israelis until they signed declarations confirming they do no business with Israeli settlements.
No surprise, then, that the Sánchez government has come out vigorously against the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran. U.S. military aircraft are again barred from using bases on Spanish soil. In this case the ban applies primarily to those planes used to refuel fighter jets while aloft.
Sánchez has not flinched since Trump threatened in response to cut off all trade with Spain. Here is the Spanish prime minister as quoted in an NPR dispatch from Madrid on March 12:
“We say no to breaking the international law that protects us all, especially the civilian population. No to accepting that the world can only solve its problems through conflicts and bombs. And in short, four words. No a la guerra. No to the war.”
Sánchez is now known in Spain and beyond as Europe’s “no-to-war” prime minister.
‘Leaders, Not Vassals’
It gets more interesting. Spain’s members of the European Parliament have been raising hell since the U.S.–Israeli aggression began. Here are Irene Montero and Isabel Serra, Spanish MEPs, in Strasbourg last week:
“The offensive carried out by the U.S. and Israel — two nuclear powers —represents a crime of aggression and a serious attack against the U.N. Charter, Iran’s sovereignty and regional and global peace. They [the U.S.] are doing this while maintaining a blockade on Cuba, starving people, continuing the genocide in Gaza, and threatening to invade Greenland.”
This was in a publicly available letter addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, the warmongering president of the E.U. Commission, wherein Montero and Serra also asserted, “This crisis shows to what extent the E.U. is subordinated to NATO.”
The Times of London ran an interesting piece in this line in its March 11 editions under the headline, “Spain accuses Germany of acting like a ‘vassal’ to the United States.”
The piece below this (which relies in part on an earlier report in Politico) quotes various members of the Sánchez government as they attack Friedrich Merz, the worst of the authoritarian “centrists” holding power in Core Europe — a first-in-line supporter of the Israelis’ genocide and now the war with Iran.
Yolanda Díaz, Sánchez’s deputy prime minister and minister of labor:
“Europe is an orphan at a moment of historic gravity. What Europe needs today is leadership, not vassals who pay homage to Trump.”
Díaz in 2021. (AntonMST29/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
José Manuel Albares, foreign minister in the Sánchez government:
“I can’t imagine [Angela] Merkel or [Olaf] Scholz behaving like this. It corresponds neither to Konrad Adenauer nor the values on which this party [the Christian Democratic Union] was founded. Now there’s a different leadership with different values.”
I draw readers’ attention to the gravitas and the high consciousness in evidence in these remarks.
The Sánchez government has effectively declared itself to be about a lot more than “No a la guerra.” It is about no to the Gaza genocide, no to the Zionist terror machine, no to the silence and complicity of the European powers, no to the obsequiousness of Sánchez’s counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
Most of all, and we must not miss this, the Spain of Pedro Sánchez is about no to the trans–Atlantic order as now constituted.
I thought the remarks of Albares were especially revealing in this connection. Sánchez’s FM has a different read on Merz’s predecessors than I, to put it mildly — he is far too forgiving of both — but his invocation of Adenauer says a lot about how serious the thinking in Madrid has got these days.
Albares at U.N. headquarters in New York in February 2024. (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)
Adenauer, postwar Germany’s first chancellor, was a lifelong advocate of strong ties to the United States, but there was a moment in the 1950s when he turned somewhere between 45 and 90 degrees.
This was during the Suez crisis, 1956, when the Soviets, then in possession of the atomic bomb for seven years, threatened Britain, France and Israel with nuclear strikes if they did not end their campaign against Egypt.
Stunned by Washington’s apparent indifference to this warning, Adenauer quickly saw virtue in the Gaullist idea of Europe as a third force situated between the two great powers of the time.
In my read of Pedro Sánchez and his understanding of our “moment of historic gravity,” this is where he and his ministers think Europe needs to go — back to a project long in the air but never realized, on to a different European future.
Emmanuel Macron, who nurses a de Gaulle complex the way Tory PMs in Britain wish they were Churchill, has long spoken of Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy.” And done nothing apart from preening and posturing.
Sánchez, to finish this point by way of comparison, takes seriously what Macron never has. He, Sánchez, evidently thinks it is time. For this it may soon be right — let us see — to mention him in the same paragraph as Havel as a European leader with an authentic, original, imaginative vision.
I was amused to see a commentary in The Guardian’s March 7 editions under the headline, “Pedro Sánchez’s lone stance against Trump may look risky, but it is cannily pragmatic.”
In it Eoghan Gilmartin, an Irish journalist living in Madrid, makes the argument that Sánchez’s high-visibility positions on Gaza, the Iran war, defense spending, international law and so on reflect geopolitical calculation, electoral politics at home and rank opportunism.
Gilmartin is closer to the Spanish earth than I, but I don’t buy his case. True enough, Sánchez has lately had to watch where he is in the polls, notably since he offered amnesty and pardons to Catalan separatists two years ago. But he has stayed with that controversial decision (altogether rightly in my view). Is this an opportunist?
At the end of January, before the U.S. and Israel began their operation against Iran, Gallup released a poll showing, along with a great deal else, Trump’s approval among the Spanish at –51 percent, one of the lowest ratings in Europe.
Does reflecting the wishes of an electorate now count as nothing more than “canny” politicking?
This is so Europe as it is these days. Even people who act on principle over the course of years cannot possibly have any principles. Is this not precisely what Pedro Sánchez has determined to argue against?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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