Spain’s government has spent years straining alliances, disrupting defense cooperation and shielding authoritarian regimes. Washington’s response to considering placing sanctions on the country was long overdue. The question is why it took so long.
For years, Spain’s government has moved from rhetorical hostility toward the United States and Israel to concrete policies that increasingly undermine Western strategic interests. What began as ideological positioning has evolved into actions that disrupt logistics and defense supply chains; cancel industrial programs tied to American partners; and restrict the use of ports, airspace and defense procurement channels.
This does not represent a sudden escalation but the delayed recognition of a pattern that Washington has watched develop for years.
The immediate trigger of the crisis was Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to make lawful use of American military bases—namely, facilities such as Rota and Morón—on Spanish territory to be used for operations against Iran as part of the joint U.S.-Israel war.
As such, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a full trade embargo on Spain. He also ordered a cutting off of all trade and criticized the country for not meeting NATO defense spending targets.
The Rota and Morón airbases are not symbolic installations. They form part of the strategic architecture that allows the United States and NATO to project stability across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. These bases exist precisely for moments such as this.
Yet the government led by Pedro Sánchez chose political posturing over alliance responsibility. Instead of facilitating operations against a regime widely recognized as one of the principal sponsors of terrorism and regional destabilization, Madrid attempted to distance itself from Washington while publicly criticizing the strikes.
From Washington’s perspective, this was not merely a diplomatic disagreement.
It was another example of Spain behaving as if it could indefinitely benefit from the United States’ strategic umbrella while resisting the responsibilities that come with being a reliable ally.
For years, American administrations have warned that the imbalance in defense spending among allies undermines the credibility of the alliance. Yet Spain remains one of the lowest defense spenders in NATO.
Rather than confronting this reality directly, the Sánchez government has repeatedly tried to mask the problem—using accounting maneuvers, reclassifications of civilian expenditures and political messaging designed to portray limited increases as major strategic commitments.
The underlying reality remains unchanged: Spain continues to rely heavily on the security guarantees provided by allies that invest far more in collective defense. That combination—strategic free-riding paired with ideological confrontation—inevitably erodes trust within the alliance.
The ideological direction of Spanish policy has also produced consequences inside Spain itself. A striking example is the recent police raid on the headquarters of Sidenor in Basauri in the Basque Country.
Sidenor is one of Spain’s leading steel producers and a strategic supplier for heavy industry. Its president, José Antonio Jainaga, who also chairs the rail manufacturer Talgo, was summoned to testify under accusations framed as “collaboration with genocide.”
The accusations did not originate from a government audit or from an international sanctions authority. They stem from a criminal complaint filed by members of a radical union inside the company, targeting Sidenor’s exports of steel to Israel.
In other words, ordinary commercial activity—conducted in the absence of any international sanctions regime prohibiting such exports—has been reframed as potential criminal liability through ideological litigation.
The message to industry was unmistakable: Commercial relations with Israel could now carry legal risk in Spain. This escalation is rooted in a Royal Decree-Law adopted by the Sánchez government imposing sweeping restrictions on relations with Israel. Its preamble treats the claim of “genocide in Gaza” as an established fact and uses that assertion to justify broad bans on procurement, transit, and defense cooperation.
Foreign policy of enormous consequence was pushed through by executive decree with limited parliamentary scrutiny. And the consequences have been immediate.
Spain has frozen or canceled major defense programs involving Israeli firms, including the SILAM/PULS rocket system with Elbit, targeting pods and missiles supplied by Rafael and ammunition contracts linked to IMI Systems. These decisions did not simply affect Israeli companies. They disrupted broader industrial ecosystems involving European and transatlantic partners, including Rheinmetall Expal, EM&E and Indra. Roughly 1 billion euros (about $1.6 billion) in defense programs have been thrown into uncertainty.
This is not symbolic diplomacy. It is direct political intervention in defense supply chains deeply integrated across the Atlantic alliance.
The same ideological agenda has also spread into Spanish public institutions. Several universities suspended cooperation agreements with Israeli academic institutions. These decisions were challenged in court by the organization ACOM, which argued that politically motivated boycotts violated principles of neutrality and non-discrimination. Spanish courts agreed. The rulings confirmed that discriminatory practices had indeed taken root within public institutions.
The Sánchez government’s political campaign has therefore moved beyond rhetoric and into the administrative machinery of the Spanish state.
The trajectory visible today under this leader cannot be fully understood without considering the continued influence of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the former socialist prime minister widely regarded as a key political mentor to Sánchez.
Over the past decade, Zapatero has developed a prominent role in international networks linked to regimes openly hostile to the United States. He repeatedly acted as a political intermediary in Venezuela and as a public defender of Nicolás Maduro’s regime, while also maintaining connections with structures connected to China’s expanding influence in Europe and Latin America.
These activities are not merely diplomatic curiosities.
Under Maduro, Venezuela operated under extensive U.S. sanctions while serving as a hub for sanctions-evasion networks and deepening strategic cooperation with actors such as Iran and Russia. China’s strategic expansion in Western infrastructure and technology sectors has likewise been identified by Washington as a central security concern.
When Western political figures act as intermediaries or facilitators for regimes operating under these frameworks, their activities can fall within areas where U.S. legal jurisdiction may apply.
For that reason, Zapatero’s role increasingly attracts attention in Washington policy circles. Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable.
Spain’s government has politicized law enforcement, criminalized lawful trade, interfered with logistics, disrupted defense supply chains, tolerated ideological discrimination inside public institutions and deepened engagement with regimes hostile to the United States.
These actions already affect American shipping, American-linked industries, and the strategic coherence of the Western alliance.
In theory, the European Union should defend legal certainty and non-discrimination within its own market. In practice, Brussels has shown little willingness to confront ideological abuses when they originate from national governments.
That leaves the United States as the only actor willing and able to enforce the strategic red lines on which the Western alliance depends.
The actions announced by Trump should therefore not remain merely symbolic. They should target the individuals, networks and interests responsible for these policies—without punishing the Spanish people, who are themselves increasingly victims of the direction taken by their current government.
Because when an ally begins to undermine the institutions, security cooperation and strategic commitments that bind the Western alliance together, the cost of inaction quickly becomes higher than the cost of confronting the problem.
