ROME — As other European leaders offer parsed words, about-faces or outright backing for the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Pedro Sánchez, the photogenic Spanish prime minister, delivered a striking rebuke Wednesday of President Donald Trump’s military foray — refusing to back down a day after Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain.
For months, the left-leaning Sánchez has been emerging as the embodiment of European resistance to Trump, locking horns with the president on defense spending while contrasting the mass legalization of migrants in Spain to the “cruel” crackdowns elsewhere. As the attack on Iran unfolded Saturday, Sánchez condemned the Iranian regime but also denounced the U.S.-Israeli operation as contributing “to a more uncertain and hostile international order.” Spain also refused to allow the use of its bases in support of the operation.
Trump escalated Tuesday, threatening to cut off trade with Spain, but Sánchez, hardly intimidated, doubled down on his high-stakes clash with Trump, with stinging criticism in a national address Wednesday.
“We’re not going to be complicit in something that’s bad for the world nor contrary to our values and interests simply to avoid reprisals from someone,” Sánchez said in his speech, seemingly referring to Trump.
In a sharp jab, Sánchez evoked the memory of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, warning that “we must learn from history, and we cannot play Russian roulette with the fate of millions of people.”
“Twenty-three years ago, another American administration dragged us into a war in the Middle East,” Sánchez said, “a war that, in theory it was said then, was being waged to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, bring democracy and guarantee global security, but which in reality, seen in perspective, produced the opposite effect. It triggered the biggest wave of insecurity our continent has experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Some observers warned that Sánchez was playing with fire — noting that a full-on economic confrontation with Trump’s America could derail Spain’s new economic miracle and its status as one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. But Sánchez — slumping in the polls and roiled by scandal, yet known for having nine political lives — appeared to be gambling on Trump’s unpopularity in Spain, particularly among the prime minister’s own left-wing base.
“If we only focus on Pedro Sánchez’s interests, I think it’s a win-win,” said Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carls III University, noting that Sánchez has little to lose given that few like his chances in any upcoming election. “The adverse effects of this position would be midterm and long-term, and Pedro Sánchez will not be around in the mid- or long term,” Orriols said.
Tension increased over the weekend, when Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles told reporters that her nation had declined to allow the United States to use its military planes at Spanish bases to wage war in the Middle East. That led the Pentagon to withdraw 12 KC-135 tanker aircraft, used for refueling, from their stations at Morón de la Frontera and Rota on the Atlantic coast.
Trump lashed out during a Tuesday news conference in the Oval Office, saying: “We are going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” He said he had directed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “to cut off all dealings with Spain.”
Sánchez indicated Wednesday that he would not cave to pressure, saying he believed in the “economic, institutional and, I would say, moral strength of our country.” He seemed to throw down the gauntlet to the rest of Europe, adding that “being blind and subservient” is no “way of leading.”
Even as the war in the Middle East escalated, the decision by Sánchez to stand up to Trump in a way no other European leader has since the strikes began Saturday dominated Spanish and broader European news. It brought a round of applause from the left, calls of solidarity from leading European Union figures and also drew recriminations from the right.
“Spain, led by a progressive government, is teaching a lesson in sovereignty to the many pseudo-sovereigntists scattered across Europe,” a group of left-wing Italian lawmakers declared on X. “This is the difference between a statesman safeguarding national interests and a cheerleader rejecting them.”
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of Sánchez’s main opposition, the center-right People’s Party (PP), posted on X: “To Pedro Sánchez. If Iran thanks you and the United States considers you a terrible ally, you have failed. … It’s harming Spain’s interests against what you have called a ‘hateful regime.’”
Sánchez has repeatedly displayed a rare willingness to challenge Trump. Following the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, Sánchez said “the world is on the edge of a dark abyss.”
He added: “We are normalizing a scenario where certain powers bomb each other, their leaders trade nuclear threats, and civilians bear the consequences.”
During a tense NATO summit that same month, Sánchez acknowledged that he and Trump did not greet each other. He called it unintentional, though it happened after Trump lashed out at Spain for bluntly rejecting his call to surge defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.
He has also dared to venture where most European leaders fear to tread by slamming Trump’s domestic agenda. Last month, Sánchez took apparent aim at the crackdown on migrants in the United States, contrasting it with his own government’s decision in January to grant legal status to up to 500,000 undocumented migrants.
“Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel,” Sánchez wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “My government has chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status.”
In the early hours of the U.S. attack on Iran, the leaders of Germany, France and Britain appeared uneasy about getting embroiled in the U.S. gambit even as they put the onus on Iran over its nuclear and missile program.
But it didn’t take long for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a staunch ally of Israel, to muster fuller support, proclaiming on Sunday that “this is not the time to lecture our partners and allies” about violations of international law.
That sparked recriminations from some European officials and commentators, who said Merz had abandoned the tenets he touted in talks on Trump’s bid for Greenland or Russia’s war in Ukraine. The chancellor, who visited the White House on Tuesday, also faced criticism for sitting idly in the Oval Office instead of standing up for a European neighbor, as Trump bashed Spain.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, quickly reversing an earlier decision, said he would allow the United States to use British bases to destroy Iranian missile capabilities.
French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, ordered a surge in French military reinforcements to the Middle East and deployed the country’s aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean. Macron pledged Paris would help protect fellow E.U. member Cyprus, as well as Persian Gulf nations that have come under fire in Iran’s retaliation.
In a speech on Tuesday, Macron heaped blame on Iran for the war, while also saying that France could not “approve” of a U.S.-Israeli attack that fell “outside of international law.” He added, however, that “history never weeps over butchers of their own people, and none will be missed,” an apparent reference to Iran’s assassinated leaders.
The Elysée said Macron called Sánchez on Wednesday to express “European solidarity in response to the threats of economic coercion.”
The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, which handles trade policy for all 27 E.U. nations, said Wednesday that it expects the U.S. to “fully honor” its trade deal with the bloc, a warning that the administration could not single out Spain. The E.U. will show “full solidarity” with member states and “through our common trade policy, stand ready to act if necessary to safeguard E.U. interests,” trade spokesman Olof Gill said.
Sánchez appeared to be gambling that Trump will lose interest in exacting revenge, or decide that it might not be in the interest of the United States. Unlike many of Europe’s larger nations, Spain runs a trade deficit with the United States — nearly $4.8 billion in 2025 — meaning a confrontation could hurt American exporters.
Since Spain is part of the E.U., which negotiates trade as a bloc, targeting the country for tariffs could be tricky. Sectoral sanctions — such as a levy on olive oil, a notable Spanish export — could also be too blunt an instrument, as it risks damaging countries more friendly to Trump, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Italy.
Should the U.S. be determined to act, it has some tools that should give Sánchez pause, including retaliatory and antidumping tariffs, as well as a “nuclear option” of financial sanctions, said Omar Rachedi, senior fellow at the Esade Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, a think tank in Barcelona.
“What the Trump administration might want to do is punish Spain to send a signal to everybody else,” Rachedi said. “And there are some things it could do to achieve that.”
Francis reported from Brussels. Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report.
The post Spanish prime minister slams Trump’s war in Iran, escalating feud appeared first on Washington Post.
