Eduardo González
The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Javier Solana, stated yesterday that Spain should take advantage of Joe Biden’s arrival at the Presidency of the United States to “know how to play more widely” with the chance of the Rota (Cadiz) air and naval base in North Africa, while he was convinced that the new US president’s major international priorities will be China and the EU and that Cuba and Venezuela “will not be among his preferences”.
“If someone asks an American high command where to refuel a plane travelling from Afghanistan to Virginia, they will say Rota”, said Solana (who was also Secretary General of NATO and High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy of the EU) during his speech at the video conference The Biden effect: opportunities and challenges for multilateralism, organised by the Fundación Consejo España-EEUU through the YouTube channel of the Institute for International Affairs and Foreign Policy (INCIPE).
“I don’t understand why Spain doesn’t play this positive role better”, he admitted. “Rota’s base has not been made to create jobs in Andalusia, we have to know how to play more widely with Rota, with North Africa and with other assets with which we have the capacity to play“. Trump’s decision to recognise Morocco’s sovereignty in the Sahara “has left us in the lurch, because Spain has a lot of responsibility in the Sahara, and we have to do something for the stability of Morocco and the stability of Spain on the other side of the sea”, he added.
Last September, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, assured that any decision on the possible intention of the United States to move the Africa Command (Africom) to the Rota base corresponds “solely” to Washington. Two months later, the minister stated that the solution to the problem of Western Sahara “does not depend on the will or unilateral action of any country, however large that country may be”, and announced that the Spanish government was already having “a series of contacts” with Biden’s team to “seek a return to multilateralism”.
During his address, Javier Solana gave a long review of what, in his opinion, should be Biden’s main priorities. His foreign policy “doctrine” will be based on “using soft power as much as possible” to overcome “the damage created” by the outgoing president, Donald Trump, in international relations, and whose domestic policy should help “clean up” a country marked by “deep polarisation and a serious problem of coexistence”.
According to Solana, Biden’s major challenges in the multilateral sphere should be the United States’ return to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “from which he left at a dramatic moment, when it was most needed because of the global pandemic”, and to radically change its relationship with the World Trade Organisation (WTO), “a fundamental institution that has no director general because the person elected by consensus was vetoed by Trump and which also has no dispute settlement mechanism because the United States has vetoed all the judges in charge”. Likewise, he continued, “Biden is very clear that he is going to return to the Paris Agreement, as evidenced by the appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry as special envoy for Climate Change”, and should return to the nuclear agreement with Iran, because “one of Trump’s great mistakes was the breaking of an agreement codified by a resolution of the United Nations Security Council”.
On a bilateral level, Javier Solana stated that the relationship between the United States and China must take on “a new dimension” based on “competition without catastrophe” because “with China there is no other formula to negotiate, as it is the world’s leading future economy”. “No talk of the Cold War, this has nothing to do with what was happening between the US and the USSR, China has a technological development that the USSR never had”, added Solana, who also expressed his confidence that Washington and Moscow will renew the START Treaty for disarmament in two weeks’ time. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “is willing to renew it and Trump did not want to, but Biden I think is willing to renew it”, he added.
EU, defence, Cuba and Venezuela
On the other hand, Javier Solana stated that “US relations with the EU were bad with Trump because Trump did not want the EU and, internally, wanted to break it“. “He wanted to do trade negotiations with Germany and they didn’t let him because of EU rules. That didn’t fit in his head and he did everything he could to destroy the EU, and some of those winds came into the Brexit case”, he continued. “The EU already has a document ready to start negotiations on the new transatlantic cooperation and we will have to see what the perspective of the exit of the United States is going to be in order to recover the position that the EU has always wanted to have with the US”, he said. In any case, he added, “Biden has already said very clearly, for those who wanted to hear him, that between the United Kingdom and the EU, bilateral relations with the EU will take precedence over the bilateral relationship with the United Kingdom, which was previously preferable”.
With regard to relations with the United States in defence and security matters, Solana stated that “reaching 2% of military spending in EU countries, as the United States wants, can be solved, but reaching 4%, as Trump once said, is nonsense”. In his opinion, “an effort must be made to ensure that what is meant by the European defence pillar is well understood and that when we are asked to increase the EU’s contribution we cannot ask to spend it on American companies, which was Trump’s position. The EU needs strategic autonomy, and that is something that other friendly countries, including the United States, have to accept.
Javier Solana also said he was convinced that China and the EU would be Biden’s top foreign policy priorities, and that Latin American issues would be left behind. “I do not think Biden’s preferences are the Cuban and Venezuelan issues and I do not think there will be any quick decision on these issues”, he said.
