Luis Ayllón
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares will make his first trip to Washington next week since taking office in July, The Diplomat has learned from reliable sources.
Albares plans to travel to the US capital tomorrow, Monday, and to carry out his programme of contacts on Tuesday, the 18th, and Wednesday, the 19th, when he will return to Madrid, sources from his department confirmed.
The most important of these contacts will be the meeting he will hold on Wednesday with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, with whom he already had the opportunity to talk in person on 6 October in Paris, where the two men coincided at the OECD ministerial meeting.
At that time, Albares and Blinken, who had already spoken on several occasions by telephone, discussed the situation in Afghanistan, where Spain and the United States cooperated closely in the evacuation plans after the Taliban came to power in August.
According to the State Department, they also discussed ways in which Spain and the United States can cooperate on democracy and human rights issues in Latin America, as well as other global and regional considerations, including efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela.
Now, according to the sources consulted, the heads of diplomacy of the two countries will be able to analyse in greater detail matters relating to Latin America, a region in which the United States always values Spain’s positions, but where there are some discrepancies, especially with regard to relations with the regime of Nicolás Maduro, with which Washington maintains positions of greater harshness than those of the Spanish government.
Issues such as relations with Morocco could also come up, which in Spain’s case are stuck, while King Mohammed VI awaits a pronouncement from Madrid on Western Sahara that comes closer to the US approach, which is more inclined to make gestures of support for Morocco’s autonomy plan for the former Spanish province.
There is also an issue of great importance to the Spanish government, which is the preparation of the NATO Summit to be held in Madrid on 29-30 June, especially at a time when tensions with Russia have increased due to President Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of troops to the Ukrainian border and the latent threat of an invasion of that country.
Moreover, the Atlantic Alliance Summit will be an opportunity for the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to make his first visit to Spain since he arrived at the White House.
In their conversation, Albares and Blinken will also have the opportunity to analyse bilateral issues, such as the presence of US troops at the Rota and Morón de al Frontera bases, under the Military Agreement between the two countries, which, in June 2021, was extended for another year until May 2022, without any modification, since Biden’s arrival at the White House was so recent that there was no time to negotiate.
At the bilateral level, Spain could try to resume the pact reached with the United States in 2015, in the time of Barack Obama, for Washington to remove the land contaminated with radioactive waste, which still remains in Palomares (Almería), where in 1966 four thermonuclear bombs accidentally fell when two American bombers collided.
Albares’ agenda in Washington also includes a meeting on Tuesday with the influential Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who chairs the US House of Representatives. On the same day, the minister is scheduled to hold a breakfast meeting with Spanish businessmen with interests in the United States.
Albares’ programme also includes a meeting with the Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, as well as a meeting with the directors of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank whose purpose is to carry out studies on national security, and one of whose latest reports published is, precisely, on the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The minister’s activities in Washington could be rounded off by a meeting with the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Mauricio Claver-Carone, although this appointment has not yet been confirmed.
