Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will meet this coming Friday in Washington with the US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, to address the war in Ukraine and the Gaza conflict.
“This Friday I am going to travel to Washington, where I am going to hold a meeting with my colleague and good friend Tony Blinken,” the minister announced during the inaugural conference on Strategic Autonomy, held within the framework of the Opportunity Generation Business Meeting, organized by the Europa Press agency and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Madrid.
According to Albares, the United States is “Europe’s natural ally” and the meeting will serve to analyze the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, because the Spanish Government “defends exactly the same principles” in both conflicts: “May peace return in both places, but let it be a just peace, a peace within the United Nations Charter.”
The first meeting between Albares and Blinken took place in October 2021 in Paris, coinciding with the celebration of the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The two met again in January 2022 during Albares’ first trip to Washington, where they talked about the crisis between Russia and Ukraine (before the start of the invasion), the NATO Summit in Madrid, democracy in Latin America and the situation in Western Sahara.
Likewise, they met again at the end of June of that same year in Madrid, on the occasion of the visit of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to meet with the President of the Government Pedro Sánchez, and to participate in the NATO Summit. ; and they met again in September 2022 in New York, coinciding with the Ministerial Week of the United Nations General Assembly; and two months later in Bucharest on the sidelines of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting. In their last bilateral meeting, which took place exactly a year ago in Washington, Albares and Blinken addressed the removal of land contaminated with plutonium from Palomares (Almería).
At the end of last October, Albares had a telephone conversation with Blinken to talk about the situation in the Middle East and the need to avoid escalating the conflict. On the other hand, the Spanish Government celebrated at the end of April the decision of the US House of Representatives to approve a package of almost 60,000 million euros of aid for Ukraine.
The extreme right in Europe
On the other hand, the Foreign Minister took advantage of the event to attack the extreme right in the face of the next European elections from June 6 to 9, which will be “crucial” to stop the forces that “believe that the adversary is the enemy that must be fought and annihilated, who prefer disqualification rather than words”, and who “are going to grow enormously” in the elections.
According to Albares, “in European societies, and clearly here in Spanish society, disqualification expands its social space and its media space, and when disqualification occupies social space, the word, which is the basis of political dialogue and democracy, is reduced.” For this reason, the minister urged to “recover the value of the word in the face of disqualification” in the European elections, in which “the construction of Europe and the construction of democracy are at stake, which are in the end two synonymous issues.”
