The Government is preparing for a difficult relationship with the Trump Administration

Luis Ayllón The Spanish government is preparing to maintain a difficult relationship with the United States, following the victory of Donald Trump, who never met privately with Pedro Sánchez during the two and a half years that they were at the head of the respective administrations. The victory of the Republican candidate opens a panorama in which there will be more than one shock, despite the fact that the Government is trying to put the emphasis more on what unites the two countries as allies than on the differences in their approaches. The head of the Executive was quick to publish a message on his account on the social network X on Wednesday, in which he congratulated Trump on his victory and added: “We will work on our strategic bilateral relations and on a strong transatlantic partnership.” Along the same lines, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, insisted on the “intense relationship as NATO allies and through the Euro-Atlantic partnership,” although he did not want to comment on possible political and economic effects for Spain of Trump’s return to the White House, until he sees what the first decisions of the new US Administration are. Sánchez, however, is not among the leaders with whom Trump spoke by phone hours after his victory was announced. Experts in relations between Spain and the United States, consulted by The Diplomat, are convinced that there will be no changes in what affects the military and security sphere. For Washington, the key element of its relationship with Spain is the Defense Cooperation Agreement and the maintenance of the agreements that allow the Pentagon to have, at the Rota naval base, at this time, five NATO Anti-Missile Shield destroyers (with another one expected to arrive next year). In any case, in the expectation that the United States will now demand more forcefully from Europe a greater contribution to the budget of the Atlantic Alliance, Spain is not in the best situation, because with 1.28 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is the member state that invests the least in Defense of all the NATO countries. It does not seem that, on the bilateral aspect, however, there is any concern about possible changes in relations in the military field, but there is in others, because Trump has no sympathy whatsoever towards Sánchez and, of course, he will not have been very satisfied, if he has received the comments of leaders of the PSOE and of the Sumar partners in the Government, insisting on disqualifications towards the one who will be the 47th president of the United States. Fleeting encounters The mutual antipathy between Sánchez and Trump was already evident since the arrival of the former to La Moncloa in June 2018, when Trump was in his first term. Their meeting, a month later, at a NATO summit in Brussels was limited to a cold greeting. And a year later, in July 2019, during a G-20 meeting in Osaka (Japan), the image of a nonchalant Trump could be seen indicating to Sánchez where he should sit and cutting off any possible dialogue. The meetings in those two and a half years, until Biden arrived at the White House in 2020, were limited to a couple of photos of the Trump couple with Sánchez and his wife, Begoña Gómez, in September 2018 and 2019, in the protocolary greeting of the traditional reception that the president of the United States offers in New York to the leaders who attend the United Nations General Assembly. If Sánchez ever tried to meet Trump in private in Washington, Moncloa did not, of course, make it known, but the truth is that this meeting never took place. According to observers, the background does not predict an easy relationship in the future, and not only because Sánchez expressed his preference for the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris during the US election campaign, and described Trump as a “reference for the far-right international”. There are other factors, such as the position of the Spanish Government on some international issues, which do not favour the desire to strengthen the strategic partnership with the United States. Among these factors is the confrontation with Israel – which has still not sent its ambassador to Madrid – and the fact that Sánchez's Government has become the champion of the process of recognising Palestine as a State. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that Washington's support for his offensive in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism will be strengthened and he will take care to remind Trump where each country stood in the current conflict. Spain has also been one of Ukraine's main supporters within the European Union and one of the biggest critics of the Russian invasion, and now faces the prospect of a change in US policy on the war. Nor will Sánchez's closeness to Trump help him to understand Trump, the latter's closeness to the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, who is directly at odds with the Spanish president and who has seen how the head of the Executive withdrew his ambassador in Buenos Aires, to reappoint another ambassador five months later, trying to close the open crisis Tariffs Thus, the exporters of the Spanish black table olive have already expressed their concern about Trump's victory. The general secretary of the Association of Table Olive Exporters (Asemesa), Antonio de Mora, told Efe that he hopes that the announcement of the 10% increase in tariffs will not be added to those already imposed on their products, which are currently 35%, and which have not been eliminated by Joe Biden, despite the rulings handed down by the World Trade Organization (WTO). According to De Mora, the sector has lost 70% of the market and has stopped exporting more than 260 million euros in the last five years. Added to this are the tariffs on steel and aluminium exports from Europe, which Trump imposed in his first term and are still in place and which also significantly affected Spain, which, despite everything, was in 2023 the seventh country that exported the most to the United States.

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