Defying Trump, Swiping at Israel: Pedro Sanchez’s Brilliant, Empty Foreign Policy

Spain formally withdrew its ambassador from Israel on March 11. The announcement, published in the Boletin Oficial del Estado, terminated the appointment of Ana Maria Salomon Perez, downgrading Madrid’s diplomatic presence to a charge d’affaires. The move capped a sequence of escalating gestures Spain has taken against Israel.

To much of the European Left — and to a growing number of commentators beyond —Pedro Sanchez, head of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, and Spain’s prime minister since 2018, has become the leader the continent needs: the man who says “no to war,” who stands up to President Donald Trump, and who defends international law when others capitulate. Bloomberg called it el efecto bandera — a rally-round-the-flag moment. Left-wing mega philanthropist Alex Soros said Spain is “becoming the leader of the free world” thanks to its anti-war stance.

This reading is not wrong in the way a lie is wrong. It is wrong in the way a magic trick is wrong: everything you see is real, but it is merely a sleight of hand.

The Arithmetic of Survival

To understand Sanchez’s foreign policy, start with arithmetic. In Spain’s 350-seat Congress, 176 seats are needed to govern. After the July 2023 election — in which the conservative People’s Party (PP) actually won a plurality — Sanchez cobbled together a minority coalition with Sumar (the remnant of the far left) and then secured his investiture through deals with Catalan and Basque separatist parties, including the granting of a sweeping amnesty to those involved in the 2017 independence referendum. It was a feat of raw political engineering that sacrificed doctrinal coherence for survival.

The coalition’s logic requires Sanchez to do two things simultaneously: crush the space to his left so that no rival can outflank him on progressive credentials and ensure that the far-right Vox grows strong enough to prevent the PP from ever reaching 176 seats on its own. If the PP needs Vox to govern, Sanchez can always run as the bulwark against fascism. If the left fragments, he loses his base.

Every major foreign policy gesture of the past two years serves this dual purpose.

The Gaza Playbook

Spain initially recalled its ambassador to Israel in a tit-for-tat sparked by Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz proclaiming, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The phrase is widely understood as a euphemism for Israel’s destruction. But this was hardly the first sign of crumbling ties.

Spain started a trend among European states when Sanchez recognized a Palestinian state in 2024. Sanchez then became the most senior European leader to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza. Madrid increased its hostility toward Jerusalem, canceling arms contracts; joining the International Court of Justice case against Israel; joining the Hague Group, a collection of countries dedicated to punishing Israel for its conduct in the Gaza war; enshrining an arms embargo on Israel in its parliament; closing its ports to weapons and supplies destined for Israel; and rejecting Trump’s Gaza “Board of Peace” for sidelining the United Nations and lacking Palestinian input.

Each of these moves was calibrated to occupy the political space that the left-wing Podemos party — which ascended meteorically in 2014 but is now a spent force — once claimed. When Sumar and Podemos fragmented in 2024 over coalition appointments, Sanchez absorbed the oxygen. Podemos’s leader called the Gaza war a genocide just 10 days after the Hamas attacks. Sanchez’s Gaza positioning was not merely principled; it was a hostile takeover of the Spanish left’s most mobilizing cause. The massive pro-Palestinian protests in Spanish cities starting in mid-October 2023 provided the emotional infrastructure; Sanchez provided the institutional validation.

For the domestic audience, the message was clear: you don’t need Podemos when the prime minister himself will say “genocide.”

Iran and the Trump Standoff

The Iran crisis supercharged the playbook. When the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, began on February 28, Sanchez moved within hours — banning U.S. use of the Rota and Moron bases, denouncing the strikes as illegal and unjustifiable, and condensing his position into a four-word slogan: “No a la Guerra (no to war).”

The phrase was not new. It was the rallying cry of the massive 2003 protests against Jose Maria Aznar’s decision to join the Iraq War alongside President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair — a decision that contributed to Aznar’s political destruction and the PSOE’s return to power. By invoking the Iraq parallel, Sanchez was tapping into one of the deepest reservoirs of Spanish political memory: the conviction that Aznar’s war was Spain’s original sin, the moment the country was led astray by American hubris.

The domestic effects of Sanchez’s anti-war cry were immediate. His approval ratings climbed. The PP was placed in an impossible position — supporting the strikes aligned them with Trump and Vox, while opposing them ceded ground to Sanchez. Vox’s embrace of the American position reinforced Sanchez’s framing: a vote for the PP’s allies is a vote for Trump’s wars. As Ipsos analyst Paco Camas Garcia noted on X: Sanchez “is using foreign policy to regain the political initiative at home.”

Trump’s furious response — threatening to cut off all trade with Spain, declaring “we could just fly in and use” the bases — was, from Sanchez’s perspective, a gift. Every Trump insult validated the narrative. European Council President Antonio Costa called Sanchez to express “full solidarity.” Sanchez had engineered a situation in which American bullying made him look brave.

There is a problem, however. According to flight-tracking data cited by Spanish journalists, flight RCH846, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, departed from Rota Air Base on the same night Sanchez’s foreign minister was categorically denying American use of the bases. At least one other U.S. military aircraft reportedly operated from Spanish bases in the following hours. If confirmed, the “no to war” position may have been — at least in part — a performance for domestic consumption, while operational cooperation continued behind closed doors.

The Corruption Smokescreen

The timing of Sanchez’s foreign policy escalation is not incidental. His government is engulfed in the worst corruption crisis since Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s.

The Koldo Case — named after Koldo Garcia, former adviser to ex-Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos — has metastasized into a sprawling investigation involving pandemic-era procurement fraud, kickbacks on public contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros, and cash payments delivered in PSOE-branded envelopes. The Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit is examining 22 contracts worth $409 million allegedly manipulated through favoritism.

Santos Cerdan, the PSOE’s former organizational secretary — effectively Sanchez’s party’s “number three” — was detained in June 2025 for corruption. Intercepted messages reportedly show Cerdan instructing Garcia to insert “two ballots” during the 2014 primary that Sanchez won, raising questions about the integrity of Sanchez’s own rise to power. Abalos himself is facing Spanish Supreme Court proceedings for criminal organization, bribery, and embezzlement.

The investigations extend to Sanchez’s own family. His wife, Begona Gomez, was formally charged in 2024 with influence peddling and corruption, in a case that expanded to include allegations of embezzlement and the misuse of public staff. His brother is under investigation for alleged influence peddling. Spain’s attorney general has himself been investigated for leaking confidential information. In June 2025, tens of thousands marched in Madrid under the PP-organized slogan “Democracy or Mafia.”

Against this backdrop, the Iran crisis and the Trump confrontation serve an obvious diversionary function: they dominate the news cycle, cast Sanchez as a statesman defending principles, and frame any domestic criticism as either pro-Trump or unpatriotic.

The Deeper Game: Immigration, Europe, and the Vox Strategy

In December 2025, Sanchez announced the regularization of approximately 500,000 undocumented migrants — a move that served humanitarian and economic goals (Spain’s labor market needs workers) but also, predictably, inflamed the far right. Vox seized on the decision to campaign on border control, cultural identity, and the failures of integration, particularly after the 2025 Torre-Pacheco anti-migrant riots.

This is the pattern: Sanchez takes positions that are defensible on their merits but that simultaneously feed Vox’s growth, which, in turn, makes the PP unable to govern without far-right support, thereby making Sanchez indispensable as the anti-fascist alternative. It is a strategy of extraordinary cynicism executed with extraordinary skill.

The European dimension adds another layer. Spain is the European Union’s second-largest recipient of post-Covid recovery funds — approximately $188 billion in grants and loans. Sanchez’s relationship with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was functional: von der Leyen needed PSOE votes in the European Parliament for her second term. But the bases standoff, the mass regularization, and increasingly vocal criticism of NATO defense spending targets are testing that relationship. At the June 2025 NATO summit, Spain was the sole holdout against the alliance’s 5 percent of GDP defense spending target. “Sometimes it’s wiser to spend more money on cooperation aid or strengthening multilateralism than to just buy weapons from the American defense industry,” Sanchez said — a line designed for domestic consumption that landed poorly in Brussels and Washington alike.

The Latin American Connection

Sanchez’s foreign policy orientation cannot be understood without its Latin American dimension. Spain’s PSOE maintains deep ties with the Grupo de Puebla — a network of left-wing Latin American leaders and former leaders. Former Spanish Prime Minister and PSOE leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has served as an informal mediator between Venezuela’s Maduro regime and the opposition, drawing persistent criticism within Spain, Venezuela, and the United States for his close ties to the regime.

When Trump launched his military operation against Venezuela in January, Sanchez joined Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay in a joint statement condemning the incursion — while the European Union condemned Maduro’s lack of legitimacy and called for restraint. The pattern is consistent: Sanchez positions Spain closer to the Latin American left than to its European allies on matters of sovereignty and the use of force, leveraging historical and linguistic ties to build an alternative diplomatic identity.

What Spain Does Not Have

Notably absent from all of this is a coherent foreign policy. Spain under Sanchez has no strategic vision for its role in NATO, no articulated position on European defense integration, no framework for managing the relationship with an increasingly assertive China, and no serious engagement with the structural challenges of the Middle East beyond gestural solidarity with Palestinians and theatrical opposition to American power.

The country spends less on defense than almost any other NATO member. It has no independent intelligence assessment capability in the Middle East that would support the sweeping legal and moral judgments Sanchez renders from Madrid. Its diplomatic service — while professional — is stretched thin and subordinated to the communications needs of the prime minister’s office.

What Spain has is a prime minister of extraordinary political talent who has understood, perhaps better than any other leader in Europe, that in a fragmented media landscape, foreign policy is simply content. A base denial is a headline. A Trump confrontation is a news cycle. An ambassador recall is a political event. None of these require a strategy. They require an instinct — and Sanchez’s instinct is impeccable, inside Spain, at least.

The Costs

The costs of this approach are real, even if they are deferred.

Spain’s relationship with the United States — its most important security partner outside Europe — has been damaged in ways that will outlast the current crisis. The ambiguity around U.S. military bases has introduced uncertainty into NATO operational planning at the worst possible time. Spain’s credibility as a serious interlocutor in Middle Eastern affairs — never strong — has been further diminished by positions that are driven by domestic electoral logic rather than regional knowledge.

Sooner or later, Sanchez’s magic will run out, and his defiance of Trump and hostility toward Israel will be exposed as little more than parlor tricks.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where David May is the research manager and a senior research analyst. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Simone and David on X @srodan and @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.