Beyond friendship and hostility
In 2026, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence.
Spain was already present at the beginning of that story.
That fact is sometimes presented ceremonially as evidence of an ancient friendship between two countries. The historical reality is considerably more interesting. The Spanish Monarchy of Carlos III did not support the American insurgents because it had suddenly embraced republican revolution. Spain remained a vast imperial monarchy with obvious reasons to regard colonial emancipation with caution.
It became involved because weakening Great Britain was in the Spanish national interest.
That distinction — cooperation without identity of interests — provides a useful framework for understanding much of the relationship during the following two and a half centuries.
Spain and the United States have been collaborators, territorial competitors, enemies, reluctant partners, strategic allies and highly interoperable members of the same Western security system. Political affinity has varied enormously. Governments have disagreed over Cuba, North Africa, the Middle East, Iraq, trade, defence expenditure and the proper distribution of responsibilities inside the Atlantic alliance.
Yet beneath those disagreements there has gradually emerged something more durable than friendship: systemic coherence.
The contemporary relationship survives not because Madrid and Washington always interpret the world in the same way, but because both operate inside an institutional, military, technological and economic architecture whose accumulated value is usually greater than the advantage either side could obtain by destroying it.
A monarchy helping to create a republic
France and Spain shared the fundamental strategic objective of weakening Britain during the American War of Independence, although they approached the emerging United States differently.
France formally recognised the United States and entered into an alliance with it in 1778. Spain entered the war against Britain in 1779 but avoided becoming a formal American ally and did not officially recognise the new republic until 1783.
The difference was logical. For the Spanish Crown, encouraging the defeat of Britain was desirable; legitimising without qualification the principle that American colonies could separate from European monarchies was rather less comfortable.
None of this made the Spanish contribution marginal.
Spanish Louisiana became a significant route for money, arms and supplies. Bernardo de Gálvez, its governor, conducted successful campaigns against British positions at Baton Rouge, Mobile and Pensacola. Those operations forced Britain to defend another theatre and helped protect the southern and western approaches to the rebellious colonies.
The first great paradox of Spanish-American relations was therefore already visible:
Spain materially contributed to the survival of a republic that it remained politically reluctant to recognise.
This was not sentimental solidarity. It was strategic convergence.
The balance of power reverses
The consequences of the American Revolution did not remain confined to the original thirteen states.
It would be too simplistic to derive Spanish-American emancipation directly from 1776. The French Revolution, Haiti, the Enlightenment, local political structures, Creole interests and the internal evolution of the Spanish Monarchy all mattered.
But the decisive institutional fracture came in 1808.
Napoleon’s intervention in Spain, the Peninsular War and the collapse of effective royal authority created a fundamental constitutional problem throughout the Spanish world: if the legitimate monarch could no longer exercise sovereignty, who could?
The consequences for Spain were devastating. The war damaged finances, infrastructure and state capacity. Political instability followed. Much of continental Spanish America achieved independence during the next two decades.
For the United States, the gradual disappearance of Spanish imperial power from North America removed an important territorial constraint.
Florida illustrates the transition. Spain had become increasingly unable to exercise effective control over the territory while American pressure intensified. Andrew Jackson occupied Spanish positions in 1818. The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, finally ratified in 1821, transferred East Florida to the United States and settled an enormous transcontinental boundary. The United States did not simply pay Spain a purchase price; it assumed claims of up to five million dollars while Spain relinquished territory it had increasingly little practical capacity to defend.
The process continued after Mexican independence.
Texas, its annexation by the United States and the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 carried American territorial power dramatically westward. Spain did not intervene. North America had ceased to be a space in which Madrid could determine the balance of power.
The historical direction had reversed.
In 1779, Spain had been a global empire intervening in the war of a young American republic.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, that republic was expanding across territories once contained within the Spanish imperial system.
1898: the Darwinian moment
The Spanish-American War was brief. Its psychological consequences were not.
The Treaty of Paris of 10 December 1898 ended Spanish sovereignty in Cuba and transferred Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States, with Washington paying twenty million dollars in connection with the Philippine cession.
For the United States, the conflict confirmed a transformation that had been developing for decades. It had become a continental industrial power capable of projecting naval and military force into the Caribbean and the Pacific.
For Spain, the same event became el Desastre.
Its significance cannot be reduced to the loss of territory.
The war occurred in an intellectual climate fascinated by national vitality, hierarchy, competition and decline. Social Darwinist language was frequently transferred from biology to societies, races and states. An ascending industrial republic defeating an old European empire fitted almost too easily into the ideological vocabulary of the period.
The danger is to accept that contemporary interpretation retrospectively.
Spain in 1898 was not a medieval society suddenly confronted by modern technology. It possessed universities, banks, railways, mines, engineering, shipbuilding and important industrial centres. What it lacked in comparison with the United States was not intelligence or invention, but scale, fiscal strength, industrial depth and — perhaps above all — institutional continuity.
The nineteenth century had imposed an exceptional accumulation of shocks: Napoleonic invasion, imperial collapse, civil wars, pronunciamientos, repeated constitutional change, political violence and chronic difficulties in maintaining long-term state projects.
1898 therefore represented more than the defeat of one fleet by another.
It was the encounter between two states whose historical trajectories had been moving in opposite directions.
Innovation without institutional continuity
The history of the submarine provides an instructive counterpoint to the conventional image of Spanish technological backwardness.
Narcís Monturiol was one of the important nineteenth-century pioneers of underwater navigation. Isaac Peral later developed and tested an electrically powered military submarine conceived specifically as a submerged torpedo platform.
The significance of Peral is not that one experimental submarine could have won the war of 1898 eight years later. That would be an implausible counterfactual.
The more interesting question is institutional.
What might have happened if successful experimentation had been followed by a sustained programme: successive designs, trained crews, doctrine, maintenance infrastructure and a small operational force of coastal submarines?
Such a force might not have preserved the Spanish Empire. It could, however, have made American naval superiority more expensive to exercise around Santiago, San Juan or Manila at a time when effective antisubmarine warfare barely existed.
The episode suggests a broader problem:
Spain’s difficulty was not always an inability to invent the future. It was often an inability to organise continuously around it.
The United States of 1898 was becoming exceptionally effective at converting industry, technology, logistics and administration into state power.
That difference mattered more than any individual invention.
Isolation, escape routes and the limits of pressure
After the Second World War, Franco’s Spain appeared to occupy the losing side of history without having formally participated in the conflict.
The diplomatic isolation was real. The United Nations recommended the withdrawal of ambassadors in 1946, and Spain remained excluded from important elements of the new post-war institutional order.
Yet even this period reveals a recurring feature of the relationship between Spain and the wider Western system: pressure tended to have limits.
Argentina under Juan Domingo Perón provided Spain with an important economic and political lifeline. Commercial agreements supplied grain, credit and other essential products at a moment when Madrid had few alternatives.
There is no reason to interpret this as an American-designed escape route. The more important point is that Washington itself gradually concluded that unlimited isolation could become strategically counterproductive.
By 1947 and 1948, American strategic planning documents were already questioning a policy that had failed to remove Franco and might instead destabilise a country whose geography was increasingly important in the emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Spain had demonstrated something that would recur repeatedly in later decades: an ally or partner can be punished, ignored or pressured without every available channel necessarily being closed.
International systems tend to preserve escape routes when the cost of total rupture becomes greater than the political value of punishment.
Franco, the United States and strategic ambiguity
The Cold War simplified the relationship.
Washington did not need to consider Franco’s Spain an attractive political model. It needed geography.
Spain offered access to the Atlantic, the western entrance to the Mediterranean, proximity to North Africa and strategic depth behind continental Western Europe. The regime also offered one additional characteristic valued in Cold War planning: predictability.
Franco, in turn, understood that the United States could provide security, economic assistance and a route back into the international system without requiring the immediate dismantling of his political regime.
The agreements of 26 September 1953 formalised that convergence. The United States gained access to major military facilities; Spain obtained military and economic assistance and, more importantly, progressive international rehabilitation.
Neither side needed to idealise the other.
The relationship was asymmetrical, but its logic was simple.
The same period nevertheless reveals Franco’s considerable skill in strategic ambiguity.
Spain remained strongly anti-communist, yet refused completely to follow Washington in isolating Castro’s Cuba. Spanish vessels continued trading with the island. American officials expressed irritation and applied pressure, but the disagreement remained compartmentalised inside a broader relationship Washington still considered strategically valuable.
The pattern was almost the inverse of the immediate post-war period.
When Spain was isolated, Argentina had provided an escape route while Washington gradually recognised the limits of isolation.
When Washington later sought to isolate Cuba, Spain itself maintained a partial escape route while carefully avoiding a rupture with the United States.
Franco’s undeclared nuclear ambitions offer an even more sophisticated example.
Project Islero, initiated in the 1960s, explored the possibility of an independent Spanish nuclear weapons capability. The project was technically serious enough to generate concern, but its political utility may have lain partly in remaining a capability rather than becoming an arsenal.
Crossing the nuclear threshold could have exposed Spain to sanctions, threatened access to sensitive Western technology and damaged the American relationship on which much of Spain’s military and economic modernisation increasingly depended.
Nuclear latency could therefore offer something that nuclear possession might destroy: leverage without complete strategic separation.
Whatever Franco’s ultimate intentions, the contradiction was obvious. A Spanish nuclear deterrent might increase theoretical autonomy while simultaneously damaging the wider system from which Spain derived much of its practical security.
This distinction between demonstrating an alternative and actually taking it to the point of rupture would become a recurring characteristic of the relationship.
Democracy consolidates the relationship
The death of Franco did not produce a geopolitical reversal.
Democratic Spain did not abandon the Western orientation established during the dictatorship. It legitimised, institutionalised and eventually multilateralised it.
The Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed in January 1976 already reflected the change in language. Cooperation was explicitly placed on the basis of sovereign equality.
Spain joined NATO in 1982 and the European Communities in 1986.
Neither development weakened its relationship with the United States.
They consolidated it.
The strategic relationship was no longer an arrangement between Washington and an isolated authoritarian regime. Spain was becoming institutionally part of the political, economic and defence architecture of the West.
The decisive bilateral legal instrument is the Agreement on Defense Cooperation between the Kingdom of Spain and the United States of America, signed in Madrid on 1 December 1988.
The agreement is significant not only because it regulates American use of facilities in Spain. Its language demonstrates the transformation of the relationship.
Both parties were NATO members. The text refers to democracy, individual freedoms, the rule of law, sovereign equality, mutual obligations and an equitable sharing of defence burdens.
It also leaves no doubt about sovereignty.
The bases and installations concerned remain under Spanish command. Uses outside the agreed purposes require prior authorisation from the Spanish Government. The treaty expressly recognises Spain’s inherent right under international law to adopt measures necessary to safeguard national security in an emergency.
Rota and Morón are therefore not American enclaves inside Spain.
They are Spanish military installations within an agreed bilateral and Atlantic architecture.
The letter nobody sends
Perhaps the most revealing provision of the 1988 agreement is not the one that authorises cooperation, but the one that allows it to end.
Article 69 originally established an eight-year period followed by automatic one-year extensions unless either party notified the other in writing, at least six months in advance, that it did not wish the agreement to continue.
The Second Protocol of Amendment, signed in 2012 and entering into force on 21 May 2013, opened a new eight-year period. Since 21 May 2021, the system has again operated through annual extensions under Article 69.
Legally, therefore, the relationship is not irreversible.
Spain can leave.
The United States can leave.
What is remarkable is that successive governments of strikingly different political orientations have repeatedly chosen not to do so.
The 1988 agreement was signed under Felipe González.
It was amended under José María Aznar.
Under Mariano Rajoy, the 2012 amendment incorporated the permanent deployment at Rota of American AEGIS destroyers connected to NATO missile defence, and the 2015 amendment established a permanent American crisis-response force at Morón.
Under Pedro Sánchez, Spain authorised in 2023 an increase from four to six permanently based US Navy AEGIS destroyers at Rota.
Governments changed.
Political relations fluctuated.
The architecture deepened.
There is a useful distinction here between legal possibility and systemic probability.
A government could theoretically send the notification required by Article 69.
But such a letter would immediately raise much larger questions: the future of Rota and Morón, NATO missile defence, intelligence cooperation, military interoperability, training, logistics, industrial programmes, established command relationships and decades of accumulated infrastructure.
Ending the agreement is legally simple.
Replacing the system behind it is not.
The agreement can be terminated by a letter. The strategic ecosystem cannot.
That is why political rhetoric should not automatically be confused with structural change.
A Spanish government can disagree sharply with Washington over a particular war without leaving the Atlantic system.
An American president can criticise a Spanish government without concluding that Rota has ceased to matter.
The system itself was designed to absorb disagreement. Article 68 requires the parties to try to resolve difficulties by mutual agreement, and Article 69 provides consultation mechanisms before certain forms of termination.
Permanent harmony was never assumed.
Managed friction was.
The alliance without a single enemy
The disappearance of the Soviet Union arguably transformed the relationship more profoundly than Spanish democratisation itself.
During the Cold War, Western governments disagreed constantly.
France pursued strategic autonomy. West Germany developed Ostpolitik. Spain negotiated the American military presence and preserved independent positions in the Arab world.
But behind those disagreements stood an enormous simplifying factor: the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact provided a shared strategic reference.
After 1991, the question became more complicated.
What exactly was the alliance for, and which threats deserved priority?
Washington increasingly focused on the Middle East, terrorism and eventually the Indo-Pacific and China. Europeans debated strategic autonomy, defence expenditure and the extent to which the United States would continue treating Europe as its principal strategic theatre.
Spain’s resulting ambivalence is not especially Spanish.
It is European.
France can regard the United States as indispensable and simultaneously demand greater European autonomy.
Germany can depend on American deterrence while objecting to American trade or foreign-policy decisions.
Spain can maintain one of the deepest bilateral military relationships in Europe while disagreeing with Washington over Iraq, Palestine or elements of North African policy.
This is not evidence that the alliance has failed.
It is evidence that an alliance originally structured around one overwhelming adversary has had to learn to operate without one universally prioritised threat.
Europeanisation without decoupling
Spain’s accession to the European Communities also transformed the bilateral relationship in a way that NATO membership alone could not.
Not everything that appears to be Spanish-American is now bilateral.
Trade is the clearest example. Spain does not conduct an independent tariff policy toward the United States. In this field, Washington largely negotiates with Brussels.
Spain therefore has several simultaneous relationships with the United States.
There is a bilateral relationship centred on defence, diplomacy, intelligence and specific legal instruments.
There is an Atlantic relationship through NATO.
And there is an increasingly important European relationship through the institutions and competences of the European Union.
This modifies the asymmetry.
Spain alone is a medium-sized European power dealing with a superpower. As part of the European Union, it participates in an economic and regulatory space of continental scale.
European integration did not merely transfer competence away from Madrid. In certain fields it multiplied Spain’s negotiating weight.
The same logic is now entering defence.
Washington increasingly demands that Europe assume more responsibility for its own security. Spain broadly accepts that conclusion, but its emerging position is equally clear: additional expenditure should also generate industrial capacity, technology and employment in Spain and Europe.
That does not necessarily imply separation from American industry.
It suggests a different model.
Spain increasingly seeks not simply to buy American, but to build within the same ecosystem.
Spanish platforms can incorporate American sensors, weapons or propulsion. American and allied platforms can incorporate Spanish subsystems. European industrial autonomy and Atlantic interoperability are not mutually exclusive.
The result is better described as Europeanisation without decoupling.
Rota illustrates the point particularly well.
Spain participates physically in NATO’s ballistic-missile defence architecture through the American AEGIS destroyers permanently based there. When Germany later promoted the European Sky Shield Initiative, Spain could reasonably argue that it already participated in an established NATO missile-defence system.
A bilateral Spanish-American installation had become part of a wider European collective-defence architecture.
Morocco, Western Sahara and the southern uncertainty
There is one region in which Spain has historically been less confident that American priorities will automatically coincide with its own: North Africa.
Morocco is the central reason.
For Spain, Morocco is simultaneously a neighbour, an important economic partner, a security partner and the state whose territorial claims create the most persistent southern strategic sensitivity.
For the United States, Morocco is also useful: strategically located, politically connected to Washington and important in American policy toward North Africa, the Sahel and the wider Arab world.
This produces an unavoidable ambiguity.
Washington has an interest in a strong relationship with Spain.
It also has an interest in a strong relationship with Morocco.
From Washington, those policies are not necessarily contradictory.
From Madrid, they can occasionally feel uncomfortable.
The Western Sahara crisis of 1975 is instructive.
Declassified American documents do not support the simplistic claim that Henry Kissinger merely handed the territory to Morocco. Washington publicly maintained neutrality, expressed concern about a possible military confrontation, attempted to dissuade Hassan II from precipitating one and supported diplomatic management through the United Nations.
But those same documents also show that Morocco’s strategic importance weighed heavily in American calculations.
One State Department telegram stated the dilemma with unusual clarity: the United States could remain neutral regarding the merits of competing territorial claims, but because it maintained important military relationships with both Spain and Morocco it could not remain indifferent to the methods used to resolve them.
That distinction remains useful today.
Spain should not expect the United States to reproduce automatically every Spanish position regarding Morocco.
But neither should an improvement in US-Moroccan relations be interpreted as evidence that Washington has somehow replaced Spain with Morocco.
Strategic systems are not romantic triangles.
Morocco and Spain perform different functions.
Morocco is an important regional partner.
Spain is a NATO ally, an EU member, host to Rota and Morón, contributor to NATO missile defence and a military force capable of operating at very high levels of interoperability with the United States.
Those assets are not interchangeable.
Ceuta and Melilla illustrate the corresponding Spanish responsibility.
Spain cannot simultaneously insist upon sovereignty and expect another state permanently to exercise that sovereignty on its behalf.
International law does not prevent Spain from reinforcing the defence of territory under Spanish sovereignty. What international law regulates is the manner in which force is used, not the ordinary capacity of a sovereign state to station its armed forces within its own territory.
Border policing, migration control and territorial defence are legally distinct functions and must remain proportionate to the nature of the threat.
But the underlying principle is straightforward:
sovereignty creates responsibility.
A United States increasingly demanding greater European burden-sharing is likely to expect Spain to exercise the powers Spain itself insists upon possessing.
Spain as a diplomatic facilitator
Spain’s usefulness inside the Western system is not limited to military geography.
It also possesses a less visible diplomatic asset: relatively low-friction access to actors that do not always have equally uncomplicated relationships with Washington.
Spain is unmistakably Western.
It is a member of NATO and the European Union, hosts American forces and shares a sophisticated security relationship with the United States.
At the same time, it has maintained historically substantial relationships with the Arab world, North Africa, Turkey and other states that preserve significant strategic autonomy.
This does not make Spain neutral.
It can make Spain useful.
The Western Sahara dispute again provides an early example. In 1979, American diplomats meeting in Madrid concluded that Spain or France might have a useful role in helping the parties understand the dangers of the conflict and move beyond public polemics. The American assessment explicitly noted Spanish interest in such a function.
The pattern is broader.
The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 was primarily an American and Soviet diplomatic initiative. Yet the choice of Madrid mattered. Spain offered a Western European capital acceptable to Israel while simultaneously possessing a long history of engagement with Arab states.
Spain did not need to dominate the negotiation in order to facilitate it.
This distinction is important.
Diplomatic influence is not always measured by who speaks at the table. Sometimes it is measured by whose table can be used.
A medium power can occasionally enter diplomatic spaces in which the very weight of a superpower becomes a complication.
Spain can speak as a Western state without always being perceived as merely an extension of Washington.
That difference can itself be an asset to Washington.
Interoperability as strategic capital
The strongest Spanish asset inside the contemporary relationship may nevertheless be neither diplomacy nor geography.
It is interoperability.
This is cumulative capital.
Political preferences can change after an election. Interoperability is built over decades through doctrine, communications, training, command structures, maintenance, security clearances, weapons, logistics and industrial cooperation.
A Spanish F-100 frigate can operate inside an American carrier strike group because both navies have spent years making that possible.
Rota forms part of NATO’s missile-defence architecture because American AEGIS ships are not simply visitors to a Spanish port; they operate inside a permanent bilateral and alliance framework.
This produces relationships that extend beyond Spain and the United States themselves.
Turkey provides an excellent example.
Ankara is one of NATO’s most strategically valuable and politically autonomous allies. Its relationship with Washington is frequently difficult. Spain, however, has developed unusually stable defence relations with Turkey.
The Turkish amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu was built in Turkey from a Navantia design derived from the Spanish Juan Carlos I, with Spanish engineering support, systems and technology transfer. In 2026, Navantia and Turkey agreed on a further framework for the ship’s life-cycle support.
That industrial cooperation has become operational interoperability.
During NATO’s Steadfast Dart 26, the Anadolu sailed from Rota alongside Spanish warships as part of a force whose maritime component was under Spanish command. Turkish amphibious capabilities, Spanish special operations forces, German aircraft and NATO command structures operated inside the same exercise.
The emerging HÜRJET/SAETA II relationship reflects the same logic in aviation: a Turkish platform, Spanish adaptation and industrial participation, and American GE propulsion.
No single country controls the complete ecosystem.
That is precisely why leaving it becomes increasingly difficult.
Modern interoperability is not merely the ability of two systems to communicate.
It is a political relationship expressed through technology.
The same principle explains why Western armed forces can adopt useful niche technologies developed by allied industries without perceiving them as a strategic problem.
A system does not cease to be Western because every component is not American.
On the contrary, a network in which Spanish, German, French, Turkish, Israeli and American companies can supply interoperable capabilities may ultimately be stronger than one in which Europe functions solely as a customer and the United States solely as a supplier.
The likely direction of the relationship
The next stage of Spanish-American relations is therefore unlikely to be defined by Spain choosing between Europe and the United States.
Spain has already made both choices.
The relevant question is how responsibilities, industrial value and strategic autonomy will be distributed inside a system that remains fundamentally transatlantic.
Europe will probably spend more on defence.
Spain will seek to ensure that much of that expenditure produces employment, technology and industrial capacity at home and in Europe.
American companies may not always welcome European preference for domestic industrial participation.
But from a wider strategic perspective, a militarily stronger Spain whose systems remain interoperable with NATO and the United States is not necessarily a loss for Washington.
Spain’s objective is increasingly likely to be:
more industrial autonomy without strategic separation.
That is also compatible with America’s repeated demand that Europe assume a larger proportion of the burden of its own defence.
The resulting system may therefore become more complex while remaining coherent.
American technology will continue to appear inside European platforms.
European technologies will increasingly appear inside wider NATO and American supply chains.
Spanish companies will seek niches in which they can contribute rather than simply purchase.
Allies such as Turkey and strategically autonomous partners such as India will remain connected to Western technology through overlapping industrial relationships in which Spain can sometimes function as an integrator.
None of this requires perfect political alignment.
It requires sufficient compatibility to keep the network working.
Systemic coherence beneath political noise
Two hundred and fifty years of Spanish-American relations are difficult to reduce to friendship, hostility or alignment.
Governments have changed.
Regimes have changed.
Strategic priorities have changed.
Spain has moved from imperial power to defeated empire, from dictatorship to democracy, and from bilateral dependence to European and Atlantic integration.
The United States has moved from insurgent republic to continental power, from imperial expansion to global predominance and, increasingly, toward a system in which it asks allies to assume greater responsibility.
Political rhetoric has often suggested rupture.
The underlying system has usually suggested continuity.
Spain has disagreed with Washington over Cuba, Iraq, the Middle East, Western Sahara and other questions.
Washington has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with Spanish governments, defence expenditure and particular foreign-policy choices.
Yet Rota remains.
Morón remains.
NATO interoperability remains.
Industrial links continue to deepen.
The legal architecture survives governments whose political instincts could hardly be more different.
That continuity is not accidental.
It reflects something stronger than political affinity: systemic coherence.
Both countries operate within an institutional, military, technological and economic environment whose accumulated value is considerably greater than the temporary advantage either could normally obtain from confrontation.
The relationship can absorb disagreement because neither party usually has an interest in destroying the architecture within which that disagreement takes place.
This does not mean that the system is immutable.
Europe will become more responsible for its defence. Spain will seek greater industrial returns from that effort. Washington will continue pursuing relationships with countries such as Morocco that do not always coincide perfectly with Spanish interests. New administrations will introduce new rhetoric, new tensions and new demands.
But those developments do not necessarily point toward strategic separation.
More probably, they will produce a more distributed version of the same system: greater European responsibility, stronger national defence industries, deeper industrial interdependence and continued operational compatibility with the United States.
Spain does not need to reproduce American policy in order to remain a reliable ally.
The United States does not need to approve every Spanish decision in order to continue considering Spain strategically valuable.
The system does not require enthusiasm.
It requires sufficient compatibility of interests, sufficient interoperability and sufficient institutional memory to make continuity more rational than rupture.
That logic was already visible under Carlos III.
Spain cooperated with the American revolutionaries because British power created a convergence of interests.
Franco later cooperated with Washington because Soviet power, geography and the survival of his regime created another.
Democratic Spain consolidated the relationship because Atlantic and European integration became part of its own transformation.
The reasons changed.
The systemic logic survived.
Perhaps the most revealing question is therefore also the simplest.
The 1988 defence agreement contains a legal mechanism allowing either country to bring the arrangement to an end.
Political leaders can threaten, criticise, disagree and behave hyperbolically.
But structural change begins only when someone decides that the system itself is no longer worth preserving.
So far, nobody has sent the letter.
Appendix: putting Spain into American scale
American scale can sometimes distort the perception of European states.
Spain had approximately 49.8 million inhabitants on 1 July 2026. If it were hypothetically inserted into the United States, it would therefore be more populous than California, whose 2025 population estimate was approximately 39.4 million.
Spain’s nominal GDP in 2025 was approximately US$1.91 trillion.
Geographically, Spain is somewhat larger than California and smaller than Texas.
It is therefore useful to remember that Spain is not a small state in demographic, territorial or economic terms. At the same time, its relationship with a continental power of more than 300 million inhabitants and an economy many times larger is inevitably asymmetric.
The European Union changes that equation. In commercial and regulatory matters, Spain participates in a continental bloc capable of negotiating with Washington on an entirely different scale.
This is why contemporary Spanish-American relations cannot be understood through a purely bilateral lens.
Spain today operates simultaneously as a sovereign state, a European Union member and a NATO ally.
All three layers matter.
