Sanxe dog in the Strait of Hormuz
The US aircraft carrier Nimitz crossed the Strait of Malacca yesterday, heading for Hormuz. After several months of cruising in the South China Sea, the USS Nimitz—a 333-meter-long ship with two nuclear reactors, 90 combat aircraft, and some 6,000 military personnel on board, including sailors and air force personnel—is heading toward the Middle East to reinforce surveillance of the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to and from the Persian Gulf and a vital enclave for maritime hydrocarbon transport.
As an extreme measure in the face of Israeli air attacks, the Iranian regime might be tempted to blockade Hormuz to provoke a global fuel supply crisis that would force a halt to the offensive. In the absence of an atomic bomb, Hormuz could be the ayatollahs' last resort. Last Sunday, Iran's official news agency reported that authorities in Tehran were considering blocking the strait, through which some 20 million barrels of oil, approximately 20% of global crude oil consumption, pass daily. Nearly 60 million tons of liquefied natural gas pass through the same route daily.
An image of the USS Nimitz
Public domainWe return to 1980. When the Iran-Iraq War broke out immediately after the Islamic Revolution in ancient Persia, both sides initiated naval hostilities in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz to block each other's oil tankers. As a result, oil prices rose again, leading to a surge in inflation. The Spanish economy suffered a setback, and Adolfo Suárez began to get nervous. His problems were mounting, and all he needed was a new oil crisis. Suárez had won two consecutive legislative elections (1977 and 1979), but he was accumulating enemies among the ruling classes. Bankers and major businessmen believed he had fulfilled his role and that it was time to promote the creation of a major Spanish conservative party. They couldn't understand the Suárez who embraced the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat , who delayed Spain's entry into NATO, and who seemed to want to compete with the PSOE on its own turf. The military ultras hated him. The Catholic hierarchy, in the midst of a Wojtylian shift in Rome, accused him of having made too many secular concessions to the left. His party was fracturing, corroded by internal dissension. And King Juan Carlos would soon withdraw his support.
At that point, Suárez began to obsess over Hormuz. In all his parliamentary interventions, he cited the strait that could strangle the world economy. The Madrid press began to mock his unusual interest in international politics. Suárez suffered from Hormuz syndrome, they wrote. On January 29, 1981, while the skirmishes in the Persian Gulf continued, Adolfo Suárez González resigned in an attempt to ward off the possibility of a military coup, which he believed was imminent. The coup took place on February 23. Forty-odd years later, Hormuz returns, and another Spanish president finds himself on the ropes. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Suárez never took much interest in international politics, but he realized that Hormuz could decide his fate. With Pedro Sánchez, things happen the other way around. He is one of the Spanish presidents who has shown the greatest interest and competence in foreign policy, rivaling Felipe González and José María Aznar . He speaks languages fluently and knows the circuits of European politics very well. However, in recent weeks he has distanced himself from the foreign front as his internal problems have grown. Let us remember that two months ago Sánchez traveled to China to meet with President Xi Jinping , the same day that the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni , was received by Donald Trump at the White House. That trip to Beijing was very significant. It had an air of defiance towards Washington. One day we will know what the political cost of that trip was for the now troubled President Sánchez.
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He now has a very awkward appointment scheduled for June 24 and 25 in The Hague, Netherlands. The NATO General Assembly, with US President Donald Trump in attendance, will be held. At that assembly, the United States will demand that NATO member states increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP. Trump isn't satisfied with 2%, a demand first made by Barack Obama at the NATO General Assembly held in 2016 in Warsaw, shortly before the end of his second presidential term. Trump wants 5%, and he wants it now.
It's possible that an agreement could be reached in The Hague to increase European defense spending to 3.5% in the coming years, with a margin of fluctuation toward 5% for additional spending on cybersecurity. Sánchez can hardly make that commitment with the current parliamentary majority. A complicated, highly heterogeneous majority, which now risks fraying under the extreme compression of the legislature. Podemos has already positioned itself in that scenario: it accuses Sánchez of being a warmonger and the PSOE of being a corrupt party. Podemos would not vote today on a vote of confidence raised by Sánchez. The purple party is waiting for the assembly in The Hague to draw a dividing line with a thick marker and once again call on Izquierda Unida to leave the government. The small Podemos, a grouping that condenses many remnants and disappointments, still intellectually led by Pablo Iglesias , a man with a capacity for political combat, sees an open space and occupies it. Its four deputies would be decisive in the vote on a vote of confidence. Today they're at number one. Everything comes back. Julio Anguita 's pincers return. Everything rhymes.
Sánchez will be attending The Hague at his worst political moment. Nothing like that lavish NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June 2022, with all the leaders gathered at the Prado Museum. Sánchez and his wife, Begoña Gómez , beaming, next to US President Joe Biden . How time has flown! At that magnificent closing of the Madrid meeting, the man in difficulty was Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi , who had to sit on one of the museum benches to take a call from Rome: his government had entered a crisis. That photo was widely discussed. Everyone was celebrating, and Draghi, the great European technocrat, was receiving bad news. His government fell after two weeks. In The Hague, the leader in crisis will be Sánchez. Bad time to greet Trump or bump into the President of the United States in one of the assembly's corridors. It's going to be a complicated meeting.
Draghi at the NATO summit in Madrid, June 2022
Ballesteros / EFEIn military circles, there is fear that the United States is threatening a significant withdrawal of military personnel from Europe to concentrate forces in the Indo-Pacific. There is also a presumption that the true objective of the new US leaders is to promote a NATO-like structure for the Indo-Pacific, to tighten the screws on China, gradually weakening the Atlantic Alliance with the excuse that Europeans are not taking the step of dedicating 5% of their budgets to military spending. Spain is not currently in a political, social, or budgetary position to take that step. Neither is Italy. Nor is Portugal. Nor are other European countries. This jump from 2% to 5% would require cuts that would not be supported by society today.
The jump to 2% is already being made in Spain in a very peculiar way, through budget transfers agreed upon in the Council of Ministers and not subject to Congress for approval. It doesn't seem like a very sustainable path for the foreseeable future. This is the dramatic dilemma Sánchez faces in these hours: he can only try to emerge from the serious reputational crisis posed by the Cerdán case by overcoming a vote of no confidence in Congress or by reaching a political agreement to approve the 2026 general state budget. On this platform, Sánchez could try to reach the end of his term or hand over the reins to another Socialist candidate, a hypothesis that doesn't seem to be part of his calculations at the moment. We don't know. If he's thinking about a replacement, he won't announce it now. The replacement, if there is one, will only appear at the last minute. Whether he wants to hold out until the end or is thinking of a replacement who has a chance of winning the election, the PSOE leader will find it difficult to reach a budget agreement with his allies with a heavy burden of military spending on his shoulders.
Sánchez's future is at stake these days. And he's playing it out in The Hague. The current parliamentary majority isn't functional to the new military spending demands, the specifics of which we still don't know. We don't know what room for maneuver the NATO assembly might offer. The Italian government is already fantasizing about pushing ahead with the construction of the controversial bridge over the Strait of Messina, between the south of the Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily, to classify this grandiose and expensive public project under the heading of "military spending." Italian creativity knows no bounds. Perhaps they'll allow it. Meloni is working on Trump's support. Sánchez has been to see Xi Jinping. Domestic and foreign policy continue to form a dialectical unity in the current Spanish political crisis. There's room to reach 2% military spending, and from there, things would get very complicated.
The background to military spending is important at this time. Perhaps decisive. Plans are already being made for a new system of governing Spain for the coming years, if the PSOE definitively loses the elections, hampered by abstention and the wave of the scandal. The Portuguese system. A minority government of the Popular Party, with critical abstention from the PSOE to weaken Vox's strength and ability to exert pressure. After the recent legislative elections, which were catastrophic for the Portuguese left, the Democratic Alliance (a center-right coalition) will govern in Portugal, with critical abstention from the PS, to stem the rise of the far right. This system could be repeated in Spain. All this while awaiting the French presidential elections in the spring of 2027, in which the future of Europe will be decided.
Pedro Sánchez was once again Perro Sanxe yesterday, the fighter who never gives up, not even in the face of the worst scandals. It's clear he's devised a gradual defensive strategy in light of events. A gradual reaction that compels the Popular Party to present a motion of no confidence. A motion that Alberto Núñez Feijóo doesn't want to present because he fears losing it arithmetically and politically, giving his adversary the boot. This vagueness on Feijóo's part, in turn, gives Sánchez room to maneuver. A devilish and paradoxical situation. Perro Sanxe, in the Strait of Hormuz.
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