For years, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has been the source of serious worry in Washington. It’s not just that, during Erdogan’s more than two decades of strongman rule, Turkey has emerged as a serious sanctions evasion hub for the Iranian regime in defiance of United States and international pressure. Nor is it solely that the country has grown entirely too cozy in recent years with radical Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, providing them with political cover, financial channels, and ideological support against the West.
The deeper problem is that Turkey is doing all of those things while simultaneously occupying a critical role in NATO. It serves as the alliance’s Middle East anchor, fields its second-largest army (after the U.S.), controls the strategic choke points of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and plays an active part in nearly all NATO operations (from the Balkans to Afghanistan and beyond).
That dual nature has long made Turkey the alliance’s most complicated member—and, arguably, its weakest link. Increasingly, however, it has serious competition for that title.
In recent years, Spain’s leftist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, has made a name for himself as the most stridently anti-American leader in Europe. While Madrid is playing a constructive role in assisting Ukraine, it has become an obstacle to the most important part of the NATO partnership: the bond that anchors America in the alliance.
Last year, for instance, Spain flatly refused to shoulder greater responsibility for European security by hiking its defense spending to 5 percent of GDP—a core demand of the Trump administration that other NATO members have readily accepted. Since then, Sanchez has kicked his opposition into even higher gear.
Since the start of the U.S.-Israeli military offensive against Iran in late February, Sanchez has spoken out publicly against what he has termed an “illegal” war, revived the old “no to war” slogan from Spain’s anti-Iraq campaign some two decades ago and flatly refused Washington’s requests to use joint military bases to support Operation Epic Fury.
In parallel, Sanchez has intensified his government’s outreach to China. Two weeks ago, Sanchez took a high-profile trip to China—his fourth in three years—in which he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and urged Beijing to take on a greater role in world affairs. In the process, he dented what has become a growing European consensus regarding the risks of tying the continent too closely to the PRC.
And just over a week ago, Sanchez co-hosted a high-profile gathering of global leftists in Barcelona alongside Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The event was explicitly framed as a counterweight to “far-right” forces—code, in this context, for the current U.S. administration and its allies.
Admittedly, that sort of activism from a socialist government in Madrid might have been par for the course in ordinary times. But these aren’t ordinary times. Over the past year-and-a-quarter, relations between the U.S. and Europe have been profoundly roiled by a range of issues, most prominent among them President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to gain greater strategic control over Greenland—something the White House insists it needs for hemispheric security reasons. Broader, and justified, U.S. frustrations over inadequate European burden-sharing have played a part as well. Against that backdrop, NATO’s passivity in the face of U.S. requests for assistance for its Iran campaign has only served to sour American attitudes further.
To be sure, the bloc’s professionals are doing their best to paper over these differences. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte shuttled to Washington in early April to huddle with the president (and absorb his ire). Separately, he has urged European nations to ramp up their defense spending and expounded at length on the need for a more serious, activist alliance. But, as Rutte himself has acknowledged, the results of all this have been decidedly mixed.
That is deeply troubling, because NATO’s mission is arguably more important than ever. The collective defense it offers is critical backstop in an era of Russian revanchism, Chinese assertiveness and Iranian adventurism.
Yet recent weeks have made clear that the alliance doesn’t just have a Turkey problem. It has a Spanish one as well, and the latter is likely to emerge as a real headache for U.S.-NATO relations when the dust from the current Iran conflict finally clears.
About the Author:
Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.