Unarmed and Adrift

Civilizations do not vanish because they are killed; they die by suicide. That’s the stark lesson of history — and, more or less unwittingly, the lens through which we must view Spain today. While Europe reshapes itself between the old and the new, our country lingers in a tragicomic loop of contradictions. Spain dispatches delegates to Brussels who, like the old peseta, have lost all practical value — yet they continue circulating as if still legal tender.

Ursula von der Leyen may be a figure of the past, but she still makes decisions and, knowing her own tenuous mandate, pushes them through with renewed urgency. The Digital Euro, for example, is sheer desperation — last-ditch tinkering with the façade of progress. Only someone like Donald Trump could keep Europe from burning its last cartridges of liberty.

European politics has changed, and with it the continent’s leadership. Societies across Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and Romania are embracing political renewal. In Brussels, bureaucrats cling to yesterday’s script only now with better camouflage; their latest trick is to arm Europe at the expense of its citizens. Brussels insists that member states must dramatically raise defense spending, or else be left behind in the continent’s evolving strategic reality.

In Germany, the CDU under Friedrich Merz, the SPD, and even the Greens take the issue so seriously that they are prepared to amend the constitution — a truly historic shift. This level of gravitas is absent in Spain. Here, the debate on defense is a political farce. Politics is not treated as strategy but as personal survival. Pedro Sánchez, to borrow a line from Groucho Marx, “has principles, but if they’re unpopular, he has others.”

The Spanish Socialist government’s foreign policy has been erratic and contradictory — and its approach to European rearmament is no exception. Sánchez is caught between Brussels’ demands and the ideological purism of his coalition partners, who view military spending as heresy. The paradox is that he needs Brussels to secure European funds but also needs his radical allies to remain in power. The only thing that might save him, in grotesque hyperbole, would be if the opposition self-immolated live on television.

Sánchez could have chosen Germany’s path — forging a grand coalition to address strategic challenges with real statesmanship — but that would have required leaders of vision, not mere card-sharers at the poker table of power.

The fundamental difference between Spain and Germany isn’t just defense budgets; it’s the seriousness with which matters of state are treated. In Berlin, a constitutional debate on arms spending is accorded the solemnity befitting a historic shift. In Madrid, the same topic is buried under empty rhetoric and a government more intent on funding its perpetual clientelist strategy.

The problem isn’t merely about the size of Spain’s defense budget; it’s about our country’s place on the European chessboard. No other EU government combines shades of Bolivarian solidarity with an obsession over internal territorial fragmentation and opaque air bridges to the Caribbean that no one bothers to explain. Spain is playing at something else entirely.

While our neighbors recognize that the world has grown more dangerous — that Russia is unpredictable and China poised to exploit Western weaknesses — the Spanish government remains entranced by its own ideological fictions. The stark contrast is this: other nations treat foreign policy as a matter of statecraft; in Spain it has become a stage for political posturing.

Spain’s foreign policy lacks a coherent doctrine. One day it pretends to be a great Europeanist, the next it flirts with Latin American populism, and when convenient markets itself as the bastion of classic social democracy. It is, in every configuration, a pragmatist without a compass — willing to say anything to any audience.

As Winston Churchill once quipped, “You can always count on the English to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” In Spain’s case, it seems we have many more wrong turns to exhaust before we ever find the right one.