Petulant. A bully. Capricious. President Trump is all of those things and worse. But he is also, often, right – as he is showing with the breathtakingly bold US (and Israeli) strikes on Iran. It is difficult to imagine any other recent president having the cojones to break the diplomatic cycle since the misbegotten JCPOA (President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal) was first conceived, in which Iran pretends it is a willing negotiating partner, the West decides it wants to be hoodwinked, and Iran then carries on with its efforts behind closed doors. In his first term Trump simply ripped up the deal, and in this second term he has taken two key decisions, first to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme last year, and now to attack its ballistic missile capability.
It would be a comforting thought that Iran posed no threat to anyone if it were true, but the past 47 years have shown how wrong that is. And more immediately, the British Akrotiri base in Cyprus was attacked before Sir Keir Starmer decided that international law did after all permit the US to use British military bases – and Iran launched attacks on Arab neighbours who also had taken no part in the initial US and Israeli strikes. Just as it’s difficult to imagine any other recent president launching these strikes on Iran, it’s no less difficult to imagine any recent British prime minister sticking the diplomatic equivalent of two fingers up at a US president and telling them they can’t use British bases.
But for all his understandable anger at Starmer the full blast of Trump’s wrath was rightly directed at the Spanish leader, Pedro Sánchez, who not only copied Starmer by refusing permission for the US to use its bases in southern Spain, saying it would violate the United Nations charter, but went further in a full-on attack on the operation, saying that the strikes on Iran are an “unjustified, dangerous military intervention” that violate international law. But the important point about Trump’s remarks is that he is completely right. Spain – a Nato ally – has indeed been terrible under Sánchez, and not just in its refusal to let the US use its bases. Spain has also point blank refused to increase its defence spending to five per cent, and its reckless stance in the Middle East, consistently demonising Israel and effectively backing Hamas, has undermined the US and her allies at every turn. It is no wonder that Trump is angry, and publicly so.