Felipe VI, the king of Spain, used his speech at the conference of ambassadors — which, over two days, brought together the heads of Spanish diplomatic missions worldwide in Madrid — to warn about the risk of “dismantling” the transatlantic link between Europe and the United States and the consequences this would have. After acknowledging that maintaining this link currently requires “great patience and diplomatic courage,” in an implicit reference to the unpredictable and arbitrary behavior of U.S. President Donald Trump, Felipe VI stressed that it is an “indispensable framework […] that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War” and has fostered the flourishing of democracies, stability, growth, and the development of multilateralism.
However, he warned that preserving this bond “is a shared responsibility,” one that “demands mutual loyalty, reciprocal trust, a vision for the future, and respect for the ‘rules of the game’ which, always subject to improvement, are the norms of international law.” Although he did not explicitly name Washington, his words constitute a veiled rebuke of the Trump administration’s recent decisions, including the military intervention in Venezuela.
“We all lose out from the erosion of this bond,” he insisted, alluding to the U.S.-European relationship. “And I don’t want to raise here what the hypothesis of its total dismantling would mean for everyone.”
The king, who ascended the throne in 2014 after his father’s abdication, began his address by announcing the release of five Spanish citizens detained in Venezuela and calling for “a genuine, peaceful, inclusive, and sovereign transition, respectful of the free and independent will of the Venezuelan people, to begin as soon as possible, with guarantees.” He emphasized that the Venezuelan people “must be the sole protagonists of their own destiny.”
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