Pedro Sanchez digs in over Iran after Trump threats to cut Spain off
by Paul Godfrey · UPIMarch 4 (UPI) -- The leaders of Spain and Canada set themselves at odds with President Donald Trump over the United States' military offensive against Iran with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez calling it a "disaster."
In a televised address on Wednesday, Sanchez suggested the U.S. administration had failed to heed the lessons of history, including the U.S-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and said his government was opposed to its latest military intervention in the region.
Speaking hours after Trump threatened to punish Madrid's refusal to permit two of its bases to be used to launch strike missions against Iran by severing all trade, Sanchez spelled out his administration's "No to war" position.
"Very often great wars start with a chain of events spiralling out of control due to miscalculations, technical failures, and unforeseen circumstances. Therefore, we must learn from history and cannot play Russian roulette with the fate of millions," said Sanchez.
"The question is not if we are on the side of the ayatollahs -- nobody is. The question is whether we are in favour of peace and international legality. You cannot answer one illegality with another, because that is how the great catastrophes of humanity begin," he added.
Sanchez said his stance was no different to his positon on Ukraine or Gaza, with his Spanish Socialist Workers' Party highly critical of Israel's deadly military response to the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, accusing it of genocide against Palestinians.
However, he caveated his critique by saying the people of Spain were in solidarity with countries that had been "illegally attacked by the Iranian regime," referring to Iran's neighbors in the Gulf.
On Tuesday, Trump criticized Spain's response to his effort to "de-fang" the Iranian regime for the benefit of the United States and the world, saying Spain had been "terrible" and that Washington would cut off all trade and other ties with Madrid as a result.
"We don't want anything to do with Spain," he said.
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave his qualified backing to the United States' campaign against Iran but said it was with some unease because it heralded a new era in which dominant powers eschewed consensus, instead acting in isolation, unconstrained by international norms or law.
"Now the extremes of this disruption are being played out in real time in the Middle East," Carney said in a speech Wednesday during a visit to Australia.
"We are actively taking on the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish to be. But we also take this position with some regret because the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order," he said.
Speaking to the press traveling with him, Carney said Ottawa was not given advance notice of the attack on Iran by the Trump administration and no request was made to Canada to take part.
He stressed that while Canada fully backed efforts to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and upending international peace and security, from a "prima-facie" standpoint, the strikes did not appear to be consistent with international law.
Ottawa severed diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2012 over its record of human rights violations and designated the 190,000-strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group in 2024, in one fell swoop banning a significant contingent of the country's top officials from entering Canada.
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