The King, Felipe VI, and the Head of Government, Pedro Sánchez, will hold meetings this Tuesday with the President of the United States, Joe Biden, on the eve of the start of the NATO summit that will be marked by the war in Ukraine and that will approve the Alliance's priorities for the coming years.
Biden and the rest of the leaders of the 40 delegations attending the summit and the events organized in its context will arrive in Madrid throughout the day and will have a first joint meeting at the dinner that Felipe VI will offer them at the Royal Palace.
Sánchez will hold bilateral meetings with four of them today: Biden (4:00 p.m.) and the Prime Ministers of Australia, Anthony Albanese, (9:00 a.m.); New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, (10:30 am), and Iceland, Katrin Jakobsdóttir, (6:00 pm).
The one that he will star with Biden, on his first visit to Spain as US president, is intended to serve to reaffirm the strategic relationship between the two countries and their collaboration in the face of common challenges in the future.
Sanchez and Biden, who will appear before journalists in Moncloa at the end of their meeting (5:30 p.m.), met for the first time at the NATO summit in Brussels in June last year but only had a brief hallway conversation of just 50 seconds. A meeting that was televised, as the president's team wanted, to curb criticism from the opposition who argued that the fact that Biden had not contacted Sánchez in six months demonstrated Spain's loss of weight on the international stage. However, that conversation was branded by the opposition as "embarrassing ridiculous".
Subsequently, the two presidents have coincided in other international events such as the G20 summit in Rome and a meeting last March in Brussels between Biden and the EU leaders, and they have held several telephone conversations.
The last of them on June 21 to discuss the agenda of the NATO summit and in which the president of the United States thanked the efforts of Spain for its organization.
They also spoke by telephone in August of last year, when they agreed that the Rota and Morón bases would temporarily house Afghans who had collaborated with the United States and who were being evacuated from their country before the Taliban came to power.
Biden will be the tenth US president to visit Spain. The last to do so so far was Barack Obama in 2016.
Upon his arrival at the Torrejón de Ardoz air base (3:10 p.m.) from Germany, where he has participated in the G7 summit, he will be received by the King, with whom he will meet at the Palacio de la Zarzuela after the The president of the United States meets the head of the government.
The NATO summit will take place at the Ifema site, and Sánchez will tour its facilities this afternoon with the Secretary General of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, who will also hold a meeting with the King.
It will be at the end of the day when the Royal Palace hosts the dinner offered by Felipe VI.
For her part, Queen Letizia and the first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, who met in Zarzuela on Monday and visited the headquarters of the Spanish Association Against Cancer, will travel to the local Ukrainian refugee center on this day Madrid from Pozuelo de Alarcón.
