Spain has had to hold the six-month presidency of the European Union with a functioning Government and two simultaneous wars in the most critical areas of the great Eurasian continental shelf. Both wars can end very badly. “Decisions made now will affect millions of lives, reverberate for generations and risk all kinds of escalations,” wrote yesterday Ben Rhodes, former advisor to US President Barack Obama.
Both wars can end up connected – if they are not already connected –, causing a wave of destabilization in international relations with consequences that are impossible to predict. The world has a lot at stake starting this morning.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 ended with a great economic crisis. The legendary oil crisis of the 1970s, caused by Arab countries in retaliation for Western support for Israel, had an enormous impact throughout the industrialized world. We could say that the Spanish transition was the daughter of the Yom Kippur War. Inflation and the closure of industries that caused the rise in fuel prices generated, starting in 1974, an unprecedented climate of social protest that coincided with the final years of General Franco. Without the oil crisis of 1973 and subsequent years, the exit from the dictatorship would have been different, slower, surely.
We'll see what happens now.
The lives of thousands of people are at stake. At stake is the outcome of the European elections in seven months (June 2024) in a cycle of marked conservative withdrawal throughout Europe, of which Spain has just emerged as an exception: a complex exception. The outcome of the North American presidential elections (November 2024) may also be at stake. For this reason, the United States has deployed a powerful naval force off the coast of Israel. To protect its allies and to dissuade Iran from giving the order to attack Hizbullah from Lebanon. If an escalation were to occur, the two wars would be perfectly connected, with Russia and Iran piloting both fronts. Very important balances are at stake for the destiny of the world, a world in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between truth and lies.
Spain has had to be on guard in the officers' room of the European Union during this fateful moment. It is on guard with the Government in office, which does not prevent the regular functioning of any mechanism of the European institutions, but it does reinforce the feeling that at the moment everything is being taken with a pinch of salt.
The socialist part of the acting Government is moving its discourse to the left in recent hours, with more resounding support for the population of Gaza. And it now remains to be seen if the international situation will influence the negotiations for the investiture. Spain is a slow country for the links between internal politics and foreign policy.
