Spain and the United States - Real Instituto Elcano

OVERVIEW 19
Later, the runway at Rota became a valuable asset to the US Air Force when
Washington lost its bases in Morocco in 1963. The runway was lengthened so
that it could handle landings of B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers in
emergency situations. Rota became, and still is, one of the three largest and
most important US bases outside continental America for strategic deterrence.
The US-Spanish relationship is the longest-standing association with a
foreign country in Spanish contemporary history. According to Angel Viñas,
the leading Spanish historian on the subject, “Spain had changed orientations
in its foreign policy posture (leaning either toward France or the UK, whose
actions usually restrained the Spanish margin for manoeuvre, or briefly to
Germany) but in no case did such orientation lead to a permanent alignment.”
That changed with the bases agreement.
In the domestic arena, Viñas lists five main consequences of the Pact
of Madrid:
• The agreement was essential in engineering a pervasive feeling of
security in the dictatorship, which had been hotly contested in the
immediate post world war period.
• It became the mainstay of what might be called a “Franco model of
deterrence”. Externally, it was applied to North African security
scenarios. Domestically, it was applied to the “internal enemy” (the
vanquished in the Civil War and all those who might actively oppose the
dictatorship). This was not lost among US decision makers. What Spain
needed (and got), said President Eisenhower, was a “good little army”
that could keep the country stable.
• It led to the introduction of modern approaches to economic management
and opened the door to Spain becoming a member of the Bretton Woods
institutions (International Monetary Fund and World Bank). Without this,
Spain would not have established an economy linked to the global one.
• It gave Spain respectability and led to visits by Presidents Eisenhower,
Nixon and Ford (no European prime minister or head of state met Franco
apart from Portugal’s dictator, Oliveira Salazar). Furthermore, the US
government did not interfere at all in Spanish domestic affairs even to the
extent of not giving any kind of moral support to the political opposition
during Franco’s last years.
• The US connection produced a strong anti-US sentiment among the
Spanish left, which, combined (for very different reasons) with the