Since the Madrid Pacts Since 1953, the US military presence in southern Spain has been one of the silent pillars of Western security architecture. Throughout the Cold War, the crises in the Mediterranean and the successive enlargements of NATO, this relationship has survived changes of government, diplomatic tensions and strategic redefinitions without losing its structural weight.
Therefore, an idea that had gained strength It worried Spain.
The threat that shook the board. It happened in the summer of 2025, when from circles close to the Republican Party slipped the idea of moving the Rota and Morón bases to Morocco in response to the Spanish refusal to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP. As the days passed, the debate stopped being rhetorical and became a strategic question of first order.
The proposal suggested that Washington could punish an ally considered insufficiently committed by relocating key assets to the Maghreb, in a context of increasing US support for Rabat and internal tensions in NATO over burden sharing. However, beyond the political noise, the real viability of this maneuver depended on much deeper factors than a simple temporary decision.
The first reason: anti-missile shields. Rota is not an interchangeable base, but an essential node of the NATO missile shield together with Romania and Poland, integrated into a system of sensors, radars, satellites and command centers that requires millimeter coordination and reaction times of between five and twenty-five minutes.
Not only that. Also houses Aegis destroyers equipped with SM-3 missiles and is part of the technical framework whose nerve center is in Germany, all in allied territory fully integrated into the Atlantic Alliance. The simple idea of moving that capacity to Morocco would imply rebuild from scratch critical infrastructures, redesign the legal and operational framework and, above all, locate sensitive parts of the system in a country that does not belong to NATO, with the legal and political complications that this entails.
Morocco is not NATO territory. Rabat has offered in the past ports and military facilitiesand its weight as a strategic partner in the Maghreb and the Sahel has grown exponentially hand in hand with US support for the Sahara and normalization with Israel.
However, it is one thing to strengthen cooperation and quite another to replace a structural base already established by facilities outside the allied legal and military umbrella. They remembered in Infodefensa that implementing equivalent capabilities there would require extremely complex bilateral agreements, multimillion-dollar investments and institutional guarantees difficult to match those of a European partner, in addition to altering the logistical balance that allows the United States Navy operate with continuity in the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic and Africa.
A second irrefutable reason. As they said this morning in Spanishfar from reducing its weight, Rota has begun an expansion valued at more than 400 million of euros, a work that involves new docks, semi-buried magazines and maintenance contracts that can reach 90 million annually with up to six destroyers deployed.
In this way, Spain has not only authorized the increase from four to six Aegis vessels, but is adapting the infrastructure to double docking capacity and consolidate the base as a high-tech anti-aircraft and anti-submarine node. In political and strategic terms, the operation amounts to a kind of reinforced transfer of territory and operational sovereignty, although assuming, of course, that the base converts Spanish soil into a potential target in the event of conflict.
Broken as a structural piece. In short, the presence of thousands of American soldiers, the agreed ceiling in the bilateral agreement and the local economic impact show a relationship that transcends governments and cycles politicians. So that the hypothesis of a transfer If Morocco were to be moderately credible, clear signs of withdrawal should be observed, such as a reduction in ships or a halt in investments, and the truth is that exactly the opposite is happening.
There was already a compelling reason why the United States could not take the base to Morocco: its irreplaceable integration in the NATO architecture. And now Spain has just added a second one that is even more difficult to ignore, by reinforcing and expanding that presence with investments and effective transfer of strategic space that consolidate the Rota base. as a structural piece of Washington’s device in Europe.
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