Geology has been imposed on geopolitics. The trip from Pedro Sánchez to New York, where he planned to maintain a series of meetings and participate on Thursday at the UN General Assembly, has remained suspended by volcanic eruption in La Palma. This is the first time that the UN celebrates its General Assembly since 2019, since last year it was virtual due to Covid-19. In this way, Sánchez has canceled all the acts he had foreseen for Monday in New York and keeps the trip postponed, waiting for the development of events, according to government sources.
With the entire meeting, it will take place with great security measures, to the point that in the room in which the meeting is celebrated, there will hardly be representatives of the delegations. Like seven weeks ago, when he made his last visit to the US, Sánchez is not going to meet with any representative of the US government. The President has felt personally disappointed and irritated after Joe Biden dedicated him a 28-second ride in a hallway during the NATO Summit in Brussels in June despite the efforts of the Government of Spain to achieve a decent conversation of such name between the two leaders.
Given the US indifference, Moncloa has tried that this new visit from Sánchez to the US is a chance so that Spain wins international weight and to obtain investments for the recovery of the economy after the crisis of the coronavirus. That means a series of bilateral meetings, participation in different forums that are carried out taking advantage of the UN assembly and those who usually attend other world leaders and interviews in the media.
Who does keep his agenda is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, who arrives today to New York, on a visit whose program has not been made public. At the moment, the head of Spanish diplomacy will participate in a meeting at the Cervantes Institute of that city on the situation of the Spanish language in the world. Albares will move on Thursday to Washington, where he is scheduled for him to meet with senior Joe Biden government charges.
The last time an Foreign Minister of Spain was in the United States was 19 months ago, in February 2019, when the then holder, Arancha González Laya, participated in a meeting of United Nations, in a context marked by the unleashed crisis After the revelation, a month before, of the meeting at the Barajas airport between the then Minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, with the Vice President and Minister of Venezuela Popular Power, Delcy Rodríguez.
What is not clear is that Albares will receive his American counterpart, the Secretary of State Tony Blinken, or the National Security Counselor, Jake Sullivan. In principle on Friday is a terrible date in Washington, given that it is when biden celebrates that it will be the most important meeting in foreign policy since it came to the White House, with the reception of the First Ministers of India, Narendra Modi, Japan, Yoshihide Suga, and Australia, Scott Morrison, countries that form the so-called Quad, a military alliance driven by Washington to contain China in the Indian and the Pacific. This is the first time that since the Constitution of that Group in 2007 in which the maximum responsible for the four countries are cited.
By whether the meeting was not relevant enough, the Australian Morrison arrives just a week after he signed another military alliance with the US and Great Britain, the Aukus, also against China, which has caused as collateral damage the first withdrawal of a French ambassador of Washington in history. In this context, it does not seem unleashed to imagine that the importance of the visit of Albare to Washington will be fully eclipsed.
Date Of Update: 22 September 2021, 11:20
