Spain, nevertheless, appeared thrilled to welcome the first U.S. President to visit in more than a decade.
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President Barack Obama is greeted by King Felipe VI of Spain upon his arrival at Torrejon Air Base in Madrid, Spain, Saturday, July 9, 2016. Obama’s wife, Michelle, visited Spain in late June with their daughters, Malia and Sasha, to promote her global girls’ education initiative. He is visiting on invitation of the mayor of Dallas, the White House said.
When the White House first announced last month that President Obama would visit Spain to meet with its prime minister, it wasn’t entirely clear who that prime minister would be.
But events beyond his control ended up turning his first and only visit to Spain, the largest European country that had yet to welcome the president, into a rushed one.
Obama has been loath to tear up his schedule in response to previous acts of violence, saying repeatedly that altering his plans would be tantamount to giving in to terrorists.
Obama met with King Felipe VI at the royal palace, where he reminisced about his last visit to Spain as a backpacking young college graduate contemplating law school.
Obama also pointed to other forces driving discontent at home and in Europe – lone-wolf terrorism or economic instability wrought by globalization – and tried to sell his policies aimed at each.
Obama was supposed to spend two days in Spain after attending a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Warsaw earlier this week. “We know that we have had hackers in the White House”, he added.
Instead Obama, who landed in Madrid late on Saturday night, will squeeze in sessions with King Don Felipe and acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Sunday. After almost seven months and two inconclusive elections, Spanish politicians have been unable to form a functioning government.
Obama’s secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, echoed that message back home Sunday as he appeared in a series of joint television interviews alongside New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton in New York. “That’s what America stands for, that’s what Spain stands for and that’s what North Atlantic Treaty Organisation stands for”, said Sasha Obama. “We’re connected by the ties of family and culture, including millions of Americans who celebrate their Hispanic heritage”.
The president sees delivering this sort of guidance a core part of his leadership, so much so that some of his memorable speeches were in honor of mass shooting victims, including his challenge to protect children from guns in Newtown, Conn. – “We’re not doing enough.” – and his singing of “Amazing Grace” after the shooting in a black church in Charleston, S.C.
Mr. Obama called for a stable Spanish government, but said the U.S.’s relationship with Spain was independent of the political party in power.
“Spain”, he said, “has travelled a particularly hard path in recent years”.
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He said that Washington has a commitment to its trans-Atlantic allies that will not change, and that includes a strong and united Spain.
