For five months a Washington policy campaign has been arguing that the United States should abandon its naval station in Spain, and it is the same campaign, by the same author, that wants Ceuta handed to Morocco.
On May 17, Michael Rubin—the American Enterprise Institute senior fellow whose March articles urged Washington to declare Ceuta and Melilla “occupied Moroccan territory” and urged Morocco to send a mass of unarmed civilians across the border—published “The U.S. Military Should Replace Rota with Gibraltar,” carried by the Middle East Forum and reposted by AEI. Its subhead: “Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Restricted Operations at the Naval Station to Express His Animosity Toward Trump and Sympathy to Iran.” Its instruction: “Trump should not forgive Spain.”
Rubin explains Rota’s military value: “Personnel and equipment use the airfield to transfer on and off aircraft carriers and other ships about to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar,” and with Lajes mothballed and Souda Bay 1,750 miles east, “Rota represents an essential node in U.S. logistics.” His answer is to move that node 65 miles, to the British territory of Gibraltar. He recommends the move as a lesson to “small state politicians more committed to ideological virtue signaling than serious defense that hosting U.S. forces is a privilege rather than leverage.” That Spain resents the British presence at Gibraltar “would simply be the icing on the cake.”
The two halves are joined in his closing sentence: “Not only should Trump define Melilla and Ceuta as occupied Moroccan territory, but he should also relocate U.S. assets from Rota to Gibraltar and instruct the Pentagon to stop prostrating to Spain.” Earlier in the same piece he calls Spanish objections to British Gibraltar “hypocritical given Spain’s colonization of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast.” A companion article by Rubin, “Here’s How Trump Should Retaliate Against Spain,” also ran in The Washington Examiner April 2.
Set the two recommendations on a map. On the north of the Strait of Gibraltar stand British Gibraltar and the Spanish bases at Rota and Morón; on the southern side of the strait are Spanish Ceuta and Morocco. Rubin’s program moves American naval power off the Spanish shore and onto the British one, and transfers the southern shore from Spain to Morocco—which is to say, it removes Spain from both sides of the strait and leaves London and Rabat holding the door to the Mediterranean. This is the stated program by the AEI’s Rubin.
Since 2020, Spanish and Moroccan press have periodically reported that Rabat offered its Ksar Sghir naval base—on the Strait, midway between Ceuta and Tangier—as a replacement for Rota; the U.S. Embassy denied receiving any offer, and the story resurfaced in La Razón on March 2 of this year. Both routes would end in the same place: American naval power at the strait, hosted by someone other than Spain.
What makes that more than a basing question is Israel’s position in Morocco. Since a 2021 security cooperation agreement, Rabat has made Elbit Systems a principal weapons supplier and become, in the words of the Israeli business daily Globes, “a huge customer for Israel’s defense industry": Barak MX air defense from Israel Aerospace Industries in a contract reported at $1 billion, a reconnaissance satellite from the same company in a 2024 deal of comparable size, Elbit howitzers and Hermes drones, Harop loitering munitions, Israeli radars fitted to Moroccan fighters, and a drone production plant built inside Morocco with Israeli partners. In January the two governments signed a joint military work plan for 2026 at the third meeting of their Joint Military Committee in Tel Aviv, five years after normalization; the IDF called Morocco “a key partner for regional stability.” Add the British base at Gibraltar, and the powers positioned around the western door of the Mediterranean are the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel—with Spain, the one NATO member that refused its bases for the Iran war, being pushed off both shores.
This weekend the commander of U.S. European Command notified the Pentagon that he has five guided-missile destroyers, three of them immobilized by maintenance problems at Rota, and must now choose between defending the American homeland and defending Israel. He says he cannot cover his missions from Rota, after five months of published argument that the United States should leave Rota for Gibraltar and strip Spain of its African territory. (We make no claim that the backlog at Rota was arranged; warships do wear out.)
Two of the three global maritime chokepoints in the news this year, Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb, have been effectively closed by war. The third is now the object of a documented campaign to change who holds its shores.
