Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of U.S. European Command, has formally notified senior Pentagon officials that without another guided-missile destroyer he will be forced to choose between defending the American homeland and defending Israel, the Washington Post reported Aug. 1. He has five. Two are on station in the Eastern Mediterranean. The other three are tied up in port with serious maintenance problems—at Naval Station Rota, Spain. There is a public campaign in Washington to take those ships out of Rota, to be seen in parallel with the campaign for Morocco to control Ceuta.
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.
Note the timing: an American theater commander says he cannot cover his missions from Rota following months of Washington think tank arguments for a the U.S. transferring its forces from Rota to Gibraltar and stripping Spain of its African territory.
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.