A woman plays with her dog and a swimmer plunges into the Atlantic as the sun sinks over a quiet Spanish beach. But intruding on the tranquil vista is a pair of hulking US warships.
The 9,000-tonne destroyers are among five based in Rota, once a poor farming village that now houses the most important US naval base in Europe. The vessels, which can detect and shoot down enemy ballistic missiles, are the linchpins of an American shield set up to protect Europe.
The base is awaiting a sixth warship promised in 2022, but with US President Donald Trump in the White House, all bets are off. His demand that Europe end decades of “freeloading” and start defending itself has triggered angst that Washington is about to slash its epoch-defining military presence in Europe.
Almost 84,000 active US service members are spread across at least 38 European bases, some of them dating back to the end of the second world war. The base in Rota emerged from a 1953 pact between then-US president Dwight Eisenhower and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
It now boasts an airfield, three piers and what the Pentagon calls “the largest weapons and fuels facilities in Europe”. Close to the Strait of Gibraltar, it is vital to “projecting military power into the Mediterranean, north Africa and Middle East”, according to the Pentagon’s guide for incoming personnel.
Rota, which claims to have the most pizzerias per capita in the world, is “one of the most sought-after gigs in the military rotation,” said James Bem, a New Yorker who co-founded the local Slice of New York pizza chain. “It’s basically paradise.”
But Rota’s regional value and leisure options will not necessarily secure its future. Local memories, which include rock ’n’ roll seeping out from the base and past Franco’s fascist censors, count for even less.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this year warned European allies that US protection would not “last for ever”. But US secretary of state Marco Rubio this month dismissed reports of a possible reduction in US troops as “hysteria and hyperbole”.
Jim Townsend, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for Europe, said: “Anything could happen. There’s so many things that could set Trump off.”
Potential triggers included retaliation against Trump’s tariffs, European support for Ukraine, or resistance to the US president’s goal of taking over Greenland, he said. “Trump could say: ‘Look, it’s me versus you guys now. Screw you. You defend yourself.’”
Spanish politics could make Rota even more vulnerable. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, one of the EU’s senior leftwing leaders, has repeatedly antagonised Trump on foreign policy issues.
Michael Walsh, a former campaign official for Joe Biden who became a critic of the Democratic president’s foreign policy, said these “misalignments create political risk for the US” and increased the chances of a decision to downsize Rota.
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Sánchez’s friendliness towards China is a particular source of friction, with the premier calling on Washington and Beijing to “talk” about the tariff war during his visit to the Chinese capital last week. A second is that Spain spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than any other Nato member. A third is Sánchez’s criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
The set-up in Rota itself is not simple. It is officially a Spanish naval facility “used jointly” by the Americans, meaning Washington needs Madrid’s permission for certain things.
The base, which hosts 2,800 US troops including those who are at present at sea, also exemplifies just how far Europe is from being able to protect itself.
Nato calls the ballistic missile shield its own, but it is an unequivocally US product. Other Nato members could, in theory, take over its eastern flank, two lightly manned US launch sites in Poland and Romania. But the warships, which Barack Obama’s administration began moving to Rota in 2014, are another matter. They provide a mobile shield initially intended to protect the continent from Iran — and no European navy has anything similar.
That is one reason Europe wants to avoid a US withdrawal and would prefer to gradually take on greater defence responsibility over the next decade.
Rota’s mayor Javi Ruiz Arana said the town had been shaken by rumours about cuts before. But for now, the base was humming and powered about two-thirds of local economic activity, he said. Americans still drive their Chevrolets and Hummers along Rota’s narrow streets, and Navantia, a state-owned Spanish shipbuilder, has a seven-year €822mn maintenance contract for the destroyers.
“If anything, people have the feeling the base is growing,” said Ruiz Arana. “There’s investment, hangars are being enlarged, there’s a project to expand the port.”
Americans in Rota hoped to ride out the uncertainty. “Everyone’s got their own opinions,” said one service member walking a pooch on the seafront. A military spouse from the Midwest said they believed the US would end up with a reduced security bill for Europe: “There’s a little rough road at the beginning, but I think it’s going to level out.”
One option reportedly under consideration is to pull out thousands of troops sent by Biden to bolster Nato’s eastern flank in 2022.
Demand for personnel beyond Europe is rising as the US shifts its focus to China, said Raymond Spicer, chief executive of the US Naval Institute and a retired rear admiral. “The pivot to the western Pacific is a big factor,” he said.
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But even if the US does reduce its presence in Europe, it will still need to protect what remains. That means a role for the destroyers and specialised marines stationed in Rota, whose role is to respond to any attack on a US embassy or base.
Spain’s ministry of defence said: “With regard to [US-Spain] relations and Rota, there has been no change with the arrival of Trump.” Economy minister Carlos Cuerpo insisted this week that US-Spain relations were in “one of their best moments”.
Walsh, however, said one non-European country could give the US equally good sites on the other side of the Mediterranean: Morocco, which is rumoured to have offered the US alternatives to Rota before. The kingdom reinforced its status as a Trump ally in 2020 by normalising ties with Israel.
“In the eyes of the Trump administration, there would be much less risk putting US military bases in Morocco compared to Spain,” said Walsh, who is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
If Sánchez overestimated how much the US needed Rota, the chances of a Trump shock were especially high, he warned. “There’s a danger they overplay their hand in the political game with Trump and things fall apart.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela in Madrid; cartography by Ian Bott
