I made a little joke the other day and put it on Facebook. Contemplating my mortality, I noted that I was nevertheless younger than Trump, Bibi and Putin (at 79, 76 and 73 respectively), and with a bit of luck, would outlive the three of them. Although, it’s true that they probably enjoy better medical attention than I do.
None of the three above-mentioned gentlemen appear to have any love for Spain. 
I’ll leave it to The Gentle Reader to agree or disagree about those three leaders – and perhaps a few others (Kim Jong Un springs to mind) who are jostling for position behind them for the Planetary Ogre Awards – and attempt instead to focus here on their enmity with Spain and indeed Europe.
Let’s see: Donald Trump is annoyed with Spain for not leading the re-armament of Nato, for failing to buy enough American military hardware and for letting in too many immigrants – particularly those of the coloured persuasion.
Bibi Netanyahu is crushed over our negative reaction to his country’s unwelcome presence in Eurovision, the issues over the Tour de España this past summer and also our unremitting anger against his genocidal activities in Palestine.
Vladimir Putin simply doesn’t like any country that backs Ukraine and he has threatened Europe with a ‘if you want war, I’ll give you war’. A nasty piece of work in my opinion.
As for his current occupation of as much of the Ukraine as he can obtain, it doesn’t appear that Donald Trump is as concerned as one might hope, as the recent American plan for the next two decades seems to suggest that they will be busy with their own back-yard, if one can so describe Venezuela and Columbia (and don’t forget Greenland), leaving Russia free to snaffle up bits of the old Soviet Union and presumably, allow Xi to absorb the lost province of Formosa, currently called Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the surviving bits of Europe can go play with our rigorously attached plastic bottle-caps.
Russia, too, is especially keen in manipulating the voting system in other countries to help the far-right, or (as in Catalonia in 2017) to divide the Europeans in any way that they can.
All these autocracies are actively trying to change our minds about this and that and they use fake-news, distortions, legions of preppy influencers, ample funding and false narratives to do so.
Europe, it would appear, has been having it too good, and we need to buckle down to the lofty ideals of our billionaires and pay more in taxes, take out private health insurance and keep working into our eighties.
We read that the Trump administration has just released its National Security Strategy, the blueprint for the next two decades.
That document announced the U.S. will back away from the global alliances formed in the wake of World War II and calls for making sure Nato, the organization that has opposed first Soviet and now Russian aggression since 1949, doesn’t continue to expand (so much for the Ukraine). The administration’s document calls for a world dominated not by a rules-based international order in which countries must respect each other’s sovereignty, but by a few major powers that control weaker nations in their sphere of influence.
The document also warns about Europe becoming less white, or as Trump says “Europe is facing the disappearance of its civilization” (unless we knuckle down). The BBC adds: at the same time ‘…the document hails the growing influence of "patriotic European parties" and says "America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit".
"We want Europe to remain European," says the American plan. In a sort of far-right, anti-immigrant way.
And then there’s Elon Musk who is currently calling to 'Abolish the EU', for his own commercial reasons.
Russian officials appear to be happy with this U.S. foreign policy, and we read that ‘The Kremlin on Sunday welcomed US President Donald Trump’s move to stop calling Russia a direct threat and said his new national security strategy, which portrays European powers as in decline, largely accorded with Russia’s own perceptions’.
In short, it appears that a still disunited Europe is either on its own or must cozy up to the Chinese.
As the aggressive foreign powers attack us through fake-news, manufactured guilt, the Internet and Hollywood, we can only reply with our softer version of spreading our own culture through the Instituto Cervantes, the British Institute, the Goethe-Institut and so on.
Pedro Sánchez is one of our better statesmen, and he said in Los Cortes this Saturday during the celebrations of the anniversary of the Spanish Constitution that “Europe will never be under the tutelage of anyone, nor will it be a vassal of any political power or any national power from other geographical latitudes”. On Monday, the President of the European Council, António Costa, stated that the European Union would not accept any "threat of interference in European political life". He also referred to the U.S. document’s text which criticizes the "regulatory suffocation" of the European Commission.
Meanwhile, as Trump joyously received the FIFA’s peace prize, Pedro Sánchez was awarded the Mario Benedetti International Prize for the Fight for Human Rights and Solidarity 2025, an award he shares with the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
Now, if we could just resolve the Ukraine issue in a sensible way.