Hazen E. Griffin explores the current situation in Iran, the historical context behind it, and what may come next.
The official narrative of the current Iran War holds that it began on the 28th of February, 2026, when the US and Israel launched a decapitation strike and unceremoniously took out Iran's top leadership, including their beloved Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had been in his position since 1989 after an eight-year stint as President of his country. Iran responded by firing several salvos of missiles at Israel, giving their proxies and allies the go-ahead, and blockading the Strait of Hormuz. So it goes: a fairly textbook scenario that most newspapers probably had prepared in advance on the off-chance that the Iran War actually did start.
In reality, the war has been building up for decades before reaching a boiling point this year. Since the turn of the century, Iran and the West have been in a dispute over the status of Iran's nuclear program; in 2015, Iran and the US reached a deal with European assistance. Despite the fact that Iran was never found to be in breach of the deal’s agreements, the US left the deal in 2018 anyway, leaving EU officials with their hands tied between supporting their rambunctious North American ally or following the spirit and letter of the deal with Iran. Unsurprisingly, they chose the former. But in August of last year, the EU began connecting with Iran to resume talks on revising and re-implementing a fair and equitable deal on nuclear restrictions. The war— ostensibly about Iran's leadership but in actuality leading to the slaughter of schoolchildren— has since put a stop to these EU-Iran talks and buried anything left of Iran's nuclear program under a mountain of rubble.
The war in Iran might have kicked off on the 28th of February, but logistical operations to supply that war began weeks or months before then. Irish investigative journalism magazine The Ditch reported in March and April that American and Israeli passenger flights carrying munitions used in the attacks on Iran flew through Irish airspace without authorisation to do so. The British government reportedly denied requests by US officials to use British air bases to stage the decapitation strike on Iran's government before eventually giving full access to American forces after the war began.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called the beginning of a new war "greatly concerning" and called on all parties to "exercise maximum restraint.” The US Defence Manpower Data Center, as reported by Reuters, shows that there are some 68,000 active-duty US troops in Europe as of December 2025. European governments have a say on how foreign military bases in their territory are used.
Such has been the case in Spain, which has established a line consistent with its position on Israel's genocide in Palestine. Just weeks after the war began, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that his country would bar the US from using its naval and air bases in Spain to transport weapons or stage attacks on Iran, prompting the Pentagon to divert refueling missions to elsewhere in Europe— proof that tangible actions by European governments can and will change the shape of the Israeli-American war effort on European soil.
On the ground in Spain, however, some elements in the workers' movement criticise Sánchez's government for diverting warships to support EU ally Cyprus, which has received retaliatory attacks from Iran due to the presence of British military bases. Spain's two largest trade union federations, the Worker's Commission and the General Union of Workers, signed statements urging the Sánchez government to use its position in the EU to advocate for a pro-peace position and to move against further militarization in the region, as evidenced by the deploying of EU battleships to Cyprus and the extension of the EU escort mission in the Red Sea against Yemen's Houthis, both missions in which Spain has played a role.
Compare, then, the response of Spain with that of France, which announced the expansion of its nuclear program a mere two days after the beginning of the war and has since moved to strengthen the integrity of the EU as a military entity. In early March, Reuters reported that the French military allowed the US Air Force to only temporarily use French airbases, but only if they aren't attacking Iran directly, a move more geared towards military independence than any serious love for dialogue.
Amid all of this dialogue and positioning, France still exports weapons to Israel, a fact that the country's General Confederation of Labour was eager to point out in early April and which the French government denies— despite a report from Le Monde deeming it to be the case. In a case similar to that of Shannon Airport in Ireland, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris was recently found to have been used by Lockheed Martin on its way to export arms to Tel Aviv.
The response of France is not entirely unique in Europe. Germany's government, for example, has announced its intention to "keep a cool head" about the wanton bloodshed in the region and indicates no plans to restrict use of its bases to the US, leaving Spain's lead largely unfollowed, albeit not without reason. The Irish Times reports that many EU countries feel positively about the French model to reduce military reliance on the US.
Trump called Spain’s policy towards the war a slurry of names and has threatened wide-scale sanctions against the Spanish economy, thereby implicitly threatening the entirety of the EU. It's no surprise that some leaders in Europe, especially those who keep a self-proclaimed "cool head", wouldn't want to rock the boat and add more fuel to the fire in their own country. What some might call the coward's way out, others will merely see as keeping their head down.
The US views its bases in Europe as its own property to use however it pleases, even though many of those bases are at least ostensibly jointly operated with their host country. Regardless, Trump's response to Sanchez indicates a serious discontent with the very notion of opposing the war and especially with calling out the US's role in that war directly; much of the world has become jaded with Israel's role in this war after seeing its genocide in Palestine continue.
With the failure of the peace talks in Pakistan on the 11th of April, it remains to be seen if EU countries will take action in any concrete way. In Spain and in France, cracks are beginning to form in the Euroatlanticist paradigm of the US and the EU serving as close military allies— and we have certainly come a long way since the mass European engagement with the war in Iraq. The voice of the workers, though, is clear, and they are asking why they're still handling or abetting the delivery of military goods to Israel when the talking heads in their government are distancing themselves from America— and that is the question that the EU will need to answer sooner rather than later.