With Mr. General Félix Sanz Roldán
June 2022
To close our Road to NATO Summit, General Felix Sanz Roldan, former Director of the National Intelligence Centre, shared his vision and professional experience working with NATO. The general commented that his entry into NATO was very different from what we can all expect today. At 36 years old, as he said, he entered the alliance through the "back door". At that time, his status was not the same as that of any other military officer in NATO, as part of his job was to prepare for Spain's entry into the alliance. The Madrid summit is a direct result of the general's low-profile work all those years ago.
He also praised the work of YATA Spain, commenting that the men and women in the room were likely to be leaders in the near future. The general also recalled the negative perspectives on NATO expressed recently by important world leaders, such as President Trump in 2017 or President Emmanuel Macron in 2021, who said that NATO was "dead" compared to exactly the same statements in 1993. According to the general, these statements showed that the purpose of NATO was not properly understood, but Russia's aggression in Ukraine has made many people understand the true value of NATO, which provides us with collective security, giving as an example the comment made to him by a taxi driver that he felt much safer in a NATO state now that war was once again present in Europe.