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Austria has rejected US requests for military overflights of its territory since the start of the Iran war in line with its policy of neutrality, a defence ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.
“There have indeed been requests and they were refused from the outset,” Colonel Michael Bauer said, adding that every time a similar request “involves a country at war, it is refused.”
Austria has been a neutral country since 1955 and is surrounded to the north, south, and east by NATO member states, with neutral Switzerland to the west.
In mid-March, Switzerland, also invoking its neutrality, said it had refused the use of its airspace.
US President Donald Trump has criticised European members of the trans-Atlantic defence alliance for refusing US military aircraft permission to use their airspace for operations connected to the war.
The office of French President Emmanuel Macron expressed surprise at Trump’s criticism of France as being “very unhelpful” for not letting planes carrying military supplies for the conflict fly over its territory.
On Tuesday, it emerged that Italy had also denied a US aircraft permission to land while it was en route to the Middle East for a combat mission.
And Spain has banned all US military aircraft involved in the war from using its airspace and military bases, extending an earlier restriction that applied only to two American installations on Spanish soil.
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares confirmed the expanded ban on Monday, telling Catalan radio station Rac 1 that Madrid would block any US flights linked to the conflict from entering Spanish airspace.
“Spain should not do anything that could escalate” the conflict, Albares said. He added that the decision reflects the “majority sentiment” of Spaniards who oppose the war and aligns with UN principles.
Those decisions, as well as allies’ reluctance to join a naval force to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz, led Trump to slam NATO as a “paper tiger” on Wednesday and say it was “beyond reconsideration” that the US would withdraw from the alliance.
“I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump said.
Those comments were echoed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the US would “have to reexamine” its relationship with NATO.
“I think there’s no doubt, unfortunately, after this conflict is concluded, we are going to have to reexamine that relationship. We’re going to have to reexamine the value of NATO in that alliance for our country,” Rubio said to host Sean Hannity on Fox News.
But Trump’s comments were slammed by France’s president on Thursday, who said the US president was undermining NATO by creating “daily doubt about his commitment” to the north Atlantic alliance.
“If you create daily doubt about your commitment, you hollow it out,” Macron said during a state visit to Seoul, adding that there is “too much talk … going off in all directions.”
Additional sources • AP, AFP
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