Romania’s liberal government not only agreed to a US request to use the enormous Mihail Kogălniceanu air base in Constanța as part of Operation Epic Fury in Iran on March 11, it did so with notable enthusiasm.
President Nicușor Dan said the decision would make Romania safer, although it faced strong resistance from the far-right of the formerly pro-Trump Make Europe Great Again (MEGA) movement.
The agreement allows the use of the Black Sea base for the deployment of refueling aircraft, monitoring equipment, and satellite communications equipment for a key US anti-ballistic missile site. NATO’s former Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, has described the base as “incredibly important for anything we do” in the Middle East.
Bucharest did not wait for Washington to call twice. In less than 24 hours, the Supreme Council for National Defense was convened by the president to adopt this decision, which was also adopted by parliament that same day.
The pro-European ruling coalition’s parliamentarians voted in favor of allowing the US to use the base as part of the Iran campaign. The most vocal opponents of this decision were the far-right politicians from AUR and POT, a party created as a satellite of Călin Georgescu, the Russian-endorsed presidential candidate for whom the Romanian Constitutional Court decided unanimously to annul the elections of 2024.
In January, George Simion, the AUR leader of the opposition, generated headlines by cutting a Greenland-shaped cake colored like a US flag.
But when push came to shove, he opposed help for the US. Simion justified his vote by claiming Romania lacked any guarantee that the equipment deployed at the air base is purely defensive, nor was there any guarantee that the base would be protected by the US. The US withdrew 1,000 military personnel last year, but says another 1,700 will remain, along with a critical Aegis Ashore missile defense system.
The Romanian decision came as President Trump expressed strong dissatisfaction with other European countries for standing back from the war against Iran. Even the UK, a traditionally close ally, was criticized by President Trump for a delay in agreeing to the use of British bases for strikes against Iran.
By deciding to stand with the US despite the domestic political risks, Romania is an outlier in the current European political landscape. It follows President Dan’s decision to attend the Board of Peace meeting in Washington last month, the only European head of state to do so. Romania’s support for the US brought the inevitable (if vaguely worded) threat from Iran.
Romanian trust in European solidarity has been diluted over the past year. When the US announced its troop withdrawal, the Foreign Minister pledged that additional non-American NATO troops would quickly come to supplement the vacuum thus created. But they never materialized, underscoring once again the vast gap between Europe’s strategic ambitions and its operational reality.
If nothing else, recent events underline the importance of the Mihail Kogălniceanu base, which has been called the Ramstein of the East in acknowledgement of its better-known brother site in Germany. Romania is spending around $2.7bn over 20 years, and the US around $110m. The site is vast — spread over almost 7,000 acres, it will be able to accommodate 10,000 personnel.
Romania has previously proved a loyal US ally by supporting US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It endorsed Trump’s proposal to increase NATO’s spending target to 5% of GDP for defense, and is exploring co-production opportunities with American companies as part of the rearmament effort.
What does it hope for in return? The pro-US political groups would like Washington to do its part by establishing a permanent military presence in Romania and updating its Black Sea security strategy to acknowledge both the region’s complex web of threats stemming from Russia, China, and Iran, but also its immense potential in energy and critical minerals.
This is not a charitable endeavor; it’s clear how the US would benefit, and it seems to have acknowledged this with the Mihail Kogălniceanu request.
It might also reflect that, whatever the statements of the Romanian far-right, they feel no obligation to the US and no loyalty.
Antonia-Laura Pup is a research assistant within the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a member of the CEPA Black Sea Working Group. She previously served as a policy advisor to the President of the Defense Committee in the Romanian Parliament.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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