Because English is a Germanic language that has half of it’s vocabulary as borrowed words from a Romance language (French) that then got chewed up and mangled for a few centuries.
Not like Gaelic, which has to own the fact that most of it’s words are pronounced in the least sensible way one might think that series of letters is said.
The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t fared as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.