President Donald Trump criticized Spain for not agreeing to new defense spending targets adopted by NATO and suggested the country could face tariffs twice as high from the US.
Trump stated that the US is negotiating a trade deal with Spain and threatened to make them pay twice as much, which caused Spain's benchmark stock index to extend its losses.
Spanish officials dismissed Trump's tariff threat, emphasizing that the European Commission handles trade matters for the EU and that individual member states don't negotiate trade deals on their own.
Until now, it was mandatory to spend 2%, and almost no country met that goal. Now it’s going up to 5%, and it’ll be followed just as strictly as before. On top of that, the deadline is set for 2029—by then, Trump will either be out of office in the U.S., or he’ll have damaged their democracy so badly that it’ll be impossible not to call him a dictator. In any case, by then the game will have changed enough that a renegotiation will be inevitable.
As a Spaniard, I can tell you that our president’s tantrum has more to do with trying to project strength at home—at a time of serious corruption scandals—than with any confrontation that might actually achieve something.
It wasn’t mandatory
Mandatory minimum per agreement with no enforcement
It was never mandatory, it was a suggestion.
Read the agreement. It wasn’t mandatory
It was as mandatory as the 5% will be now, right?
Nobody knows, the new agreement hasn’t been published yet (or at least I can’t find it on the NATO website). What’s on the NATO website is the previous one and the wording is intentionally very vague, as usual in these kinds of treaties so that everyone can keep doing their thing:
Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level will:
Sanchez is a pure politician, a party rat, who hasn’t worked in a real job in his life. He simply wants to stay in power. He lacks any morals.
Sadly, on the other side of the aisle it’s exactly the same…
I’m not against professional politicians—there are things they handle and defend better than “amateurs.” What I’m against is dishonest politicians, and he’s shown himself to be one, by far.
You can agree with his policies, measures, and ideas—whatever they may be—but if a politician is dishonest, they’ll always end up betraying you for their own interests.