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.
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: