NATO leaders will meet this Wednesday in The Hague for a summit with a single topic: defense investment for the next decade, and where it is expected that all countries commit to spending 5% of GDP, as demanded by Donald Trump.
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, opposes what the US president is asking for and calls for meeting the military requirements of the Alliance without adhering to a spending percentage.
Trump and the other leaders of NATO arrived in the last hours in The Hague and were welcomed by King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands at Huis ten Bosch Palace.
What is NATO’s proposal to calm Trump?
On the table of the allied leaders is the proposal from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, to allocate 3.5% to pure Defense spending and an additional 1.5% for security-related investments, a recipe that rounds up to the 5% threshold that Trump has been demanding for months.
“It will be ‘an ambitious, historic, and fundamental qualitative leap’ to ensure NATO’s future security,” Rutte stated.
Despite the reservations of some countries such as Italy, Canada, Slovakia, or Belgium, which have pointed out their difficulties with the spending target, Spain has become the flagbearer of the “no” to the 5% spending.
That is why Rutte proposed to Sánchez in a last-minute negotiation before the summit to give Spain flexibility to set its own spending path, which Madrid wants to link to capacity objectives, in exchange for support for the summit declaration.
In the eyes of Spain, this is an exception to the general 2% target and considers that, instead, it should only dedicate 2.1% to defense to cover its military commitments. However, the NATO Secretary-General warned Spain that it will need to increase its investment to 3.5% to comply with the organization.
Trump’s criticisms of Spain
With Pedro Sánchez in the spotlight of controversy, Trump himself criticized Spain from the presidential plane Air Force One, stating that it is a “problem” in NATO due to its lack of defense spending. “Spain does not agree, this is very unfair to the rest,” he commented in reference to Sánchez’s reluctance to agree to the 5% threshold.
Later, in a message on his own social network Truth Social, the President of the United States shared a chart showing the level of spending in NATO with three illustrations of the same size: one of Trump, another of Mark Rutte, and another of Sánchez, as the country that dedicates the least to Defense in NATO.