BRUSSELS, Belgium: NATO on Sunday signed off on a pledge to ramp up defense spending before its upcoming summit, but Madrid insisted it would not need to hit the five percent of GDP demanded by US President Donald Trump.
\nThe claim by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sets up a potential clash with Trump, who has pressured allies to commit to that headline figure when they meet for the two-day gathering starting on Tuesday in The Hague.
\nSpain had been the last holdout on a compromise deal that sees allies promise to reach 3.5 percent on core military needs over the next decade, and spend 1.5 percent on a looser category of \u201cdefense-related\u201d expenditures such as infrastructure and cybersecurity.
\nMultiple diplomats at NATO said the agreement \u2014 set to be unveiled at the summit \u2014 had gone through with the approval of all 32 nations and that there was no exemption for Madrid.
\nBut within minutes Sanchez came out saying he had struck an accord with NATO that would see his country keep respecting its commitments \u201cwithout having to raise our defense spending to five percent of gross domestic product.\u201d
\n\u201cWe understand the difficulty of the geopolitical context, fully respect the legitimate desire of other countries to increase their defense investment, if they so wish, but we are not going to do it,\u201d he said.
\nNATO diplomats now fear that Spain\u2019s position could undermine its carefully choreographed show of unity with Trump in The Hague, which already risks being overshadowed by the US decision to strike Iran.
\n\u201cNot ok,\u201d one diplomat said, on condition of anonymity.
\nMadrid\u2019s claims came after Sanchez on Thursday threw a last-minute grenade into preparations for the gathering in the Netherlands by taking a strong stand against the agreement.
\nIn a blistering letter to NATO chief Mark Rutte, Sanchez said that committing to a headline figure of five percent of GDP \u201cwould not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive.\u201d
\nThat prompted a warning from Trump that \u201cSpain has to pay what everybody else has to pay.\u201d
\n\u201cNATO is going to have to deal with Spain,\u201d he told reporters on Friday, calling the country \u201cnotorious\u201d for spending less on defense than other alliance members.
\nThe outburst from Madrid\u2019s center-left leader also sparked fury from other NATO members desperate to keep Trump \u2014 who has threatened not to protect allies spending too little \u2014 on their side.
\nThe pledge is seen as key both to satisfying Trump and helping NATO build up the forces it needs to deter Russia.
\nAfter several days of wrangling involving Sanchez and Rutte, officials said Spain on Sunday signed off on the pledge.
\nDiplomats said that language around the spending pledge in the summit\u2019s final declaration had been slightly softened from \u201cwe commit,\u201d to \u201callies commit.\u201d
\nThey insisted the fundamentals of the deal remained intact and that it applied to Spain.
\nBut government sources in Madrid said the linguistic tweak meant only those countries that opted-in were covered by the promise and that Rutte was set to send a letter to Sanchez saying that Spain will have \u201cflexibility.\u201d
\nSanchez is facing a difficult balancing act of aligning with NATO allies and cajoling his junior coalition partner, the far-left alliance Sumar, which is hostile to increasing military spending.
\nSpain has been one of the lowest-spending NATO countries on defense in relative terms.
\nThe country is only set to hit the alliance\u2019s current target of two percent this year after a 10-billion-euro ($11.5 billion) injection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BRUSSELS, Belgium: NATO on Sunday signed off on a pledge to ramp up defense spending before its upcoming summit, but Madrid insisted it would not need to hit the five percent of GDP demanded by US President Donald Trump. The claim by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sets up a potential clash with Trump, who …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":82705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82706,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82685\/revisions\/82706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}