US President Donald Trump floated the idea that Spain could be removed from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in his latest swipe against a chronic under-spender on defense.
“Spain — you have to call them and find, why are they a laggard?” Trump said as he spoke with Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Thursday in the Oval Office. “And they’re doing well too, you know. Because of a lot of the things we’ve done, they’re doing fine. They have no excuse not to do this. But that’s all right.”
“Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly,” he added.
Spain previously earned Trump’s ire when it rejected the US call at the NATO Summit in June to increase defense spending to 5% of national gross domestic product, becoming the only nation in the alliance to reject the new goal. At the time, Trump suggested he planned to double tariff rates hitting products from Spain sold into the US.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said that abiding by the new threshold would see hundreds of millions of euros in additional defense spending which would require cuts to health care and education. His office released a statement Thursday pushing back on Trump’s remarks.
“Spain is a member of NATO in full right and is committed to NATO. It fulfills its targets just as the US does,” the statement said.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the US from the defense alliance over other nations’ defense spending, though he has signaled more robust support in recent months as other countries have rallied around his 5% goal. While there have been calls to expel nations from the alliance before — including after Turkey acquired Russian air defense systems — there is no suspension or expulsion mechanism in the treaty.
And while some scholars have argued that a NATO member could be expelled if the North Atlantic Council — the principal decision-making body within the alliance — determined a country to be in material breach of its treaty obligations, there’s no indication that the US could do so unilaterally.
No country has ever left the alliance, which Finland joined in 2023 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
