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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez left this week’s Nato summit with a smaller defence bill than the alliance’s other members, but Donald Trump warned the EU’s top leftwing leader that he would be made to pay in other ways.
After Sánchez’s resistance to a new spending target riled many European colleagues, the US president accused Spain of seeking a “free ride” and threatened to “make them pay twice as much” in tariffs to the US as part of a trade deal.
In reality the US cannot hit Spain with targeted tariffs because it has to negotiate any trade deal with the EU as a whole. But Trump’s words mattered more as a signal that he has Spain in his sights and could resort to a variety of tools to try to punish it.
That begs the question of whether Sánchez, who is renowned as a wily political survivor at home, has miscalculated on the international stage and pushed his luck too far.
“It was selfish and it was reckless,” said one European Nato diplomat. “We all have spending difficulties, but he tried to make it all about him.”
Other allies complained that Spain could have quietly accepted the summit declaration’s ambiguity and long timelines, which in effect soften its 5 per cent of GDP spending target, without making a fuss.
The Socialist prime minister, before Trump’s comments, thanked allies for respecting “Spanish sovereignty” by letting him claim an explicit opt-out from the 5 per cent goal. Accepting it, he said, would have been a “huge mistake” costing Spain €300bn over the next decade.
The clash in The Hague came as he was weakened at home by a swirl of corruption scandals, which include his wife and brother as well as two former right-hand men accused of taking kickbacks on public contracts. All deny wrongdoing.
The sense of crisis — including mounting calls from his critics for a general election — led to suggestions that Sánchez wanted to use the summit to change the subject.
That process began when he told Mark Rutte, Nato secretary-general, in a public letter last week that he refused to accept the “unreasonable” spending target. He then announced in an impromptu television address on Sunday that Rutte had accepted his position.
One conservative official said Sánchez was seeking a “Zelenskyy moment” with Trump, referring to the Ukrainian president’s Oval Office dust-up.
Michael Walsh, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said: “A confrontation with Trump is going to get a lot of people’s attention, and in Spain there are a lot of voters who are not sympathetic with Trump nor his foreign policy.
“I think there’s a possibility that this was an intentional move and Sánchez knew it would blow up. He decided the risk was worth taking because it would distract from things at home.”
One Spanish official said the Sánchez team was “unfazed” by Trump’s threat. Last week, when the prime minister sent his letter to Rutte, Madrid had already run the numbers on potential American retaliation and concluded that the tariff threat was not grave.
Any US tariffs on goods that Spain produces in significant volumes, such as iron, aluminium and cars, would also hit the EU’s other 26 member states, including those that willingly signed up to Trump’s 5 per cent target.
The US could instead target products of which Spain is one of the few producers, such as Iberian ham and black olives, but their economic weight is limited.
The Spanish official said that during the private meeting of Nato leaders Trump had not mentioned Spain by name. He commented on it only when asked at a subsequent press conference, saying its refusal to commit to 5 per cent by 2035 was “terrible” and merited punishment in a trade deal.
“You know they are doing very well. The economy is [doing] very well. And that economy could be blown right out of the water with something bad happening,” Trump said.
By breaking ranks, Sánchez had drawn attention to the difference between Nato’s capability targets — real military gaps assessed by alliance experts — and the 5 per cent demanded initially by Trump and fashioned into an official target by Rutte.
“We all knew that the only objective was to get through these days and then take stock. He couldn’t help himself,” said a second European Nato diplomat.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said: “We will go through another review by 2029 at the latest and Spain will find out whether it can keep its promises with less financial spending.”
It is possible that Trump will move on from Spain to other matters. In January he appeared to be unsure where it was when he called it a “Brics country”. But there was another interpretation of his words then: they were a put-down and a warning that he saw Spain as a bedfellow of certain enemies.
Sánchez is not only at odds with the Trump administration on defence. He has tested its patience by slamming Israel’s assault on Gaza, attacking the Silicon Valley “techno-caste” and courting President Xi Jinping in China. He is also an advocate of immigration.
As the EU’s most senior leftwing leader, he has made himself a convenient symbol of what the Maga movement dislikes.
“I believe Trump is going to retaliate,” said Walsh. “He is going to put tremendous pressure on the Spanish government to conform to 5 per cent. There is already a good chance this government could collapse because of the corruption scandals — and Trump will hope he can make that happen.”
Additional reporting by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in The Hague and Carmen Muela in Madrid
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