Trump Suggests Tossing Spain Out of NATO as a Bottom Spender [View all]
Source: Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance
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.
Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-tossing-spain-nato-213536043.html
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