White House insists all European countries must spend 5% on defense

The White House has made it crystal clear. Faced with Spain’s resistance to its demands for military spending of 5% of GDP for all NATO allies, Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Thursday that the U.S. president “wants to see all European countries pay their fair share and meet that 5 percent threshold.”

“It’s only fair considering the American taxpayers have given a significant chunk of money to the tune of billions of dollars to support our mutual interests and our assured defense,” she added. “I didn’t see Spain’s comments, I’ll make sure the president sees them.”

In a letter sent to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte ahead of a key summit next week in The Hague, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote that “for Spain, committing to a 5% target would not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive; it would move Spain away from optimal spending and would hinder the EU’s efforts to strengthen its security and defense ecosystem.”

Sánchez’s words came in response to a letter from Rutte sent to NATO’s 32 members on Wednesday, in which he proposed raising defense spending to 5% of GDP despite the fact that not a single one of the organization’s member countries currently reach that level of spending. Military spending in Spain currently stands at €19.7 billion, which represents 1.3% of GDP. Raising it to 5% would mean allocating around €80 billion more per year to defense, almost half of what it spends on pensions. Sánchez’s government prefers a 3.5% expenditure on military equipment and 1.5% on infrastructure and other investments that could also have a defensive use.

Trump is scheduled to travel on Monday to participate in the NATO summit to be held on June 24-25 in the Dutch city, Leavitt confirmed.

During his first term, Trump had demanded that the Europeans meet the 2% spending target they had set at the Wales summit of 2014. But upon his return to the White House this year, he began demanding that figure be raised to 5%, arguing that Europeans must do more to contribute to their own defense. The U.S., in his view, has already invested too much money in protecting them, without getting enough in return.

“The U.S. is looking for everybody to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to do it. We have a plan, we’re going to get to 5%. There’s a real threat on Europe and we have to do more.’ But some of our allies say, ‘yes, 5%, but in reality it’s 3.5% plus 1.5% which could be anything. And if that is overemphasized, it can lead to a clash with the United States,” Kurt Volker, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Wednesday at a telephone press conference organized by the think tank Center for European Political Analysis (CEPA) in Washington.

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