Spain reaches deal with NATO ahead of summit to be excluded from 5% defense spending goal

MADRID (AP) – Spain reached a deal with NATO to be excluded from a 5% of GDP defense spending target, days before the military alliance’s leaders will gather at a summit, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Sunday.

“Spain will, therefore, not spend 5% of its GDP on defense, but its participation, weight and legitimacy in NATO remain intact,” Sánchez said in a televised address.

Sánchez said that Spain would be able to keep its commitments to the 32-nation military alliance by spending 2.1% of GDP on defense needs.

In letters exchanged on Sunday between NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and Sánchez, Spain was granted the exemption and the language around the 5% spending target was made to no longer include “all allies,” Sánchez said.

On Thursday, Sánchez told Rutte in a separate letter that Spain could not commit to the spending target. The move threatened to derail the upcoming summit at The Hague, which U.S. President Donald Trump is due to attend, since any new spending guidelines have to made with the consensus of all 32 NATO member states.

Last year, Spain spent 1.28% per NATO estimates on military expenditure, making it the alliance’s lowest spender. In April, Sánchez announced that the government would raise defense spending to 2% this year, a move that he received pushback for at home including from some allies.

On Friday, Trump said Spain “has to pay what everybody else has to pay,” calling the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy “a very low payer.”

“They were either good negotiators or they weren’t doing the right thing,” Trump told reporters.

On Sunday, Sánchez said Spain “believes that Europe should take charge of its own defense, an idea aligned with opinions such as those expressed by President Trump.”

But he called reaching a 5% spending target “incompatible with our worldview.”