U.S. President Donald Trump instructed his Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to immediately halt all trade with Spain over their flagrant disregard for the NATO alliance and being “terrible” allies.
The United States will cease all trade with Spain, President Donald Trump said, as he sat down for talks with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the alliance’s summit in Ankara, Turkey on Wednesday morning. Dragging NATO’s European members out of their post-Cold War slump and making the alliance a credible deterrent against aggression to the Euro-Atlantic area again has been a top priority for President Trump for a decade, and his message to members today that they still have to do better continued that.
Beyond announcing the ceasefire with Iran appears to be over after Tehran’s duplicitous conduct towards the Memorandum of Understanding and dinging Denmark over Iceland, President Trump announced he’d come to the end of the road with NATO delinquent Spain. Easily the worst-performing of the major NATO states and the most reluctant to transition out of the post-Cold War paradigm of massive welfare and minimum defence, President Trump said the socialist-governed country was a lost cause.
Noting beyond Spain’s refusal to engage with NATO’s five per cent of GDP on defence spending target — as Madrid clings to the now obsolete two per cent target of years past, and insisting it is a good ally by doing so — the country also flat-out refused to assist the U.S.A. in the conflict with Iran in any way, President Trump said it was time to cut off trade. Turning in his chair at the NATO summit from alliance Secretary General MArk Rutte to face U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, seated to the President’s left, Trump said “we don’t have to trade with them, I don’t want to do any more trade with them… take it immediately, don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless, bad people.”
Bessent replied “yes sir” and President Trump added that he believed Spain would “come running back”.
Explaining his rationale, President Trump said “Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay… they’re open about it, they’re hostile”. He said the Spanish treated alliance boss Mark Rutte, the former Dutch Prime Minister turned NATO leader who is called a “Trump whisperer” in Brussels for his unfailing ability to keep on the President’s good side, “terribly”.
It isn’t yet clear what form a block on trade will take, and President Trump has threatened to block Spain in the past over their attitude towards the Western alliance. European figures were quick to kick back at the remarks, insisting that, actually, the U.S. can’t block trade with Spain and even if it wanted to, would do more harm to itself in trying.
A spokesman for the European Union called on Washington to “honour its commitments” while Spain insisted it can’t be singled out for an embargo because it’s a member of the Single Market — a questionable assertion at best assuming everyone else in the world has as much belief in the European Union as Brussels does — and . The Spanish spokesman said, reports The Guardian, that they have “no intention” of changing anything of their relationship with the U.S..
They are reported to have said: “…the US has a trade surplus with Spain (meaning it benefits more from this relationship than we do)… the bilateral relationship between the US and Spain is beneficial for both countries”.
While it is certainly true the U.S. exports more to Spain than it imports, it does not necessarily follow that America has most to lose from any temporary suspension in trade. A large proportion of Spain’s imports — skewing the balance of trade — is American energy in the form of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG), with buys up a fifth in the past year alone. The United States accounts for a third of all of Spain’s gas imports.
In a country with better energy security this would not matter as much, but Spain has recently demonstrated its extreme instability with a massive power cut starting in their territory taking out electricity to a whole corner of Europe.