Trump targets Spanish trade over NATO spending

Donald Trump called Spain a "terrible partner" at the NATO summit in Ankara, then told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut trade with Madrid (CNBC). In one move, he fused two things allies had always kept apart: military burden-sharing and commercial punishment. The problem is that Spain doesn't control its own trade policy. The EU does. A NATO spending row just became a test of whether Europe will shield a member state from its own security patron.

A Political Pledge Without Legal Teeth

NATO's spending targets sound binding. They aren't. The North Atlantic Treaty requires allies to maintain defence capacity but sets no GDP percentage. The 2% benchmark came from the 2014 Wales Summit as a planning guideline. The new 5% target, split roughly between 3.5% for core defence and 1.5% for resilience, emerged from summit pressure, with Secretary General Mark Rutte demanding "credible national plans" (The Guardian).

Spain argues it can meet its assigned NATO capabilities at around 2.1% of GDP (Tagesschau). Trump calls that free-riding. Neither side can prove its case: NATO publishes no transparent checklist showing what each ally delivers versus what it owes.

Only the EU Can Set Trade Policy

This is where the story becomes European. Under EU treaty law, trade policy is an exclusive power of the Union, not of individual governments (EUR-Lex, Art. 3 TFEU). Spain cannot negotiate a bilateral deal with Washington, and Washington cannot punish Spain alone without hitting the entire EU customs union, the single external border through which all 27 member states trade. After Trump's instruction to halt commerce, trade continued normally.

Eastern allies read the threat through their own exposure. Poland, which projects 4.68% of GDP on defence in 2026, treated Trump's frustration as understandable while calling the summit an alliance crisis. Lithuania's President Nausėda backed spending pressure but insisted that Article 5, NATO's mutual-defence pledge, must remain unconditional. For Warsaw and Vilnius, higher spending is necessary. Making US protection conditional is the danger.

Denmark's Prime Minister Frederiksen connected the Spain row to Trump's renewed Greenland pressure, declaring Denmark would defend its territory. Two targets, one logic: comply or face consequences outside the defence domain.

Europe's Untested Shield

The EU built a tool for exactly this kind of pressure. Regulation 2023/2675, the Anti-Coercion Instrument, lets the European Commission (the EU's executive arm) investigate when a non-EU country uses trade threats to force a member state's policy choices. If coercion is confirmed, the Commission proposes countermeasures and the Council (where member-state governments vote) must approve them. France and the Commission both said Brussels would defend Spain (Le Figaro).

The instrument has never been activated. Not against China. Not against anyone. Using it against Europe's largest security partner would be unprecedented.

Trump's trade threat may never become lasting policy. But it has already changed the calculation in every European capital: what does it cost to defy Washington? Europe's defence gap is real, and eastern allies are right that capability matters more than summit slogans. Yet Trump has also handed Europe's autonomy camp a concrete argument. If the ally who guarantees European security can weaponise trade over a budget disagreement, the case for reducing that dependence writes itself. Commission President von der Leyen and the governments that legislated the anti-coercion shield now face the question they designed it for.