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.”
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