Spain too digs in heels over ‘5% demand’
Cracks are appearing in the ‘increased defence spending’ resolve urged by NATO chief Mark Rutte, under pressure from US President Donald Trump.
Portugal, for example, is fully prepared to increase spending this year to reach the 2% minimum of GDP ‘demanded’ in the past – a sum that Rutte has stressed is just much too little to be taken seriously anymore – but there is no political consensus to go any higher.
Expresso explains that prime minister Luís Montenegro will thus be attending next week’s NATO summit in the Hague with a degree of uncertainty over how the country’s position will be viewed.
Spain too – another of the ‘bad payers’ that President Trump has intimated he wouldn’t lift a finger to help if they were invaded/ under threat – has said through PM Pedro Sánchez that it finds the whole ‘5% target’ set by Trump “unreasonable”, and for this reason won’t be jumping through any hoops to attain it.
In the words of Euronews: “Any agreement to adopt a new spending guideline must be made with the consensus of all 32 NATO member states. So Sánchez’s decision risks derailing next week’s summit, which US President Donald Trump is due to attend, and creating a last-minute shakeup that could have lingering repercussions.”
Expresso stresses that even spending 2% of GDP will be a ‘stretch’ for Portugal, not to mention some of the other ‘bad payers’ (Slovenia, for example, has vowed to leave NATO if it is obliged to fully sign up to Rutte’s blueprint). And although foreign affairs minister Paulo Rangel has said the equivalent of “if we have to go higher, we will”, PS Socialists are not supporting this approach, neither is CHEGA – the country’s second political force.
Without the support of the PS or CHEGA, the government won’t be in a position to increase defence spending to NATO’s satisfaction.
As it is, Expresso points to a lot of inventive strategies just to reach the 2% target, including “reclassifying a series of expenses already realised by the state that would be eligible within NATO’s accounting criteria, and which Portugal hasn’t yet fully used”.
All in all, hopes are that the summit next week is brief, and that President Trump is sufficiently distracted (the war in the Middle East and whether or not to involve the United States more than it already is being probably the greatest question mark on Mr Trump’s horizon) so that there are not too many contretemps.
Expresso writes that “everything has been organised to avoid dramas and controversies (at least to try to) to guarantee that President Trump leaves the summit satisfied”… ND
Source material: Expresso/ Euronews
