It is regrettable that Poland failed to expel Russia’s ambassador over his rejection of a diplomatic summons. Still, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has rightly called out Spain for its continued failure to treat NATO as anything other than a prestigious country club.
There isn’t a better poster child for freeloading in the trans-Atlantic alliance than that of Spain.
Speaking to the Spanish El Pais newspaper this week, Tusk recalled, “At the last European Council, I had an interesting discussion with the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. He asked us to stop using the word ‘war’ in statements. He argued that people do not want to be threatened in this way, that in Spain, it sounds abstract. I replied that in my part of Europe, war is no longer an abstraction — and that our duty is not to discuss but to act and prepare to defend ourselves.”
It says much about Sanchez that even now, in 2024, he cares more about rhetoric than he does about the reality of Russia’s threat to Europe. Sanchez knows that Ukraine is only one element of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s broader territorial ambitions. These ambitions extend to NATO and European Union member state Estonia, in particular. Putin’s threat to NATO is neither hypothetical nor unserious. And in that regard, it is surely deliberate that Tusk singled out Spain here.
After all, even though it was somehow allowed to host the 2022 NATO Summit, Spain is a deeply unserious NATO ally. NATO figures show that Spain’s defense spending rose from just under 1% of GDP in 2014 to 1.26% of GDP in 2023. In 2014, all NATO members agreed to move toward NATO’s defense spending target of 2% of GDP. Sanchez bears personal responsibility for Spain’s continued failure to match action to rhetoric. He has been in office since 2018, but his government says it will spend just 1.3% of GDP on defense in 2024. Poland? It spends just shy of 4% of GDP on defense, more in percent-of-GDP terms even than the United States.
Poland’s defense spending reflects its understanding of Putin’s Soviet supremacist ideology. But Warsaw also understands that credible alliances require more than shared values. They require the fair sharing of burdens in the political formalization of and physical commitment to those shared values. In contrast, Spain’s NATO neglect pitch perfectly underlines why some Republican Party skeptics of NATO, even if misguided, cannot simply be written off as “isolationist idiots.” Why should America be expected to fight for Spain, these critics might say, if Spain is unwilling to even talk about the potential of a defensive fight?
To be clear, NATO continues to serve American interests, as well as American values. The U.S. nuclear umbrella remains critical to Europe’s security. As does the U.S. Army’s rapid reaction forces. And for now, NATO is safe: Although most of the media ignored it, former President Donald Trump has rightly clarified that he would “100%” defend any NATO ally that meets the 2%-of-GDP defense spending target. Again, however, Spain’s unashamed freeloading offers only ammunition to the former president’s worst impulse of viewing geopolitics through the prism of a business contracting agreement. And with the U.S. military underprepared for war with China, Spain’s position is untenable for NATO and U.S. interests. Tusk gets this.
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Fortunately, Tusk and Polish President Andrzej Duda remind us that there are reasons for hope toward building a more credible NATO. As does the United Kingdom, Finland, Greece, and the Baltic states (which all also exceed NATO’s 2%-of-GDP defense targets). Although it’s partly a hedge against Trump’s possible return to the White House, French President Emmanuel Macron is also boosting France’s defense budget and support of Eastern Europe.
Yet Spain poses a real challenge to NATO’s sustainability. As do Canada, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. In 2011, six years before Trump took office, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it best, “If current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders — those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me — may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”