MADRID \u2013 <\/p>\n
Spain has asked to opt out of NATO’s plan to increase members’ defense spending to 5% of their gross domestic product, a move that could derail a summit at which the military alliance plans to ask them to commit to the target.<\/p>\n
In a letter sent to NATO chief Mark Rutte on Thursday and seen by Reuters, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez requested a “more flexible formula” that either makes the spending target optional or excludes Spain from its application.<\/p>\n
He said it was not Spain’s intention to obstruct the outcome of next week’s NATO summit. But any agreement to raise defense spending \u2014 a response to a request by U.S. President Donald Trump \u2014 would require unanimous approval by the 32 member states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MADRID \u2013 Spain has asked to opt out of NATO’s plan to increase members’ defense spending to 5%…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[473,2000,299,2821,104,1017],"class_list":{"0":"post-198774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-defense","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-nato","12":"tag-spain","13":"tag-u-s"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114713478017857182","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}