{"id":205594,"date":"2025-06-22T17:07:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T17:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/205594\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T17:07:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T17:07:11","slug":"spain-agrees-with-nato-to-skip-5-defence-spending-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/205594\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain agrees with NATO to skip 5% defence spending target"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">MADRID (Reuters) -Spain agreed with the NATO military alliance to be excluded from spending 5% of its gross domestic product on defence, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Sunday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">&#8220;A 5% spending would be disproportionate and unnecessary,&#8221; Sanchez said in an address on national television.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">&#8220;We fully respect the legitimate desire of other countries to increase their defence investment, but we are not going to do it,&#8221; he said, adding Spain could meet all its commitments to NATO, in terms of staff or equipment, by spending only 2.1% of its GDP.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">Diplomats had said earlier on Sunday the 32 countries comprising NATO had agreed on a statement for the upcoming summit setting a goal of 5% of GDP for annual defence and security related by 2035 overcoming Spain&#8217;s objection.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">In a letter sent on Thursday, Sanchez had told NATO chief Mark Rutte his country wanted to opt out of a new 5% spending target. The letter raised concerns that Spain would derail the whole summit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">At an estimated 1.28% of GDP, Spain had the lowest proportion of expenditure on defence in the alliance last year, according to NATO estimates. Sanchez agreed in April to accelerate efforts to meet NATO&#8217;s current target of 2% this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">(Reporting by Ana Cantero, editing by Inti Landauro)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MADRID (Reuters) -Spain agreed with the NATO military alliance to be excluded from spending 5% of its gross&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[2000,299,28144,2821,5338,104,20134],"class_list":{"0":"post-205594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-gross-domestic-product","11":"tag-nato","12":"tag-pedro-sanchez","13":"tag-spain","14":"tag-spending"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114728117829254774","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205594","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=205594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}