{"id":24309,"date":"2025-04-16T08:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T08:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/24309\/"},"modified":"2025-04-16T08:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T08:47:10","slug":"trumps-treasury-chief-jabs-spain-on-defense-spending-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/24309\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s treasury chief jabs Spain on defense spending \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Spain is one of the worst offenders in the transatlantic military alliance, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/spai-pedro-sanchez-calls-creation-european-army-military-budget\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">spending just 1.32 percent<\/a> of its GDP on defense, well below NATO&#8217;s current target of 2 percent. Madrid <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/europe\/spain-vows-meet-2-defence-spending-goal-well-before-2029-no-new-deadline-2025-04-01\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">plans to reach that goal<\/a> before 2029.<\/p>\n<p>Bessent also hit out at Spain\u2019s \u201cdigital services tax,\u201d which forces Big Tech firms to pay more taxes in the country and is seen by the White House as unfairly targeting American tech giants, plus \u201cother non-tariff barriers\u201d levied on the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>Trump slapped a 20 percent tariff on goods from the European Union earlier this month, which he claimed was retaliation for the U.S. being treated unfairly on trade, before pausing that penalty for 90 days.<\/p>\n<p>Cuerpo\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2025-04-15\/spain-s-cuerpo-says-bessent-signaled-he-wants-eu-deal-on-tariffs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">said after the Bessent meeting<\/a> that he was confident the U.S. is open to negotiating with the EU on trade and tariffs, and wants to seal a deal before Trump&#8217;s moratorium expires in July.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Bessent has expressed his desire to reach an agreement with major trading partners, such as the European Union,&#8221; Cuerpo told the Spanish press after the meeting. &#8220;We are convinced that [European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security Maro\u0161] \u0160ef\u010dovi\u010d will be able to reach a balanced, fair, and mutually beneficial agreement.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spain is one of the worst offenders in the transatlantic military alliance, spending just 1.32 percent of its&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[1394,473,32,2000,299,2597,811,1199,104,479,1200,1201,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-24309","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-big-tech","9":"tag-defense","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-security","15":"tag-services","16":"tag-spain","17":"tag-tariffs","18":"tag-tax","19":"tag-trade","20":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114346779086948243","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24309","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=24309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}