The meeting was supposed to be the prelude to the purchase of Finnish icebreaker ships.<\/p>\n
But as United States President Donald Trump welcomed Finland\u2019s President Alexander Stubb to the Oval Office on Thursday, he veered into a discussion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) \u2014 and his ongoing feud with one of its members, Spain.<\/p>\n
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At a NATO summit in June, Spain was the most prominent holdout against Trump\u2019s push to increase defence spending among member states.<\/p>\n
Trump has long sought for all NATO members to commit 5 percent<\/a> of their gross domestic product (GDP) to building up their military assets. But Spain successfully pushed<\/a> for an exemption at June\u2019s meeting, allowing its expenditures to remain around the previous benchmark of 2 percent.<\/p>\n That resistance lingered on Trump\u2019s mind at Thursday\u2019s meeting, as he discussed the US commitment to NATO with Stubb.<\/p>\n \u201cAs you know, I requested that they pay 5 percent, not 2 percent,\u201d Trump said of the NATO members.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd most people thought that was not gonna happen. And it happened virtually unanimously. We had one laggard. It was Spain. Spain. You have to call them and find out: Why are they a laggard?\u201d<\/p>\n He then mused about taking retribution: \u201cThey have no excuse not to do this, but that\u2019s all right. Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a bitter note in an otherwise friendly meeting with Stubb, whom Trump hosted in March at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.<\/p>\n Since his first term as president, Trump has wavered<\/a> in his public comments about NATO, at times embracing<\/a> the alliance and, at other moments, rejecting it as \u201cobsolete\u201d.<\/p>\n But seated next to Stubb and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, Trump took a decidedly enthusiastic approach to defending Finland, one of the newest members of NATO. It joined the alliance in April 2023, followed by Sweden less than a year later.<\/p>\n Reporters at Thursday\u2019s Oval Office meeting pressed Trump about what he might do if Russia expands its war in Ukraine to other countries in Europe.<\/p>\n In Finnish politics, the spectre of Russian interference looms large: The former Soviet Union invaded Finland in the 1930s, and since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, relations between the two countries have soured even further.<\/p>\n Finland closed its shared border with Russia in 2024, an international divide that stretches across 1,340 kilometres, or 841 miles.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat if Russia and Vladimir Putin attacks Finland? Would you defend Finland?\u201d one reporter asked Trump on Thursday.<\/p>\n Trump did not mince words in his reply. \u201cI would. Yes, I would. They\u2019re a member of NATO.\u201d<\/p>\n He nevertheless cast doubt on the prospect of a Russian invasion under Putin.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to happen. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s going to do that. I think the chances of that are very, very small,\u201d he said, turning to Stubb. \u201cYou have a very powerful military, one of the best.\u201d<\/p>\n When pushed to specify how he might defend Finland in case of an attack, Trump offered one word in reply: \u201cVigorously.\u201d<\/p>\n Those warm remarks offered a stark contrast with his approach to Spain. In the wake of the June NATO summit, for instance, Trump called Spain\u2019s position \u201chostile\u201d and threatened its economy, pledging to make it pay \u201ctwice as much\u201d in tariffs to the US.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Spain is terrible, what they\u2019ve done,\u201d he told reporters, accusing the country of taking a \u201cfree ride\u201d at other countries\u2019 expense. \u201cThat economy could be blown right out of the water with something bad happening.\u201d<\/p>\n NATO was founded with 12 original members and has since expanded to include 32. Spain joined in 1982. So far, no members have ever been expelled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The meeting was supposed to be the prelude to the purchase of Finnish icebreaker ships. But as United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[32,2000,299,769,1234,2597,2821,12,285,104,49,286],"class_list":{"0":"post-486918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-finland","12":"tag-government","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-nato","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-spain","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-us-canada"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115346890025537265","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486918","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=486918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}