2 days ago
Why is Spain trying to pick a fight with Trump on defence?
When I joined the House of Commons Clerk's Department 20 years ago, there was a helpful list of formerly common phrases which were no longer to be used. Among them was 'Spanish practices', that arch description often applied to irregular or restrictive workplace arrangements, which I suspect had hardly been spotted in the wild for a decade or more. It was an impermissible slur, of course, dating from the days of the first Elizabeth, but it came back to my mind yesterday.
The Financial Times picked up an announcement in the Madrid daily El País that the Spanish Ministry of Defence would no longer be considering the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II for its future combat aircraft requirements. Instead, it will rely on additional purchases of the Eurofighter Typhoon, of which the Spanish Air Force currently operates 70; it ordered 20 more aircraft in 2022 and a further 25 last December. Looking further ahead, it is committed to the Future Combat Aircraft System (FCAS), in which it is a partner with France and Germany.
This is about more than the details of defence procurement. It is being presented and understood as an explicit, even pointed, decision to choose European platforms over those manufactured in America. In that context, it has to be seen alongside a war of words between Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchéz and President Donald Trump.
At the Nato summit in June, while Sanchéz, like all his fellow leaders, agreed to a communiqué including the commitment to increase spending on defence to 5 per cent of GDP, he has also stated clearly that Spain's expenditure will not go above 2.1 per cent, which is 'sufficient, realistic and compatible' with other spending requirements to maintain the country's social model. This has, predictably, infuriated Trump, who sees it as an open refusal by Spain to pull its weight to sustain collective security.
'There's a problem with Spain,' Trump told the media. 'Spain is not agreeing, which is very unfair to the rest of them [Nato], frankly.' The President had previously said, 'Spain has to pay what everybody else has to pay,' warning, 'Nato is going to have to deal with Spain.'
Trump has a point. For Spain to insist unilaterally on an exemption from bearing the costs of Nato's defence simply because it does not want to pay more is outrageous. It is a serial offender in this regard: Spain never came close to meeting the 2 per cent target originally conceived in 2004, and the last time it spent that proportion of GDP on defence was in 1994.
A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that this latest turning-away from the United States has a touch of performance about it. After all, Spain had made no commitment whatsoever to buy the F-35; it had first made a non-binding request for information in 2017 but had consistently played down the likelihood of the procurement. So, despite many lazy headlines, Spain has not 'cancelled' anything. But that kind of belligerent reportage will suit Sanchéz.
There were always reasons for doubting that Spain would choose the F-35. It is true that the navy's dozen EAV-8B Harrier II strike aircraft are scheduled to be retired around 2030, while diminishing numbers of the air force's EF-18 Hornets will stay in service until 2035.
However, if all goes well, the FCAS, a sixth-generation fighter which will be fully integrated with accompanying drones, could be operational by 2040; bridging that relatively narrow gap (in defence procurement terms) with additional 'fourth-and-a-half-generation' Typhoons is not an indefensible alternative to choosing a wholly new type in the form of the fifth-generation F-35 (each of which can cost around $100 million – or £87 million).
Why would Sanchéz engineer an argument like this? He knows that being Trump's antagonist will play well with his own socialist PSOE and his coalition partner, the left-wing Sumar alliance. He has also been mired in a scandal involving allegations of corruption and influence-peddling against his wife, Begoña Gómez, which became so serious last April that he considered resignation. Given that Sanchéz claimed there was a conspiracy by right-wing media outlets to hound his wife and exert political pressure on him, a contretemps with the notoriously intemperate and thin-skinned Trump might seem an attractive distraction.
All is fair in love, war and politics, and Trump acolytes certainly have no moral high ground from which to criticise Sanchéz for a confected conflict. For the rest of Spain's alliance partners, we should remember what the President said at the time of June's summit: 'Nato is going to have to deal with Spain.' If a spending target is agreed with the urgency that was attached to this one, it is unsustainable to have one member state which simply refuses point-blank to cooperate. Collective security has to be provided collectively, or the fundamental premise of the alliance disappears.
