Trump says Spain should be 'thrown out' of Nato over low defence spend

President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that Spain be expelled from Nato over its failure to match the higher defence spending requirement he has engineered.

"We had one laggard, it was Spain," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "They have no excuse not to do this, but that's all right. Maybe you should throw them out of Nato frankly."

In June, the 32-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organisation agreed to massively boost defence spending over the next decade under pressure from Trump, who at the time threatened to punish Madrid on trade for resisting the new target of five percent of GDP.

Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has insisted Madrid would not need to hit the headline figure. Spain has been one of the lowest-spending Nato countries on defence in relative terms.

The US president - who has repeatedly suggested Washington could withhold protection from European countries unwilling to spend more on defence - rammed through the commitment to spend five percent of their GDPs on security-related spending in a move seen as key to keeping him engaged with Nato.

That headline figure breaks down as 3.5 percent on core defence spending and 1.5 percent on a looser range of areas such as infrastructure and cyber security.

The new target replaces the alliance's former military spending goal of two percent, first set back in 2014.

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