NATO allies have reached a deal on setting a new defense spending target of 5 percent of gross domestic product that allows Spain to spend less, two alliance officials told POLITICO on Sunday.
The demand was originally raised by U.S. President Donald Trump and will be confirmed by NATO leaders meeting in The Hague on Wednesday.
Spain threw in a last-minute complication on Thursday, when Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez demanded an exemption from the new target — a steep increase on the alliance’s current 2 percent of GDP target that Spain has had trouble meeting.
In order to bring Madrid on board, the new language that leaders will approve on Wednesday was changed from “we commit” to “allies commit” to spend 5 percent on defense, a NATO official said. That would allow Spain spending flexibility as long as it meets NATO’s updated capability targets approved by alliance defense ministers on June 5.
In a statement on Sunday, Sánchez described the outcome as a “success,” which will allow Spain to “fulfill its commitments to the Atlantic alliance and preserve its unity, without having to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.”
“Each NATO member … has the right and the obligation to choose whether or not to assume those sacrifices, and we as a sovereign country choose not to do so,” Sánchez said.
He added that Spain will spend 2.1 percent of its GDP on defense “to acquire and maintain all the personnel, equipment and infrastructures requested by the alliance to confront these threats with our capabilities.”
That view was confirmed by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in a note to Sánchez: “I can hereby confirm that the agreement at the upcoming NATO Summit will give Spain the flexibility to determine its own sovereign path for reaching the Capability Target goal and the annual resources necessary as a share of GDP, and to submit its own annual plans.”
He added that the alliance will review its spending trajectory in 2029.
During the NATO summit, allies will commit to spending 3.5 percent of GDP on “hard defense” like weapons and troops and an additional 1.5 percent on defense-related investments like cybersecurity and military mobility.
Trump has said that the 5 percent target won’t apply to the U.S.
Allies will have to reach that target by 2035, a NATO official told POLITICO. That is a victory for countries like Italy and the U.K., which were worried about a speedy spending increase that could derail their public finances. Countries closer to Russia were calling for a much faster deadline of 2030, while Rutte had proposed a 2032 date.
NATO has to agree on new spending targets by consensus, giving each of the alliance’s 32 members a veto. Sánchez insisted that Madrid had not undermined alliance unity but called the boost in defense spending “disproportionate and unnecessary” as it could undermine social spending in Spain.
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed to this report.
This article has been updated.
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