At the June 25 summit at The Hague, all but one of NATO’s 32 member states agreed to raise defense spending to five percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the increase, insisting that his country’s current plans to raise defense spending to two percent of GDP were sufficient. To preserve unanimity other leaders swallowed hard and exempted Spain from the commitment.
Current domestic politics, together with the context of history and geography, help explain this Spanish difference.
Show Me the Money
For decades the US has pressed its European allies for greater “burden-sharing,” following the declines in European defense spending after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO member states responded at the Wales summit by affirming the goal of spending two percent of GDP on defense by 2024.
Implementation of the Wales commitments has proceeded sluggishly, and some (including Italy, Canada and Spain) have simply failed. As of 2024, Spain’s defense spending remained at 1.28 percent of GDP, the lowest level in the alliance.
Of late, the pressure on NATO’s European members has become more intense. On one hand Russia continues to prosecute its war in Ukraine despite massive casualties and expense. At the same time President Trump has pressed the Europeans hard for additional spending. The alliance took a leap forward at The Hague with the 5 percent commitment, although it should be noted that only 3.5 percent must go towards “core” defense spending. The remaining 1.5 percent can go to adjacent areas such as infrastructure, resilience, and civil defense.
Spain Gets a Pass
While there was resistance to this ambitious goal, ultimately all the leaders of the member states agreed to it with the exception of Spain’s Sánchez. (The Prime Minister of Belgium, another low defense spending state, reluctantly agreed to the five percent target after initially expressing hope only to increase spending “at our own pace, as a sovereign country.”)
Ahead of the conference Sánchez had made it clear that Spain would not accept this increase, stating explicitly that he was not prepared for greater defense expenditures at the expense of social spending. (Previously he had committed to raising defense spending to two percent of GDP by 2029 and in April said that this goal would be achieved in 2025 “without touching one cent of the welfare state.”)
To preserve unanimity it was ultimately agreed that Spain would be exempted from the requirement, based on its assertion that it would be able to meet its obligations based on the capabilities which it is committed to provide under NATO’s planning processes.
Spain’s defense spending is indeed modest given the size of its economy, but its military does participate in a range of NATO activities. Its active-duty armed forces number 120,000 individuals, with 72,000 in its army. It has an air force of 68 Eurofighter Typhoon and 45 older EF-18 Hornet fighter aircraft, and a navy with destroyers, frigates, submarines, and one aircraft carrier. Spain also has a defense industry of some note with strengths in aerospace and shipbuilding, which looks to participate in Europe-wide rearmament efforts.
Spain has provided training to Ukraine’s military. Its forces serve as the headquarters element for troops stationed in Slovakia under NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence program, and it has participated in air patrols over the Baltic and Black Seas. All told, Spain has used its limited resources in ways that seek to underscore its commitment to the alliance.
All Politics Is Local
Why then did Sánchez choose to highlight Spain’s unwillingness to stay in step with allies, especially in light of the ten-year horizon of The Hague commitments and his recently announced increase in current military spending?
The answer lies in a combination of Spanish politics, history and geographic realities. Sánchez’ Spanish Socialist Workers Party, a moderate leftist social democratic formation, lacks a congressional majority, governs in coalition with various groups further to the left, and needs support from regionalist parties, including Catalan separatists.
The far left parties are unenthusiastic about Spain’s military, suspicious of both NATO and the United States, and uninterested in confronting Russia over Ukraine. They seek to defend and even expand Spain’s extensive welfare state. The regionalist parties share some of these characteristics, while seeking the maximum of financial support from the central government with the minimum of oversight. Portraying himself as defending social spending against any raid on it to pay for a military buildup was thus good coalition politics for Sánchez.
And the NATO summit came at a time of particular vulnerability for him. He has had to deal with a series of scandals involving embezzlement of public resources that have reached cabinet members, Socialist Party leaders, and even his own wife. These scandals had led the far leftist and regionalist parties to consider whether it was in their interest to continue to support his government. Sánchez thus was reluctant to insist on a commitment to major increases in defense spending.
On the heels of its refusal to participate in the agreement to increase defense spending, Spain announced that it was no longer considering the purchase of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft, but would instead either purchase more Eurofighter Typhoons or wait for the Future Combat Air System to be produced by a European consortium, presumably by 2040. The timing of the announcement suggests that here too Sánchez was looking to shore up his coalition.
The Weight of History…
Spain may still have some ambivalence regarding the Western alliance—and relations with the United States. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Spain under Francisco Franco was seen as a pariah state, led by a dictator who had been close to Hitler and Mussolini. (Spain was formally non-belligerent, but supplied Germany with raw materials, allowed German submarines to clandestinely resupply at its ports, and sent volunteers to fight against the Soviet Union.)
Spain was barred from joining NATO upon its founding in 1949 and from receiving Marshall Plan reconstruction financing. But the United States nevertheless offered financial assistance and in turn was allowed to build several air and naval bases that continue to remain important for the projection of`American power into Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Spaniards, especially on the left, recall that during the Cold War the United States normalized relations with the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco.
Actual NATO membership was opposed by the European members as long as Spain remained under Franco. After his death in 1975 the country began a transition to democracy which culminated in the election of the socialist Felipe González as Prime Minister in 1982. Initially an opponent of Spain’s joining NATO, he reversed course, seeing it, along with joining the European Union, as solidifying Spain’s consolidation as a member of the democratic West. Shortly after taking office he held a referendum which approved Spain’s entry.
Spain now has over four decades of participation in NATO. But the alliance simply does not hold the same existential place in the Spanish public as it does in does in the founding states which feared a Soviet advance into Western Europe, let alone in the former Warsaw Pact countries which gained their freedom in 1989, or in Finland and Sweden which joined in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
… and Geography
Sheer distance between Spain, at Europe’s far west, and Russia, beyond NATO’s eastern edge, plays a role in public attitudes. Spain’s immediate security concerns come from the south rather than from the east. The North African shoreline is only a short boat ride from its coast. Indeed, Spain has two enclaves on it, Ceuta and Melilla, which Morocco claims and which NATO has determined are not covered by its security guarantees.
Spain faces issues of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and other criminal activity from North Africa, and behind it the Sahel countries and West Africa, all of which gives it particular concern for the stability of these states. NATO, focused on the military rather than the police dimensions of security, has largely stayed away from these issues, which, of course affect all of the countries of its southern tier, leaving them largely to the European Union to address.
NATO does have a “Mediterranean Dialogue” with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Mauritania, but its sole major military action in North Africa was the 2011 intervention in Libya, the consequences of which are still felt today, and which, given the continued chaos there, are not likely to encourage a repeat.
It has been suggested also NATO will try to work more with sub-Saharan states to counter Russian and Chinese influence. Spain, which has been active in EU and UN stabilization missions in several of these countries, might favor such engagement, but given other demands on the alliance as well as African states’ suspicions of former colonial powers, it remains to be seen if NATO will do more there.
NATO does have some outreach to the broader Middle East though the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative in which the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates participate. Spain has long given considerable attention to this area, both diplomatically and commercially (including military sales). But NATO remains focused on defense against the threat from the east, three and one half years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
One of Napoleon’s diplomats is said to have asserted: “Europe ends at the Pyrenees.” Spain’s commitment to NATO has been solid enough that it would be counterproductive to revive this line.
But in refusing to join NATO allies in committing to the five percent of GDP defense spending increase, Sánchez demonstrated his coalition’s internal weakness. He also played into historical and geographic factors that distinguish Spain from its NATO allies. In the 1960s the Spanish tourism authority launched a successful advertising campaign using the slogan “Spain is different.” On this issue at least, that slogan still holds true.
