The Atlantic Alliance, which involves North America, Europe and Turkey, containing within it a plurality of nations and many differences, is certainly not a monolith and within the framework of the Western military coalition, opinions are often discussed that may even diverge, however, divisions cannot and do not emerge regarding the Alliance’s supporting pillars and founding values such as mutual defence in the event of an attack by one of the member states, as provided for in Article 5 of the NATO treaty.
And if there is an agreement on the size of the contribution to which coalition members must adhere in terms of military spending, all NATO country governments are obliged to work to respect the majority decision. In fact, it has been established that each member nation must seek to invest 5% of its GDP in defence, and apart from the Spain of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, all have agreed to commit to this target, starting with Italy, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has assured Parliament that the government will not shirk its duty to provide new resources within NATO and Europe, because if a country does not think about its military security, it is fatally destined to cede the protection of its borders and cities to third parties, and thus large slices of sovereignty.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has been very adamant with Spain, to which he does not grant exemptions, but Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez, as he stated a few days ago, still does not consider himself bound by the 5% of GDP commitment in military spending within the Atlantic Alliance. With the conflict in the Gaza Strip, what is happening in Iran, and the war in Ukraine, which in any case continues because of a Vladimir Putin who goes on about the former Soviet Republic being all his own, this is precisely the historical moment when NATO cannot afford divisions and particularism.
But PM Sanchez evidently does not see the cohesion of the West as a value, and indeed, the Spanish socialist leader has already proven on occasion that he does not care about transatlantic relations, putting his political and human distance from Donald Trump provincially before the US-EU bond, which remains with respect to presidents and premiers who are passing through. And he has also shown that he has a soft spot for anti-Western autocracies such as China where he immediately rushed to seek advice and instruction after the first announcement of US tariffs to be applied to Europe.
Instead of demanding, as he should have, that the White House open a Euro-American negotiation aimed at averting a deleterious trade war, Sanchez took refuge, without a second thought, in the arms of Xi Jinping. He rejects increased military spending not because he is inspired by a bucolic-pacifist vision, but because he prefers the West and NATO to be vulnerable in the face of their enemies, cheering more or less creepingly for the latter. This is the bad-faith approach of the anti-Westerners of the West, of the Joseph Counts of our house. Pedro Sanchez is a Giuseppi in Spanish sauce.
