What Exactly Are We Buying When We Threaten Our Own Allies?
Picture a room full of presidents and prime ministers, seated and waiting, while the most powerful man among them shows up late and then spends the morning telling several of them they are terrible partners. That was the mood in Ankara this week, where the second day of the NATO summit was supposed to be a victory lap and turned into an airing of grievances instead.
The victory lap part was real enough. At last year’s summit in The Hague, according to NATO, all 32 members except Spain agreed to spend 5 percent of their economies on defense by 2035, with 3.5 percent going to core military needs. That is the largest jump in the alliance’s spending goals in a generation, and it is close to what President Trump has demanded for years. He could have taken the win.
Instead he told reporters he is upset with NATO, singled out Spain as a “terrible partner,” called it a “wasted cause,” and asked his Treasury secretary to cut off trade with it entirely.
As usual, the old adage “think before you speak” wasn’t applied. The United States makes money on Spain. According to USAFacts, we have run a trade surplus with Spain every year from 2022 through 2025, and the 2025 surplus came to $3.96 billion. Cutting Spain off does not punish Spain so much as it walks away from a deal we are winning. And we could not really do it anyway, because Spain sits inside the European Union’s single market, where trade is negotiated for the whole bloc, not country by country.
So what did Spain actually do? It declined to promise 5 percent. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called that figure disproportionate and said his country could meet its commitments at about 2.1 percent of its economy, and the other members let Spain take that exemption. You can think that was the wrong call. It is still a budgeting disagreement among friends, not a betrayal.
Then came Greenland. Trump repeated that the island “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, answered that Greenland is not for sale and asked allies to respect its people’s right to decide their own future. Iceland’s leader put it more plainly, saying Greenlanders do not wish to be part of the United States. Polling has backed them up, with roughly 85 percent of Greenland’s residents opposed to an American takeover. We are talking about taking territory from a founding NATO ally.
Pull back and a pattern comes into view. Alliances are being treated like invoices, valued only by what shows up on a bill. That framing misses almost everything that makes an alliance worth having. It misses the bases, the shared intelligence, the ports, and the deterrence that keeps wars from starting. It even misses the money. NATO’s chief, Mark Rutte, told Trump this week that allied defense purchases now support close to 200,000 jobs in the United States.
The real cost of a summit like this one does not land today. It lands later, quietly, when allies stop assuming our word holds and start hedging, building their own arrangements, keeping us a little further from the table. Trust between nations takes decades to build and an afternoon to shake.
We should want to be the country others rush to stand beside, not the one they sit and wait for while bracing for the insult. The strength we spent 75 years earning was never just firepower. It was the fact that our friends believed us. That is the thing actually on the table in Ankara, and it is not for sale either. Go beyond the headlines…
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