I don't know if people understand just how insanely egregious this is. First of all, 1) not only are NATO spending targets NOT legally binding (nothing in any NATO-related legal text mandates a specific GDP-based threshold for defense spending), but on top of this 2) Spain requested AND RECEIVED an exemption from the 5% target at the 2025 Hague Summit - NATO changed the declaration's language specifically to allow Spain to sign while publicly declaring it would not comply (jurist.org/news/2025/06/n…) This means that, legally speaking and according to NATO's own rules, Spain is doubly within its rights: there is no binding obligation to begin with, and Spain was excused from even this non-binding obligation. That's the first point: Germany's chancellor just endorsed - from the Oval Office - the U.S. punishing a fellow EU nation for refusing to comply with an obligation that doesn't exist in law, under a political pledge Spain was excused from at a NATO summit. The second point is that this 5% target has nothing to do with "defense", quite the contrary in fact: it is pretty explicitly an imperial tribute to the U.S. that will actually **weaken** European defense. That was Spain's main argument for refusing to comply: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that "committing to 5% would not make us any safer" because it "would only reinforce our dependence" on the U.S. (tiempoar.com.ar/ta_article/ped…) That's the insane thing about EU defense spending: in recent years, the more it has spent on defense, the more that spending has flowed to American contractors as opposed to European ones, making the EU defense industry weaker (x.com/adam_tooze/sta…). Increasing spending to 5% doesn't strengthen European defense: it accelerates exactly this transfer. All the more insane given the well-documented production backlogs in the U.S. defense industry and its inability to produce at scale: US defense analysts - including from Trump-adjacent think tanks like AEI (aei.org/research-produ…) - openly acknowledge that European customers would be deprioritized behind U.S. ones in any real conflict. AND, critically, a defense industry from a country that's increasingly hostile to Europe - explicitly so in its National Security Strategy - and whose weaponry has "kill switches" that allows for remote disabling. I mean, the sheer madness of it: anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that DOUBLING your defense spending to enrich a foreign arms industry that has kill switches on your weapons, can't meet its own military's needs, and increasingly treats you as an adversary, is not even remotely a defense strategy - it's suicide. That's why having Merz - in the oval office, sitting next to Trump - endorse economic coercion against the one EU country that's still sane enough to see through this madness is so egregious, and frankly straight-up traitorous. For those who know Asterix and Obelix, Spain is the "one small village still holding out against the invaders" and Merz is Cassius Ceramix, the self-described "gallo-roman" Gaul village chief who's the incarnation of all sycophants after his tribe were conquered by the Romans. I'm with Asterix, and all Europeans should be too.