Donald Trump wants to make good on his hysterical threats against NATO allies who refused to get involved in his war on Iran.
A leaked Pentagon email shows the Trump administration is considering a push to outright suspend Spain from the defense alliance, according to Reuters.
The message also contains options for revising the official U.S. position on British claims to the Falklands. The South Atlantic islands belong to the U.K. but are claimed by Argentina, whose president, Javier Milei, is a staunch ally of Trump.
Trump is livid at NATO after its members flatly refused to participate in the war he launched against Iran on Feb. 28. He did not inform the alliance—or Congress, for that matter—of his campaign before starting it, and has since railed against U.S. defense partners for limiting use of their bases in the region.
Spain and the U.K. have been particular targets of the president’s anger. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused to allow the U.S, to use two jointly controlled airbases in southern Spain for operations against Iran, and then closed its airspace entirely to aircraft involved in the conflict.
Trump, meanwhile, said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was “No Winston Churchill” after he insisted the U.K. would not be dragged into Trump’s war.
Another point of contention has been NATO’s reluctance to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has effectively shuttered the naval corridor, through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies passes, since the conflict began. Oil and gas prices have skyrocketed as a result.
The president is a longstanding critic of NATO. The course of his war in Iran has only deepened that contempt, and he has lately threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance altogether.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and DOD for comment on this story. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told Reuters that NATO “was not there for us” despite “everything that the United States has done” for the alliance.
“The War Department will ensure that the President has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part,” she said.
It is not clear how the U.S. might go about suspending Spain because there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism in NATO rules that would allow it. The country’s leadership has already rebuffed reports that the Trump administration may be weighing that option.
“We do not work off emails,” Sánchez told Reuters on Friday. “We work off official documents and government positions.”
It is also not clear what immediate effect a revised U.S. position on the Falklands would have. The territory has not been contested militarily since 1982, when a British task force repelled an Argentine invasion in a bloody 74-day war. Argentina retains a legal claim to sovereignty over the islands, which are known in Spanish as “las Malvinas.”
