The meeting was supposed to be the prelude to the purchase of Finnish icebreaker ships.

But as United States President Donald Trump welcomed Finland’s President Alexander Stubb to the Oval Office on Thursday, he veered into a discussion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) — and his ongoing feud with one of its members, Spain.

At a NATO summit in June, Spain was the most prominent holdout against Trump’s push to increase defence spending among member states.

Trump has long sought for all NATO members to commit 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to building up their military assets. But Spain successfully pushed for an exemption at June’s meeting, allowing its expenditures to remain around the previous benchmark of 2 percent.

That resistance lingered on Trump’s

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