U.S. President Donald Trump floated the idea that Spain could be removed from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in his latest swipe against a chronic under-spender on defence.

“Spain — you have to call them and find, why are they a laggard?” Trump said as he spoke with Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Thursday in the Oval Office. “And they’re doing well too, you know. Because of a lot of the things we’ve done, they’re doing fine. They have no excuse not to do this. But that’s all right.”

“Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly,” he added.

Spain previously earned Trump’s ire when it rejected the U.S. call at the NATO Summit in June to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of national gross domestic product, becoming the only nation in the alliance to reject the new g

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