Someone in the Pentagon wrote an email proposing to suspend Spain from NATO. The message, reportedly circulated at senior levels of the US Defense Department, also floated reconsidering American support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. The purpose: punishing allies deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the war in Iran.

There was just one catch. NATO’s founding treaty contains no provision for suspending or expelling a member state.

A NATO official confirmed as much to the BBC on Friday, stating that the North Atlantic Treaty “does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership, or expulsion.” Article 13 allows members to withdraw voluntarily, with one year’s notice. That is the only exit clause the document contains.

The episode reveals something more consequential than a bureaucratic misfire. Two months into the US-led war against Iran, Washington is treating alliance loyalty as a transactional test — and the institution it is pressuring has no formal mechanism to comply.

What the Email Proposed

According to Reuters, which first reported the story citing an unnamed US official, the internal Pentagon email described access to military bases and overflight rights as “just the absolute baseline for NATO.” The message alleged “a sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans” and outlined possible retaliatory measures against countries that had refused to support the American campaign against Iran.

Suspending Spain was one option. The email noted this would carry “strong symbolic weight” with “little operational consequence” for the US military. Another proposal involved reassessing American diplomatic backing for European “imperial possessions” — specifically the Falkland Islands, the British overseas territory also claimed by Argentina. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is a close Trump ally.

The email did not recommend US withdrawal from NATO or the closure of American bases in Europe. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson did not deny the email’s existence, telling Reuters: “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.”

Spain Stands Firm

Spain has been the most vocal European opponent of the Iran war. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused to allow US forces to use Spanish bases — including Naval Station Rota and Morón Air Base — for strikes on Iran, calling the intervention “unjustified and dangerous military intervention” in the war’s earliest days.

Sánchez dismissed the leaked email at an EU leaders’ summit in Cyprus on Friday. “We do not work based on emails,” he told reporters. “We work with official documents and official positions taken, in this case, by the government of the United States.”

He has legal grounding for that confidence. Dr. Patrick Bury, a former British Army captain and security lecturer at the University of Bath, told Euronews: “You can’t kick people out of NATO unless there’s been a material breach of process, which in the case of Spain there is absolutely no evidence.”

Bury also pointed to a direct precedent. During US military action against Libya in 1986, both France and Spain closed their air bases to the US. No suspension was proposed; no alliance crisis ensued.

The Pressure Campaign

The email did not emerge in isolation. Trump has spent months berating NATO allies as “cowards” for declining to deploy naval forces to the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed to global shipping since Iran and then the US blockaded the waterway. He has called NATO a “paper tiger” and written that the alliance is a “one-way street,” adding: “We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”

He has threatened to end all trade with Spain and mocked British aircraft carriers as “toys.” A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded that “pressure does not affect him” and that Starmer would “always act in the national interest.”

The friction predates the Iran war. At last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, allies agreed — at Trump’s insistence — to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Spain alone refused, arguing it could meet capability targets at 2%. Trump called Spain a “laggard” and remarked: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.”

An Unintended Accelerant

European leaders have been accelerating discussions about defence autonomy — a trend that documents like this Pentagon email can only reinforce. The UK, France, and others have signaled willingness to help secure the Strait of Hormuz after a ceasefire, but on their own terms.

Bury framed the structural stakes plainly: “He’s run NATO down so much — can it survive the next three years?”

The North Atlantic Treaty was designed to bind democracies against a common threat. It was not built for a scenario where the most powerful member treats the alliance as a loyalty test for wars of choice outside the treaty’s collective defence framework. Iran is not NATO territory. The obligations of Article 5 were never triggered.

An email proposing to suspend an ally from an alliance with no suspension mechanism is an exercise in institutional frustration. But it signals something real: Washington’s patience with European security independence is wearing thin, and the transatlantic architecture was never built to absorb this kind of strain.

Sources