Caring Doesn’t Matter if You're Conquered

Are castanets helpful in a gun fight? For Spain’s sake, I hope they are.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced this week that Spain’s 2.1 percent of GDP spent on defence is “sufficient” and “compatible with our social model and our welfare state.”

It was actually amazing to hear a Western leader flat out admit - boast, even - that he is running a welfare state.

Puffing out his hollow chest, he proclaimed …

“Spain is a sovereign and caring country.”

Er, I hate to break it to you Pedro, but Spain is not “sovereign” if it cannot defend itself.

Sovereignty is something you must be willing to shoot for.

And no country is “caring” if its main export to its allies is self-congratulation and unpaid invoices for freedom.

This is not just bad policy, it’s delusional.

The self-righteous PM seems to think that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping care deeply about Spain’s “social model.”

Newsflash: They don’t.

The only models authoritarian regimes care about are military ones. And Spain, for all its sun-drenched beaches and socialist bravado, hasn’t updated its model since NATO required members to stop bringing donkeys to the battlefield.

Spain, like a student who borrows everyone’s notes but refuses to study, believes defence is someone else’s problem.

Why spend more when Uncle Sam and the occasionally weaponised Germans can pick up the tab?

It’s the “free rider” syndrome, except the ride is heading straight into the geopolitical version of a minefield.

Pedro Sánchez's approach amounts to hanging a sign around the neck of the Spanish people that says, “We’ll fight to the last American.”

And here’s where things get ugly, for Spain and for Australia …