Trump orders a cutoff of all US trade with Spain — but the power to do it may not be his

World News 4 min 80 sources

At a NATO summit in Turkey, the US president told his own treasury secretary to end trade with Spain over its defence spending. The catch: Spain doesn't run its own trade — the EU does. Plus divided Fed minutes, a gloomier IMF, and an ICC breakthrough on Sudan.

Key takeaways

Trump ordered a US trade cutoff with Spain, but Spain doesn't control its own trade — the EU does — so it's unclear he can actually do it.
The US Federal Reserve is openly split on whether inflation from the Iran war means interest rates should rise, and markets fell on the uncertainty.
The IMF trimmed global growth to 3% and flagged an ICC breakthrough on Sudan war crimes as the quieter story worth watching.

A command with no clear lever

At a NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump told reporters he had ordered a full cutoff of trade with Spain. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits,” he said, appearing to address Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent standing nearby [33]. His reason: Spain’s refusal to meet NATO’s new defence-spending target. “Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay,” he said [33].

The feud is old. At last year’s summit, Spain was the only one of NATO’s members that would not sign up to the alliance’s new goal of spending 5% of national income on defence by 2035 [33]. The quarrel sharpened when Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, criticised the US decision to go to war with Iran and refused to let American forces use Spanish bases for the campaign [33].

Here is the catch. Spain does not run its own trade policy. As a member of the European Union — the 27-country bloc that negotiates trade for all its members as one — Madrid handed that power to Brussels long ago [33]. A US president cannot single out one EU country for a trade cutoff the way he might a stand-alone nation. Any real move would hit the whole bloc, or none of it. That is why the reporting around Trump’s order kept circling back to a single question: can he actually do this? [28]

Why it matters. The gap between the order and the machinery is the story. A declaration made to a room of cameras is not the same as an instruction a government can carry out. For anyone tracking US–Europe relations, the thing to watch is not the sentence but what — if anything — the US Treasury actually does in the days after.

The Fed can’t agree on what comes next

Minutes from the US Federal Reserve’s last meeting, released Wednesday, showed policymakers deeply split over where American inflation is heading [12]. Some officials argued rates may need to rise to keep prices in check; others saw no such need [39][34]. The Fed sets the interest rate that ripples through the cost of every loan, mortgage and credit card in the country — and right now the people who set it don’t share a view of the road ahead.

The reason is the war. Energy prices are about 25% higher than before the Iran conflict began in late February, and that feeds straight into the cost of everything that has to be moved or made [35]. Higher prices push a central bank toward raising rates; a war-slowed economy pushes the other way. The minutes read like a group of people staring at the same numbers and reaching opposite conclusions.

For markets, the split is its own signal. US stocks fell on Wednesday, caught between the fresh strikes in the Gulf and the prospect that borrowing could get more expensive rather than less [19]. When the people steering don’t agree on the direction, the ride gets choppier for everyone downstream.

A world growing, but slower

The International Monetary Fund — the world’s lender of last resort — cut its forecast for global growth this year to 3.0%, nudging it down again [35]. That is below the 3.5% average of the two years before, and the Fund pinned the drag on three things: the Middle East war, a splintering of global trade, and the risk that sky-high expectations for AI companies get corrected [35].

There is a brighter line inside the gloom. The IMF said the world economy weathered the war “better than feared,” partly because booming demand for AI technology offset the hit from disrupted energy supplies [35]. But the benefit is uneven: energy exporters and countries wired into the tech boom are doing fine, while commodity importers with no AI upside got downgraded [35]. Global trade growth is set to slow sharply — to 3.5% this year from 5% last year — before recovering in 2027 [35]. The Fund’s whole forecast rests on one assumption: that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping lane the war has choked, starts reopening in mid-July [35].

The story fewer are following: evidence in Sudan

Away from the summit noise, the International Criminal Court — the global court in The Hague that prosecutes genocide and war crimes — told the BBC it has reached a “breakthrough” in its Sudan investigation [74]. Its deputy chief prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, said the court now has “concrete evidence” linking leaders of the Rapid Support Forces — a paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s army — to recent massacres in Darfur [74].

The evidence centres on the cities of el-Fasher and el-Geneina, where the siege and takeover of el-Fasher marked one of the bloodiest chapters of a war that began in April 2023 [74]. Khan would not say when charges might come. “It may take time for justice to develop,” she said, “but we will get there” [74]. In a week dominated by strikes and summits, a court quietly assembling a case is easy to miss — and it is the kind of slow, documented work that outlasts the headlines.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The difference between giving an order and being able to carry it out

Power isn't the moment someone says "do this." It's whether a long line of hands, most of them not in the room, actually moves — and often they can't, or won't.

A word aimed at the wrong door

A president stands in front of cameras and says: cut off all trade with Spain. It sounds like the most powerful sentence in the world. It is spoken by the head of the largest economy on earth, to his own treasury secretary, standing right there.

And it lands on a door that doesn’t open from that side. Spain doesn’t hold its own trade policy. Years ago it handed that key to the European Union — the bloc that negotiates trade for all its members at once. To act on Spain’s trade, you’d have to act on the whole bloc, or none of it. The order was real. The lever it reached for wasn’t there.

This is not about one leader or one country. It’s a pattern that runs through every large system, and once you see it you’ll see it everywhere: the gap between a command and its execution.

Power is a relay, not a switch

We picture power as a switch. Someone at the top flips it, and the thing happens. That picture is almost always wrong.

Real power is a relay. An order at the top has to travel down a line of people and rules and machinery — a treasury official who has to find the legal authority, a customs system that has to be reprogrammed, a trade agreement that has to be reopened, allies who have to agree. Each link in that chain is a hand that has to move. If any one of them can’t move, or won’t, the order stops there. It becomes a sentence that was said, not a thing that was done.

The person giving the order often can’t see the chain. From the top, it feels like flipping a switch — you speak, and surely it happens. From inside the chain, it looks completely different: a demand arrives that the machinery in front of you simply cannot carry out. Both people are being honest. They’re just standing at different ends of the same relay, and neither can see the whole of it.

Why the loudest orders are often the emptiest

Here’s the part worth holding onto. The size of a declaration tells you very little about whether it can happen.

Sometimes the biggest, most sweeping commands are the ones with the least machinery behind them — precisely because a leader who had a working lever would usually just pull it quietly. You don’t announce a thing you can simply do; you do it. The announcement is often what’s left when the lever is missing. The words carry the weight the mechanism can’t.

So a booming order can be weaker than a quiet memo. The quiet memo has a signed authority and a system waiting to obey. The booming order has a room of cameras and a door that won’t open. If you judge power by volume, you’ll misjudge it constantly.

Who this reaches, far from the room

This isn’t a puzzle for heads of state. You are inside the same relay, at both ends of it, every day.

When your government announces a policy, what reaches you months later is not the announcement — it’s whatever survived the chain of agencies, budgets and rules between the podium and your street. Plenty of loud promises die quietly in that chain; a few dull ones reshape your life. When a company you work for declares a new direction, the same thing happens: the plan hits the machinery of who-actually-does-the-work, and what emerges is rarely what was announced.

And you give orders too — to a contractor, a bank, an institution — and feel the gap from the giving end when nothing moves. The frustration of “I told them exactly what I needed” is the frustration of standing at the top of a relay you can’t see, assuming a switch where there’s a chain.

The shape underneath, and how little any seat sees

There’s an arrangement here that poses as plain fact. Whether a country can act alone on trade, whether a leader can move a lever or only reach for it — these feel like the natural order of things. They aren’t. Spain handed its trade key to the EU by choice, in agreements built over decades. The reach of any command is set by arrangements someone designed, long before the order was ever given. Those arrangements serve some ends and block others, and they almost never announce themselves as choices.

Seeing this doesn’t make you clever about who’s really powerful. It makes you humbler about everyone — including the person at the podium, who may know less about what they can actually do than the official standing quietly beside them. The loudest voice in the room is often the one with the least clear view of the machinery below it. No single seat, top or bottom, sees the whole relay. When you next hear an order that sounds absolute, the honest question isn’t “will they get away with it?” It’s the slower one: whose hands, out of sight of the room, would have to move for this to be real — and can they?

03 · Lab · your turn

The Relay

Rehearse how an order only becomes real if every hand in the chain below can actually move — and why the loudest command is often the one with no lever.

04 · Hope · carry this

The same chain of hands that swallows a reckless order is the one that quietly keeps the world running on the days no one is watching. Most of what holds up is held by people you'll never see, doing their part of the relay.