West sends wrong message with health funding cuts, defense spending increases-Spain’s Sanchez

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -Western countries are sending the wrong message by saying they will increase defense spending but reduce aid expenditures, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Speaking at a Reuters Newsmaker event during the Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers meeting in New York, Sanchez said security also required dealing with climate change and global heath.

“So that is why I think that there’s a wrong message coming from the Western countries, which is, ‘Well, we’re going to increase our defense expenditure, but we’re going to reduce our aid expenditure,'” he said.

“What we need to do is to increase aid,” he said.

Countries must also “face the reality that we have in the eastern flank of Europe, which is this neo-imperialism of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, vis-a-vis countries such as Ukraine, but not create this false, or fake trade-off between aid and defense expenditure,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez, leader of one of Europe’s dwindling band of left-wing governments, recently angered Washington when he said Spain would not meet demands for NATO members to raise defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product, prompting U.S. President Donald Trump to threaten to raise tariffs against Spain.

At the New York event, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates announced that the Gates Foundation would give $912 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria as he urged governments to reverse global health funding cuts.

Gates also presented Sanchez with the foundation’s Global Goalkeeper Award for 2025 for Spain’s increased support for global health and expanded development aid.

(Reporting by Alessandra Galloni, Costas Pitas and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Cynthia Osterman)