Standing beside Mark Rutte in Ankara on Wednesday, hours before the alliance summit opened, Donald Trump said he had instructed his Treasury Secretary to "Cut off all trade with Spain", adding that visits should stop too and that the country's government were hopeless people not worth speaking to. Reuters and other outlets claimed it was an order.
The sentence is an order in grammar only. Spain does not have a trade policy for the U.S. regime to sever. Under Article 207 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the common commercial policy is an exclusive competence of the Union, which means Madrid cannot set a tariff, sign a trade agreement, or accept a trade sanction on its own behalf. There is no bilateral channel between Washington and Madrid to close. When the regime negotiated its tariff framework with Europe last year, it negotiated with the Commission, because there was nobody else to negotiate with.
