NATO's Ankara Summit Tests Trump's Commitment to an Alliance He Has Repeatedly Threatened to Leave
When the heads of state of NATO's 32 member nations gather in Ankara on July 7 and 8, the summit will be shaped as much by what President Donald Trump might say as by what he might sign. According to the Congressional Research Service, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has outlined three core priorities: increasing allied defence investment, bolstering transatlantic defence industrial production, and continuing to support Ukraine. But running beneath those agenda items is a more fundamental question that analysts at Just Security and the Washington Times have framed in near-identical terms: is the Trump administration seeking to rebalance NATO toward greater European contributions, or is it engaged in a slow-motion disengagement from European security altogether?
The personal dynamics surrounding the summit are striking. As the Washington Post and CNBC reported, Trump has berated and belittled many of his European counterparts in recent months, but has reserved only praise for the summit's host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump said last week that he would not have attended for most leaders, crediting his personal respect for Erdogan as the reason for his presence. Philip Gordon, now at the Brookings Institution and formerly national security adviser for Vice President Kamala Harris, told reporters that Erdogan is taking full advantage of the relationship, using the summit to elevate his standing both internationally and at home at a moment of harsh domestic political crackdown. The Council on Foreign Relations noted that hundreds of people have been arrested in Turkey ahead of the summit, yet the US government has remained silent.
The summit arrives at a moment when European allies have, in aggregate, finally delivered on the defence spending demands that US presidents have made for decades. According to the Congressional Research Service, European allies and Canada have collectively spent an additional $1.2 trillion on defence over the past decade, with all allied defence budgets now reaching the NATO target. Key allies, particularly Poland and Germany, are building up their militaries, and Germany has deployed more forces to protect NATO's most exposed members on its eastern flank. The Trump administration has branded its vision for the alliance as NATO 3.0, a framework that Secretary General Rutte has publicly accepted as the summit's governing concept. Yet senior officials at NATO headquarters privately told Just Security that the US must maintain critical military capacity in Europe and plan any transition carefully to avoid gaps in defence coverage — a caveat the Trump administration's chaotic rhetoric on troop withdrawals from Europe has done little to reassure.
The Iran war has injected fresh poison into the transatlantic relationship ahead of Ankara. The Congressional Research Service documented that several NATO allies, including Spain, France, and Italy, restricted US access to their airspace and military bases for offensive operations against Iran, and numerous allied governments criticised Washington for launching strikes without consulting the alliance. Trump responded by saying in April that he was strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO. The Washington Times reported this week that US officials are now actively considering cancelling next year's scheduled summit in Albania, raising the prospect that the Ankara gathering could be Trump's last as a NATO head of state.
For European leaders, the summit is an exercise in managed anxiety. Most, according to the Washington Times, are hoping for a quiet, technocratic gathering without drama — a hope that is, by its nature, impossible to guarantee with Trump in the room. The Central and Eastern European members, most acutely aware of Russian military pressure, have privately accepted the logic of NATO 3.0 and want greater European defence capability. But their precondition is an unambiguous US commitment to Article 5. Whether Trump provides that reassurance in Ankara, or uses the summit as another occasion to extract concessions and perform disdain for the alliance, will determine whether NATO emerges from Turkey strengthened or structurally weakened heading into the most consequential period of European security since the Cold War.