The perceived outcome of the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye last week benefitted by overcoming anxieties and low expectations. The summit’s modest accomplishments were also on display, ranging from affirmations of a greater European and Canadian leadership role, along with spending commitments to match, and continued visible support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia. This higher confidence in the alliance was an important and much-needed boost, but its durability is doubtful. 

President Trump’s scathing public utterances leading up to the summit, which he decided to attend because of his fondness for host Türkiye’s President Erdogan, seemed initially to confirm his dour view of the alliance and its lack of relevance to U.S. interests. He has presented a steady stream of fundamental challenges to alliance confidence and cohesion: He has significantly reduced U.S. financial, political, and military support to Ukraine in favor of diplomatic mediation and reengagement with Russian president Vladimir Putin; he has strongly and repeatedly implied that he is contemplating annexing or otherwise obtaining the territories of other NATO allies, namely Canada and Greenland (Denmark), prompting numerous NATO allies to begin preparing to defend NATO territory against the United States; and he has introduced greater uncertainty about the presence of U.S. forces in Europe, as well as U.S. commitments to NATO in general.

The U.S. president has also initiated a controversial (and legally dubious) war of choice with Iran, with predictable negative consequences for European (and global) energy security, and has lambasted European allies for failing to support his warmaking. With all of this in the background, one of the most important challenges for the summit was simply to avoid further exacerbating any of these rifts between the United States and Europe. In this regard, based on his own positive statements at the end of the summit and the Ankara Summit Declaration, it appears that the meeting was a success.

The Outcome

The one-page Declaration, certainly one of the shortest ever produced from a NATO summit, had clear and affirmative language on defense spending commitments, greater European and Canadian leadership, the critical importance of improving the allied defense industrial base, and a sustained and unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s defense. In addition, agreements and announcements alongside the summit were able to counter some of the ongoing narrative of U.S. disengagement from European defense through alternative arrangements. These included a German announcement to purchase U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles to replace those the Pentagon announced last month it would not be deploying in Germany; an apparent reversal of U.S. plans to resume deployment of up to 5,000 U.S. troops to Poland (which the Pentagon had paused in May); and a licensing deal for Ukraine to begin local production of Patriot missiles for improved air defense. While these steps perhaps fell short of what NATO boosters had hoped for, they were sufficiently robust to reinforce a perception of continued U.S. commitment and stronger allied cooperation. At the same time, they also demonstrate how significantly diminished expectations for the U.S. commitment to European security and NATO have become the “new normal.”

The summit also highlighted some of the real-world implications of “burden shifting” from the U.S. to Europe. Yes, European commitments to higher defense spending demonstrated that Europe is starting to step up and shoulder more of the costs of its own defense, but that comes with consequences, particularly the loss of U.S. market share and potentially scale in weapons sales. A notable example was the July 7 joint announcement by 11 NATO Allies at a NATO Industry Forum to jointly procure Sweden’s Saab GlobalEye aircraft as a key step toward modernizing NATO’s airborne surveillance and early warning capabilities over a rival offering from the U.S.’s Boeing. Building a resilient and capable European defense industrial base is a key goal for both NATO and the EU, but it likely leaves U.S. policymakers and industry unprepared and could be a significant cause for future alliance tensions.

The Türkiye Dimension

The summit also provided a venue for another subtle rapprochement, or mending of relations, within the alliance, focusing on the host country of Türkiye. In recent years, alliance relations with Türkiye have been strained for a variety of reasons. Türkiye’s purchase of the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system from Russia, its role in supporting Islamist extremist groups and attacking U.S. partners (and even U.S. forces) in the context of the Syrian Civil War and the counter-ISIS campaign, its obstruction of Sweden’s accession to NATO, and its refusal to adopt western sanctions against Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, are just a few specific examples of significant irritants. However, despite all of the difficulties in the relationship, Türkiye’s importance to NATO is hard to overstate, particularly for geopolitical reasons. President Trump clearly sees repairing relations with Türkiye as a high priority, as evinced by his statements following the summit indicating that he intends to lift all sanctions on Türkiye and may consider inviting Türkiye to rejoin the F-35 program.

What’s Next?

The clear and present challenge for NATO is successfully managing the wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, wars which do not impinge on the Washington Treaty and trigger a collective response, but which nonetheless have important characteristics of proxy war between the U.S. and Russia. In Ukraine, the U.S. and other NATO allies are providing vital military, intelligence, and political support to help Ukraine defend itself and to impose enough pressure on Russia to bring it to the negotiating table. In the Persian Gulf, Russia is providing Iran with intelligence and other support in its war with the U.S. NATO members hold a variety of views on the best way to navigate an end to these conflicts, ideally without escalating to a more direct conflagration with Russia, which is effectively fighting against a significant loss of its own geopolitical influence in both cases. There is little doubt that despite its glaring excesses, the Trump administration’s approach toward NATO has been transformational; what that transformation means for the future of European security and its architecture remains to be seen.