There are moments in diplomacy when a summit ceases to be a meeting and becomes a test of strategic intent. The choreography may be public, but the real contest unfolds elsewhere: in the phrasing of a communiqué, in the hierarchy of priorities, in the concessions buried inside a carefully drafted paragraph. At such moments, language itself becomes an instrument of power.
The NATO Summit to be held in Ankara on 7–8 July will be one of those moments. It will not be just another allied gathering to review deterrence against Russia. It will be a negotiation over the future boundaries of the Alliance: how much Europe is prepared to do for its own defence; on what terms the American security guarantee will continue to operate; how far defence production and strategic resilience must now be treated as core security assets; and whether Türkiye’s own security priorities can be more firmly written into NATO’s agenda.
At the centre of the bargain taking shape in Ankara is a new spending formula that is expected to set the tone for the Alliance’s next phase: 3.5 per cent of GDP for direct defence, with an additional 1.5 per cent for infrastructure and resilience. At one level, this looks like another burden-sharing debate. In reality, it is something more consequential. It reflects a deeper transformation in NATO’s understanding of security itself.
The Alliance is no longer measuring power only in tanks, aircraft and brigades. It is increasingly concerned with whether ports can absorb military deployment, whether railways and airfields can function in wartime, whether energy grids can be protected, whether cyber networks can survive sustained attack, and whether defence industries can continue to produce under pressure. Ammunition, logistics, critical infrastructure, industrial capacity and societal endurance are no longer peripheral to strategy. They are strategy.
This is why Ankara may come to be seen as a threshold moment in what might be called NATO’s third age. The first was the Cold War, when the Alliance’s purpose was singular and clear: collective defence against the Soviet Union. The second was the post-Cold War era of enlargement, crisis management and counterterrorism. The third is now emerging under the pressure of a far harsher world: the return of high-intensity war to Europe, the strategic revival of defence industry, the weaponisation of energy and infrastructure, and the recognition that resilience—economic, technological and social—is no less important than military firepower. The real question in Ankara, therefore, is not simply who will spend more. It is what kind of Alliance NATO is becoming.
No serious discussion of NATO’s future can avoid the Trump factor. Donald Trump has never approached the Alliance in the language of traditional Atlanticism. He sees it more transactionally—in terms of cost, leverage, burden-sharing and immediate national return. His repeated warning that American protection cannot be taken for granted unless Europe spends more has already altered the psychology of transatlantic security. For Europe, the question is now unavoidable: is the American security guarantee still an automatic political commitment, or is it becoming conditional upon financial and strategic reciprocity?
That is why the pressure for higher spending at Ankara should not be read only through the prism of Russia. It is also a response to uncertainty in Washington. European security may continue to depend heavily on American military power, but Europe is increasingly aware that it cannot leave its long-term defence posture entirely at the mercy of U.S. domestic volatility.
Yet a stronger European defence effort does not automatically produce a stronger NATO. If higher spending leads to common procurement, ammunition standardisation, integrated air and missile defence, industrial coordination and military mobility, the Alliance will emerge more credible and more capable. But if it deepens strategic divergence across the Atlantic, encourages rival defence-industrial blocs or weakens political cohesion, the result may not be a stronger Alliance but a more fragile transatlantic order.
The timing of the Ankara Summit gives it additional weight. The United Nations has in recent years been visibly weakened by great-power rivalry, Security Council paralysis and the erosion of even minimal consensus among major states. Its ability to prevent war, manage crises or uphold a meaningful degree of collective legitimacy has diminished accordingly. In that vacuum, attention naturally turns to NATO.
This does not mean NATO can or should replace the United Nations. It cannot. NATO is not a universal institution; it was not designed to act as the political custodian of the international system, nor can it claim the legitimacy to intervene in every crisis on behalf of the so-called international community. It is a collective defence alliance, geographically bounded and strategically defined.
But as the UN weakens, NATO will inevitably be asked to do more. That pressure will be most visible in areas where Allied security is directly engaged: protecting critical sea lanes, countering cyber and hybrid attacks, securing defence-industrial supply chains and responding to regional crises with direct consequences for Euro-Atlantic stability. NATO cannot become the world’s political conscience. It may, however, be pushed into serving as the practical insurer of an increasingly unstable security order.
That carries both opportunity and danger. It enhances NATO’s relevance, but it also stretches its mission. If the Alliance is expected to answer every strategic vacuum left by a failing multilateral order, it risks becoming a mechanism that is present everywhere yet decisive nowhere. The harder question is not whether NATO should do more, but where it should stop—and on what political basis it should act when the old structures of legitimacy no longer function.
For Türkiye, the significance of the summit lies above all in the opportunity to widen NATO’s strategic lens. Ankara has long resisted the tendency to define Alliance security almost exclusively through the eastern flank and a Russia-centred threat map. From Türkiye’s perspective, that picture is incomplete. Security risks do not begin and end in Eastern Europe.
Instability in Syria, the persistent threat of terrorism, the regional aftershocks of the Gaza war, risks linked to Iran, fragility stretching from North Africa to the Eastern Mediterranean, pressure on energy and maritime trade routes, and the strategic consequences of irregular migration all form part of the same security equation. To treat these as secondary is to misunderstand the geography of insecurity confronting the Alliance.
This is the logic of Türkiye’s 360-degree security thesis. NATO cannot remain an alliance intellectually organised around a single axis of threat. Collective security must also include the southern belt: state collapse, terrorism, energy insecurity, maritime disruption, migration pressure and the possibility of wider regional war. For Türkiye, these are not peripheral concerns to be appended as diplomatic footnotes. They are structural questions of Alliance security.
The difficulty, of course, is that NATO’s centre of gravity over the past two years has been overwhelmingly shaped by Russia, Ukraine and the defence of Europe. No summit communiqué is likely to reverse that reality overnight. But Ankara does not need to redraw NATO’s strategic map in a single meeting to count the summit as a success. It would be enough if it can ensure that southern-origin threats are no longer treated as episodic or secondary, but are instead acknowledged as enduring elements of the Alliance’s collective threat perception.
The prospect of a meeting between Presidents Trump and Erdoğan adds another layer of interest to the summit. It is entirely natural that Ankara would attach importance to such an encounter. Personal diplomacy still matters. A direct political conversation can soften atmospherics, widen room for manoeuvre and reopen channels that formal mechanisms alone often cannot.
But it would be unwise to expect too much from a single bilateral on the margins of a summit. The structural problems in Turkish-American relations—differences over Syria, defence-industrial restrictions, Congressional obstacles, sanctions-related tensions and the sensitivities generated by Türkiye’s relationship with Russia—are not problems that disappear because leaders meet in person. They require negotiation, patience and strategic discipline. A Trump–Erdoğan meeting may therefore not produce a dramatic reset. It may, however, produce something more useful: a better tone, more reliable communication and a more functional political setting in which difficult issues can at least be managed rather than merely accumulated.
The real measure of success for Ankara will not be the number of headlines it generates. It will be whether Türkiye can leave a durable imprint on NATO’s evolving strategic architecture. This summit is about more than spending targets. It is about the future scope of the Alliance itself: how much responsibility Europe is willing to assume; how far resilience and industrial capacity have become inseparable from security; whether NATO can expand its practical role without losing strategic discipline; and whether Türkiye can persuade its allies that the geography of insecurity no longer runs in a single direction.
One side of the bargain is already visible: more spending, more production, more resilience and more European responsibility. The other side is political. It concerns whether Türkiye can anchor its 360-degree security perspective more firmly in NATO’s agenda, and whether Ankara and Washington can at least create a more functional basis for managing the strains in their relationship.
That is why the meeting in Ankara matters. It will not simply test NATO’s resources. It will test NATO’s imagination—its ability to decide what kind of Alliance it intends to be in a world where war has returned to Europe, global governance is eroding and security can no longer be measured by military power alone. If Ankara succeeds in placing Türkiye’s concerns more durably within that debate, this summit will be remembered as more than a well-managed diplomatic event. It will be remembered as a moment when Türkiye helped shape the argument about NATO’s next chapter.