NATO’s Ankara moment

In anticipation of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte recently travelled to Washington, DC to talk with President Trump ahead of the high-level meeting. Rutte, who many have labelled a “Trump whisperer”, once more sought to calm the president’s frustrations over the alliance’s unwillingness to support the United States in the war against Iran, and the defence spending of many NATO countries, which the president deems too low. 

While Rutte conceded that President Trump had a right to be upset with the lack of assistance by NATO partners in the war with Iran, he highlighted that 5,000 U.S. military flights took off from European air bases in direct relation to the war in Iran. He further argued that between 2016 and 2026, NATO countries — excluding the United States — spent $1.2 trillion more on their defense, a 20 per cent increase in 2025 alone. Europe is steadily accepting the strategic realities of the 21st century. The debate is therefore shifting from a question of spending to a question of capability.

Ever since President Trump made it crystal clear that the United States wants its European allies to start picking up more of the tab for their own defense, increased defense spending has become a given in Europe. Beyond spending though, several countries within the alliance, namely the E5 — Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Poland — are taking the lead in forging a new strategic leadership, shifting the burden of defence away from the United States and towards European countries. 

In line with this, Secretary General Rutte is advocating for a “Transatlantic Defence Industrial Revolution” designed to shift allies onto a wartime footing and rapidly expand defence production. The war in Ukraine helps demonstrate that military strength ultimately depends less on the size of defence budgets than on the capacity to convert those budgets into ammunition, weapons, and equipment at scale. In modern warfare, factories, not funding commitments, are the true measure of strategic power. This mindset has enabled Ukraine in the past few weeks to conduct numerous successful attacks on Russian oil refineries and infrastructure, which has resulted in significant Russian fuel shortages. These drone strikes reverberated far beyond the battlefield, weakening the rouble, sending Russian stocks to a three-year low, and leaving motorists queuing for fuel across the country.

 Another interesting aspect of the upcoming summit is its location in Ankara, Turkey. Turkey has steadily become a somewhat “untraditional” NATO member which pursues its own version of strategic autonomy. With the Alliance’s second-largest military after the United States, Ankara is less dependent on American security guarantees than many of its allies. It has increasingly sought to balance relations with competing global powers, positioning itself as a pivotal swing state within NATO. Hosting the summit in Ankara therefore underscores Turkey’s growing strategic importance while highlighting broader questions about NATO’s future identity and direction. From Washington’s perspective, more self-reliant allies such as Turkey are preferable to highly dependent members such as the Baltic states. Greater military autonomy advances the burden-sharing that President Trump has long demanded. 

In general, the main agenda for the summit will almost certainly include the increase in defence spending, and the lack thereof by certain allies, the wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as more niche topics that the host country will want to raise. These include advocating for enhancing the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) to deepen security and defence-industrial cooperation with NATO’s Gulf partners — Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — while also engaging Oman and Saudi Arabia in selected initiatives. 

This might be a timely and welcome topic for President Trump, who has voiced his dismay of European allies who did not support him in the U.S. war with Iran. The upcoming Ankara Summit may therefore be remembered as a multipolar turning point, one that pushes NATO’s strategic outlook beyond its eastern flank. For Turkey, the summit is an opportunity to present itself not merely as host, but as a shaping middle power capable of helping the Alliance adapt to a more fragmented and multipolar world. In the end, the real test of burden-sharing is not whether allies reach an arbitrary spending target, but whether they develop the military capabilities, industrial capacity, and political will to secure Europe with less reliance on the United States.