By Cengiz K. Fırat
The upcoming NATO Summit in Ankara, scheduled for July 7-8 at the Beştepe Presidential Complex, arrives at a moment of growing tension within the alliance driven largely by the Trump administration’s transactional approach to collective defense.
What was once a predictable ritual of communiqués and family photographs has become a test of whether the transatlantic alliance can survive a US president who has called it a “paper tiger” and threatened, more than once this year, to walk away entirely.
The roots of this strain run deep, but they came to a head in 2026. The Greenland episode in January, when Washington signaled it would consider “all options” — including military ones — to acquire the Danish territory, shocked European capitals into recognizing that disregard for ally sovereignty was no longer merely rhetorical.
In May, the abrupt withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany and the cancellation of an already-underway rotation to Poland — reversed days later when Trump unexpectedly pledged 5,000 additional troops to Poland instead — left allies dizzy from decisions made with little consultation.
Then came Iran: Washington’s expectation that allies actively join the war effort met resistance from Spain, Italy, France and others, prompting Trump to call their reluctance “a stain on the alliance” and to again float withdrawal.
ANXIETY AMONG BALTICS
Nowhere is the anxiety sharper than along NATO’s eastern flank. The Baltic states, Poland and Romania, watching Russian drones repeatedly violate their airspace, fear that any perceived American disengagement could invite Moscow to test the alliance at the Suwałki Gap, the narrow corridor separating Kaliningrad from Belarus, where a fast-moving Russian fait accompli could outpace NATO’s notoriously slow consensus-building before Article 5 is even invoked.
The Baltic states have quietly begun discussing a “Plan B” for defense without guaranteed American backing — an extraordinary admission from Washington’s most loyal allies on spending and Ukraine.
Romania and Moldova add a further, more immediate layer. Romania, a frontline NATO state bordering Ukraine and the Black Sea, has absorbed direct spillover from the war, including repeated Russian drone debris on its territory. Moldova, not a NATO member, is more exposed still: its 2025 military strategy names Russia its principal threat, and in April Russian officials invoked the same justification used before the seizure of Donbas in 2014, warning that the roughly 220,000 Russian-passport holders in breakaway Transnistria were under threat and that Russia would “use all available methods” to protect them — a parallel Bucharest and Chisinau are watching closely.
For Turkey, the summit is an opportunity. That Donald Trump is attending at all is a deliverable for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, placing Ankara at the center of the alliance’s most difficult moment. Turkish diplomacy will position itself as a bridge-builder between Washington and its aggrieved European partners, while showcasing Turkey’s drone fleets, missile programs, and ambition to be treated as a serious capability provider rather than a merely convenient member.
Ankara will also press for reinstatement into the F-35 program, from which it was expelled in 2019 over its S-400 purchase. Erdoğan calls the exclusion unjust, but obstacles remain real: Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress in June that US law still blocks Turkey’s return, and Israel has separately signaled discomfort with Turkish F-35 access.
US WILL REMAIN DOMINANT
Spending will be the main issue on the table in Ankara as far as Washington is concerned. Under the 2025 Hague Declaration, all members but Spain committed to 5% of GDP in defense and security spending by 2035 — at least 3.5% on core capabilities, with up to 1.5% more on resilience and industrial base.
National roadmaps were due by mid-2026, and Ankara will be the first summit at which allies present them. The push toward 3.5% is real, but the gap between intent and capacity remains wide: Spain has capped itself at 2.1%, calling 5% “unreasonable,” while France and Italy face genuine fiscal constraints from already-high public debt. Several smaller allies are likely to fall short of even the core threshold well before 2035.
Washington’s demand for rapid, uniform compliance will collide with these limits — meaning the spending dispute will not be resolved in Ankara, and friction with the laggards will persist well beyond it.
The Meloni-Trump spat over a G7 photograph, and Madrid’s earlier refusal of US basing requests, confirm that personal volatility will trail Trump to Ankara too. Some tension is therefore inevitable. But the underlying calculus will hold: the US remains NATO’s dominant power, and what Washington wants, it will largely get — at least until Europe builds the capacity to act independently, a process that will almost certainly take longer than most now assume.
