This Monday Commentary was prepared by Dr Dennis Sammut, Director of LINKS Europe, and Managing Editor of commonspace.eu
The 2026 Summit of the presidents and prime ministers of NATO countries is scheduled to take place at the presidential complex in Ankara on 7 and 8 July.
The decision to hold the summit in Turkiye was taken at the last NATO summit in The Hague in 2025. At the time, people assumed that although having the summit in Turkiye is symbolic, and will help consolidate the membership of that country in NATO, the Ankara summit would simply be a glorified photo-opportunity.
It is clear now that things will work out differently. The Ankara summit will define NATO for the next decade, and preparations are on the way, seriously and in earnest.
Two reasons are contributing to this: the first is the acute situation in the international system, caused by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the crisis it has created in the Gulf, and Donald Trump’s disregard, even disdain, for the US traditional allies in Europe, and even for NATO itself. The second reason why the Ankara summit has become so important is that the Turks, as hosts, are determined to use the event to push some key issues that NATO has been avoiding for some time, including how the alliance engages with its southern neighbourhood.
Turmoil in the international system has raised questions of how the NATO alliance can look in the future.
Ukraine, whilst not a NATO member yet, has been unjustly and brutally attacked by Russia in 2022. NATO members rallied round in support, and short of deploying troops to the conflict, have done everything possible to support Ukraine. This is increasingly a European effort. Under Donald Trump, American support has become lukewarm. The leadership of NATO has had to manage this anomaly, and it has been an uncomfortable process, which will play out in the Ankara summit too.
The US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February and the subsequent conflict in the Middle East have had a profound impact on the region. The disruption of movement through the Straits of Hormuz has already impacted the world economy negatively, and things are likely to get worse before they get better. On the security side, the impact of the conflict on Gulf security, on European and global security is yet to be fully defined, but one can already see that it is huge. The US NATO allies refused to be dragged into a conflict on which they were not consulted, and which they do not see as being theirs. This has resulted in very public criticism of NATO and NATO countries by Donald Trump and the Trump administration. NATO and its members will not have the luxury of maintaining this aloofness once the dust of the present conflict subsides, and the business of constructing a new Middle East Security order starts.
Finally, the European members of NATO (and Canada) are still reeling from Trump’s statements and actions on Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark. In 2025, European allies of the US were ready to be patient and generous with Trump and his antics. In 2026, they no longer. Europe has finally woken up from its slumber. As Mathijas Matthijs and Nathalie Tocci put it, in their recent articles on Foreign Affairs, a leading US foreign policy journal, entitled “How Europe found its nerve”:
“Trump may have done what decades of European speeches, white papers, and declarations could not. By pushing too hard, he has made the costs of dependence visible. By embracing Europe’s far right, he has made it easier for democrats to draw a line. By treating allies as vassals and clients, he has reminded Europeans that alliances are healthy only when they rest on equality and mutual respect.”
This will have a lot of impact on NATO’s future, and it will colour thinking at the Ankara summit.
As hosts of the Ankara summit, the Turks embraced these three challenges. As Ilker Sezer puts it in Turkiye Today,
“For all of its complex balancing acts, NATO remains on of the most critical pillars of Turkiye’s own national security, whether you like it or not”
Speaking a few days ago in an interview on Al Jazeera, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that NATO’s biggest achievement since its creation was not its power of deterrence, but rather the fact that it had stopped different European countries from fighting with each other, and instead cooperated together for mutual defence. Given European history up to WWII, it is difficult to disagree with him.
As Levant Kemal also argues on Turkiye Today,
“As the global landscape shifts, this summit offers Ankara a significant opportunity to act as a visionary host in shaping NATO’s future trajectory”
source: This Monday Commentary was prepared by Dr Dennis Sammut, Director of LINKS Europe, and Managing Editor of commonspace.eu.
photo: Presidential Complex, Ankara.
