Ankara summit marks NATO’s new bargain

Ankara was supposed to be a summit about defence spending and burden-sharing. Instead, President Trump used the sidelines of NATO's 36th summit to declare that the ceasefire with Iran, the Islamabad memorandum signed after a June truce, was "over". The announcement came within hours of Iran striking three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the United States hitting more than eighty targets inside Iran in response, after which Tehran retaliated by striking American installations in Bahrain and Kuwait, and oil prices jumped. It happened while NATO's own leaders were gathered in Turkey to discuss an alliance built for an entirely different kind of threat, and the juxtaposition says as much about the summit's real subject as its formal communique does.

An alliance built around American security guarantees is spending this week's summit in Ankara confronting what happens when those guarantees become increasingly conditional. That's the real story underneath the headlines about defence spending targets and Trump's latest complaints. It isn't a fight over budget lines. It's a renegotiation of who actually carries collective defence, and it will still be underway long after this particular American president has left office.

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Trump hasn't hidden his irritation. After European allies stayed out of the US-Israeli operation against Iran in June, he complained that NATO wasn't there when we needed them. His secretary of state went further, suggesting Washington should re-examine the relationship altogether. What's landing on the table at Ankara isn't just another spending row. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has been pushing something he calls NATO 3.0, an explicit plan to shift a much larger share of European security responsibility onto Europeans while America downgrades its own contribution. The label signals a third paradigm shift: NATO 1.0 was the Cold War alliance built to contain a state-centric Soviet threat, NATO 2.0 was the post-9/11 pivot toward non-state threats, and NATO 3.0 is meant to be the alliance's adaptation to a multipolar order in which American leadership becomes selective rather than automatic and European responsibility becomes structural rather than optional. The Pentagon has reportedly been drawing up plans to cut the aircraft it makes available to NATO in Europe by roughly a third, on top of years of troop reductions in Germany already underway.

This is not only about a demanding president. Allies pledged last year, at The Hague, to reach five per cent of GDP in defence-related spending by 2035, split between a 3.5 per cent core military target and 1.5 per cent on wider security needs, and Ankara is widely read as the summit where Washington checks whether that pledge is becoming real capability or staying diplomatic cover. The pressure behind it has structural roots that outlast Trump himself. Washington's own industrial base has hollowed out badly: roughly 70,000 American factories and over five million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 2000, and manufacturing's share of GDP has fallen from roughly a quarter in the late 1950s to just over 10 per cent today. Automation and the relocation of supply chains explain a good part of that shift, not decline alone, but the effect on defence-industrial capacity is real regardless of cause. Federal debt sits close to $40 trillion, about 125 per cent of GDP.

Europe's real strategic awakening started well before Ankara. Ukraine's war, now in its fourth year since Russia's February 2022 invasion, made painfully clear how much of Europe's warfighting capacity, air defence, precision munitions, intelligence, and logistics still run on American infrastructure that European states neither own nor control. The response has been a fast, uneven build-out of the European defence industry, rising budgets across the Nordic and Baltic states especially, and a genuinely contested debate over what "strategic autonomy" would require institutionally rather than as a slogan. At Ankara itself, NATO members unveiled arms deals worth at least $50 billion, including European purchases of surveillance drones from the American firm Northrop Grumman and NATO's own acquisition of aircraft from Sweden's Saab, with Rutte calling for a transatlantic defence industrial "revolution". Yet Trump reportedly said he still felt let down by the numbers on the table and did not rule out further troop withdrawals from Europe, which is the clearest sign yet that burden-shifting concessions are not the same as restored confidence. Europe prefers to call this autonomy. Washington also sees it as a major opportunity for the American defence industry, and, on this showing, not yet enough of one to change its underlying posture.

Ankara's choice as host adds more than a footnote. Turkey controls the only access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, has built a genuinely capable defence-export industry of its own, and pursues a foreign policy toward Moscow, Damascus, and the Gulf that owes little to Washington's preferences. Some of the analysis coming out of this summit even suggests Turkey's growing weight in European security could come partly at the expense of France and Greece, a reminder that Europe's own internal hierarchy isn't settled either. Turkey isn't just hosting NATO 3.0; it is previewing what NATO 3.0 looks like in practice: a member state contributing more capability while exercising more independent foreign policy, which is precisely the harder accommodation the alliance's next phase will require of its European members more broadly.

The NATO 3.0 label itself is coming as much from Ankara as from Washington, which is telling in its own right. Turkish officials have been framing this summit explicitly as the alliance's third paradigm shift, and Secretary General Mark Rutte has called it a summit of accountability rather than aspiration. Part of what that new paradigm means in practice is geographic. NATO has invited Gulf states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, alongside Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, to Ankara, formalising a partnership logic that stretches well beyond the North Atlantic. The paradox is worth sitting with: even as Washington asks Europe to take on greater regional responsibility, the alliance itself is becoming more global in its partnerships, not less. An alliance built to contain the Soviet Union is now courting partners across the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific, which says as much about where Washington's own strategic attention is heading as it does about Europe's defence budget.

NATO has survived internal wrangling before. The crisis over German rearmament ran from 1950 to 1955. Suez set Washington against London and Paris in 1956. De Gaulle's failed 1958 bid for a tripartite directorate, and his later tilt toward Bonn to blunt American influence, chafed against US primacy for years. The Balkan interventions of the 1990s tested the alliance again. Each time, Washington held things together through bargaining, financing, and new institutions built to absorb the disagreement. What's different now is that the financing side of that formula is under increasing strain. A more capable Europe will not automatically produce a more cohesive alliance; it could just as easily produce a more contested one. A Europe that fields its own air defence and finances its own industrial base isn't likely to accept indefinitely a hierarchy where the big strategic calls stay concentrated in Washington.

Article 5 remains the alliance's organising commitment, on paper and in practice, and every major ally still operates within that framework. The question worth asking now isn't whether NATO survives without an unconditional American umbrella. Ankara has already moved the debate past that. The harder question is whether NATO can absorb a genuine redistribution of responsibility without the hierarchy that's defined the alliance since 1949 breaking down along the way. Previous crises got resolved because Washington could still afford to buy cohesion. This one is unfolding because Washington is increasingly unwilling, and perhaps less able, to sustain that bargain on the same terms.

(Sreshtha Chakraborty is a Research Fellow at the Centre For Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies.Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)