NATO Heads to Ankara With Spending Targets Set, Unity Under Strain

ANKARA, The flags are up on the boulevards outside the Beştepe Presidential Complex, and the motorcades are being timed. What happens inside the compound on Tuesday and Wednesday will matter far more than the choreography.

NATO's 36th summit opens in Ankara on July 7, the second time Turkey has hosted the alliance's heads of state and government since Istanbul in 2004. The agenda, as Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed it repeatedly in the lead-up, is not about new political commitments. It's about implementation.

That framing matters. The last two gatherings, Washington in 2024 and The Hague in 2025, produced the landmark decisions. At The Hague, allies agreed to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, divided into 3.5 percent for core military needs and 1.5 percent for security infrastructure including cyber and logistics. The number was widely seen as a victory for the Trump administration's long campaign against what it calls free-riding. Ankara is where the receipts come due.

According to reporting reviewed by Forbes, Rutte has said that allies will announce tens of billions of dollars in new defense-related contracts at the summit, with the first day devoted entirely to a Defense Industry Forum on procurement and joint production. The Center for European Policy Analysis, according to an analysis in the New Voice of Ukraine, has framed the gathering's core test as whether NATO can turn those commitments into "deployable forces, functioning supply chains and resilient civilian infrastructure" before conditions deteriorate further.

The numbers are moving, but unevenly. As noted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, European allies and Canada have increased defense spending by roughly 20 percent since the Hague pledge, and NATO data cited by the alliance's own summit pages shows that core European defense investment rose by $139 billion in nominal terms in 2025 alone. Some members are already on track to hit 5 percent ahead of schedule. Others are not. Politico reported in June that Spain has refused to commit to the target, while Czechia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom have made little visible progress toward it, according to an IC Brief analysis. That asymmetry hands Washington's hardliners a ready-made argument for tying base access and force posture reviews to allied compliance.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend as an invited guest. His presence is significant in itself. NATO's 2025 summit declaration dropped any reference to Ukraine's eventual membership in the alliance, a notable retreat from the language of the 2024 Washington summit. Zelenskyy arrives in Ankara without a membership timeline but with a stronger hand than two years ago: Ukraine's military has consolidated real expertise in drone warfare and adaptive tactics that, as CEPA analysts put it in a briefing published this week, the alliance is studying rather than yet absorbing.

Beyond Ukraine, the shadow of the U.S.-led war against Iran falls across the room. According to the Chicago Council, the conflict ripped open fresh fissures in the alliance. France criticised the Trump administration openly; Spain refused the use of its bases for operations against Tehran. Germany allowed its territory to be used but still levelled criticism afterward. Rutte spent months managing those differences diplomatically.

The summit declaration is also expected to address China's deepening military cooperation with Russia, a topic that analysts at IC Brief assess will likely feature explicitly in the communiqué for the first time.

Whether Trump uses the moment to claim credit for a transformed alliance, as some in his administration clearly want, or arrives demanding more, will set the summit's emotional tone. Just Security, in an analysis published this week, noted that parts of the administration continue in private to question the value of Article 5 collective defense, while others see Ankara as an opportunity for the president to present himself as the architect of a stronger, more solvent NATO.

The summit closes on July 8. The communiqué will be public within hours. The harder read will take months.

Sources cited:
- NATO.int, 2026 Ankara Summit Overview (https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/2026/07/overview---2026-nato-summit-in-ankara-)
- Forbes, What Defense Leaders Will Discuss at the 2026 NATO Summit (https://www.forbes.com/sites/marktemnycky/2026/07/01/what-defense-leaders-will-discuss-at-the-2026-nato-summit/)
- New Voice of Ukraine, NATO Ankara Summit 2026: From Promises to Deterrence (https://english.nv.ua/opinion/nato-ankara-summit-2026-from-promises-to-deterrence-50620070.html)
- CEPA, What to Watch at the NATO Summit in Ankara (https://cepa.org/article/what-to-watch-at-the-nato-summit-in-ankara/)
- Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Beyond Defense Spending: What's at Stake for NATO in Ankara (https://globalaffairs.org/commentary/analysis/beyond-defense-spending-whats-stake-nato-ankara)
- Just Security, Will Trump Take the Win at NATO's Ankara Summit? (https://www.justsecurity.org/144465/will-trump-take-the-win-at-natos-ankara-summit/)
- IC Brief, NATO Ankara Summit Briefing (https://icbrief.org/)
- European Policy Centre, Countdown to the NATO Summit in Ankara (https://www.epc.eu/projects/countdown-to-the-nato-summit-in-ankara-challenges-expectations-goals/)