When NATO's leaders gather in Ankara on 7 July, Donald Trump will be among them, and by his own account, the host is the reason. Trump has said he is attending out of respect for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and that he would not have come otherwise.
It is the second time Türkiye has hosted a NATO summit, after Istanbul in 2004, and the timing carries more weight than the venue. The leaders meet on 7 and 8 July at Ankara's Beştepe presidential complex at a moment when the United States is pulling back from Europe and pressing its allies to carry more of their own defense.
Analysts have a name for what is taking shape: NATO 3.0. The idea, as they describe it, is to redistribute the work while keeping the alliance intact. European allies would supply most of the conventional forces needed to defend the continent, while Washington keeps the nuclear umbrella and the high-end tools Europe cannot yet match, intelligence, satellites, strategic airlift, long-range strike. Paul Taylor of the European Policy Centre put it plainly: the Europeans are now primarily responsible for the conventional defense of Europe, while the US continues to provide the nuclear cover.
The money follows the logic. At last year's summit in The Hague, members agreed to lift defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, with 3.5% for core defense and 1.5% for related areas, more than double the old 2% target. Türkiye backed the goal. By 2025, every EU member of the alliance had met the 2% mark for the first time.
Then Washington made the shift concrete. In May the Pentagon cancelled the rotation of an armored brigade to Poland, more than 4,000 troops plus a long-range fires battalion, and halted a deployment to Germany, part of Trump's plan to thin the US presence in Europe. A NATO official said the decision would not dent the alliance's defense plans. Taylor's worry is the speed. Washington could draw down faster than Europe can replace it. "What happens," he asked, "if Washington decides that a limited Russian incursion into the Baltic region is 'not America's war'?"
That is the backdrop against which Ankara takes the gavel, and it goes a long way to explaining why the summit is here at all. Türkiye fields the second-largest army in NATO after the United States. Its defense industry has gone from buyer to seller: defense and aerospace exports hit a record $8.5 billion in 2025, the country's defense-industries chief announced, led by the drones that have become its signature. It holds the alliance's southeastern flank, commands the straits into the Black Sea, and has been central to Ukraine's defense.
Brussels is courting it in the open. Days before the summit, the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, came to Ankara with two commissioners, met Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and called Türkiye "a key partner on security, migration, and energy." On the alliance she was blunter: "Türkiye is making a significant contribution to protecting NATO's Eastern Flank."
None of this means Europe is ready to stand on its own, and even the alliance's defenders say so. "Can we replace US military capacities one-to-one? No, we cannot, or at least not now, because it would cost a fortune," said Karl-Heinz Kamp of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Riho Terras, a former Estonian defense chief now in the European Parliament, reckons it will take years to reach a comparable level, and he is cool on the grander fixes. A European army, he said, "is a bad idea," one that would divide NATO instead of strengthening it. The structure to manage all this already exists, Kamp argued, and it is NATO.
For Türkiye, the summit is a stage as much as a meeting. Erdoğan has said Trump's presence matters as a show of unity, and that the two expect to hold bilateral talks on the sidelines. A gathering convened to manage America stepping back will open with the American president saying he came out of respect for the man hosting it. For two days in July, the alliance runs through Ankara.