Donald Trump's advance team landed in Ankara this week, close to a thousand people mapping convoy routes and cordons before the president arrives on 7 July.
He is the reason the summit has an edge to it. Trump has said he would have skipped Ankara if not for his respect for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and he spent the run-up complaining that the United States has carried Europe for too long. In posts before the trip he put the American bill at 999 billion dollars from 2014 to 2025 and called the arrangement nonsense.
So the 36th NATO summit, on 7 and 8 July, opens with the host managing its most important guest. It is the second time Türkiye has held the summit, after Istanbul in 2004, and all 32 members are due.
Reuters, cited by the daily Sözcü, reported that Trump's day starts at Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, before he moves to the presidential complex at Beştepe for a formal welcome, a one-on-one with Erdoğan, then wider delegation talks. The two sides are expected to sign bilateral agreements and hold a joint press conference.
The bilateral file is thick. Engines for the KAAN, Türkiye's homegrown fighter, are on it, along with Ankara's push to rejoin the F-35 program it was removed from in 2019 after buying the Russian S-400 system. Syria and Gaza are on it too.
The summit's headline number is for Ukraine. Emmanuel Macron's office says NATO's European members and Canada are expected to pledge about 70 billion euros, roughly 80 billion dollars, for 2026, with a similar figure the year after. AFP reported the same 80 billion dollar total. The Élysée called it subject to final adjustment, so the real test is whether the number survives into the summit declaration.
Mark Rutte, NATO's secretary-general, has put weapons production at the center of his first Ankara summit. The alliance is selling a rebuild of Europe's defense industry, tens of billions in new orders. On day one, Defense Minister Yaşar Güler and Rutte open a defense-industry forum at the ATO Congresium, with Saab, Airbus and Northrop Grumman in the room alongside Turkish firms.
Under the ceremony sits an argument about money and trust. European allies and Canada raised defense spending by about a fifth last year. Latvia has become the first member to write a floor of 5 percent of GDP into law from 2027. What the eastern members want back is a sentence from Trump.
Lithuania's president, Gitanas Nausėda, said he is still waiting to hear Trump call Article 5, the mutual-defense clause, indisputable and sacred, and hopes to hear it in Ankara. Latvia's ambassador wants the summit to reaffirm it plainly. The clause has been invoked once, after 11 September 2001, and any response to an attack still needs every ally to agree, which is why the words matter to the countries on Russia's border.
For the host, the two days are a chance to bank its standing. Türkiye fields the second-largest military in NATO, a point the Dutch ambassador to Ankara made this week, and retired German Brigadier General Klaus Wittmann called the country the alliance's cornerstone in the southeast, a Black Sea power sitting on the straits.
Erdoğan is expected to use his time in the margins to press Israel's war on Gaza, according to the broadcaster A Haber, raising what Ankara calls the Netanyahu government's violations of international law. Türkiye has been among the loudest states against the war.
The city is already braced. Ankara police have run coordination meetings on security for the two days, and the Middle East Technical University is clearing its dorms from 6 to 12 July, with students told to move out and campus services paused.
The communiqué lands on 8 July. Whether it holds the 80 billion for Ukraine, and whether Trump says the sentence Vilnius and Riga keep asking for, is what Ankara will be judged on once the motorcades leave.