Outlook Explains | Turkey Hosts NATO Summit After 22 Years: What to Expect

When US President Donald Trump was asked last week why he was bothering to fly to Ankara, he candidly said, “"I would not have gone for most people but he called me up. He said, please, I have it in Turkey, you got to be there." That single exchange between Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says more about the state of the NATO alliance in July 2026 than almost any formal statement could.

The 36th NATO summit opens on July 7 at Ankara's Beştepe Presidential Complex, the first time Turkey has hosted the alliance's leaders since Istanbul in 2004, and it arrives at a moment when NATO's internal fault lines are more visible than they have been in years.

Turkey’s Expectations

Turkey's road back to hosting a NATO summit has not been smooth. For much of the past decade, Ankara sat in an uncomfortable position inside the alliance, blocking NATO cooperation with Austria, threatening to stall Nordic enlargement, and purchasing Russian S-400 missile systems, which led Washington to exclude Turkey from the F-35 programme.

As the Modern War Institute at West Point noted in analysis published ahead of the summit, Turkey has survived decades of disputes with NATO because the alliance repeatedly found Turkey too useful to lose, while Turkey found NATO too valuable to leave.

The invitation to host appears to have changed the calculus. Erdogan has pushed hard to use this week as a reputational reset, telling his party's parliamentary group last month that he wanted the Ankara summit to become "a reference point in NATO's history."

His leverage with Trump, who has described their relationship as one of mutual 24-hour availability, has helped him pull off what very few European leaders managed, securing Trump's attendance at a summit the US president publicly said he had little interest in attending. The Washington Times reported this week that Trump's visit could come with a significant defence gift, with F-35 re-entry talks reportedly back on the table in bilateral discussions on the summit's sidelines.

What's on Agenda

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed the summit around a single phrase, implementation not production. Last year's gathering in The Hague agreed a landmark commitment for all allies to spend five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, split between 3.5% for core defence and 1.5% for related infrastructure.

Ankara is where leaders must now show their plans to reach it. European allies and Canada collectively increased core defence investment by $139 billion in nominal terms in 2025, according to the official NATO summit overview, and Rutte has said he expects tens of billions of dollars in new defence contracts to be announced at the summit's defence industry forum on 7 July.

Even as Kyiv is not a member, Ukraine remains at the centre of the summit. President Volodymyr Zelensky Volodymyr Zelensky will attend, and the Congressional Research Service briefing on the summit confirmed that institutionalising long-term allied support for Ukraine, covering equipment, funding mechanisms and long-term resilience, is among Rutte's three core priorities. Allies have already channelled more than $4 billion through the voluntary PURL procurement mechanism for Ukraine, with an additional $1.5 billion pledged in 2026 from 25 member states and three partner countries, according to the Atlantic Council. European military aid to Kyiv rose 67% in 2025 compared with the 2022 to 2024 average, partly to offset reduced US assistance.

Beneath the Surface

The summit's symbolism would be neater if the alliance were not visibly fraying in several places at once. Trump's decision to join Israel in launching strikes against Iran earlier this year without prior consultation with NATO allies reopened deep divisions. France criticised the move openly, Spain refused to allow US operations from its bases, and several others offered verbal support while quietly registering unhappiness, as the Chicago Council on Global Affairs noted in pre-summit analysis. European officials are concerned that the fallout from that episode could overshadow the gathering, and the summit declaration is expected to include language calling on Iran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has also announced a six-month review of US military presence in Europe and reiterated threats of troop withdrawals, fuelling what the European Policy Centre described as genuine uncertainty within the alliance about Washington's long-term commitment. Turkey, for its part, is expected to push for greater inclusion in EU defence procurement initiatives. NATO Secretary General has been repeatedly warning that excluding non-EU allies from EU defence programmes increases costs, complicates production and hampers innovation, a concern directly relevant to Ankara's own defence companies, including Baykar, TUSAŞ and Roketsan.

The real question this summit must answer is whether America's place in the alliance is still fixed, or whether even that can now be renegotiated with a phone call.