Ankara’s Second Summit: Twenty-Two Years On, NATO Returns to a Türkiye That Has Changed the Rules

Dr. Ahmed Moustafa Director & Founder, Asia Center for Studies & Translation, Egypt

Twenty-two years after Istanbul hosted NATO’s leaders in 2004, the Alliance has returned to Turkish soil, this time to the Beştepe Presidential Complex in Ankara, for a summit that arrives not as ceremony but as reckoning. The 36th NATO Summit, convened July 7–8, unfolds against a backdrop few of its architects in 2004 could have imagined: a Ukraine war grinding into its fifth year, a Middle East still smoldering from a direct US-Israel war with Iran, an American president openly questioning the value of the Alliance he is attending, and a host nation, Türkiye, that has quietly become indispensable to almost every crisis on NATO’s agenda.

Türkiye’s Moment: From Junior Partner to Power Broker

Hosting a NATO summit has always been a statement of strategic weight. But Ankara 2026 is different in kind. Türkiye arrives not merely as host but as leverage. Its defense-industrial base — anchored by companies like ASELSAN, which has attracted reported interest from global capital including BlackRock, with US Ambassador Tom Barrack said to be facilitating contacts and BlackRock’s Larry Fink having met President Erdoğan earlier this year — has positioned Türkiye as a rising node in NATO’s push for defense-industrial self-sufficiency. The Ankara Summit’s dedicated Defence Industry Forum, held alongside the political summit, underscores this: Türkiye is no longer simply a NATO member on the alliance’s southeastern flank but a manufacturing and innovation hub the Alliance now needs.

This is Erdoğan’s leverage point. As European allies scramble to meet the 5% GDP defense-spending pledge agreed last year, with 3.5% earmarked for core defense and 1.5% for resilience and infrastructure, Türkiye has positioned Ankara as a “delivery checkpoint” — a moment to translate commitments into contracts, and contracts into Turkish industrial gain. Analysts covering the summit have openly asked whether the gathering represents collective security or, in effect, the largest commercial handshake in Turkish defense history.

The Russia-China Question: Hedging in Plain Sight

Türkiye’s balancing act is not new, but it has rarely been more visible. Even as Ankara hosts NATO’s leaders, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met his Russian counterpart in Moscow only weeks earlier, part of a pattern of parallel engagement that Ankara has never fully abandoned since the Ukraine war began. Türkiye continues to occupy a unique lane inside NATO: a member state that supplies Kyiv with Bayraktar drones while keeping Black Sea diplomatic channels to Moscow open, and one that has deepened economic and energy ties with both Russia and China without triggering the kind of alliance discipline applied to smaller members. For Ankara, NATO membership and multi-alignment with Moscow and Beijing are not contradictions to be resolved but assets to be managed simultaneously — a posture that gives Turkish diplomats outsized room to maneuver at exactly the summit meant to reaffirm collective unity.

Ukraine: Sustaining a War Without an End

The degraded state of the Ukraine war looms over every session in Ankara. NATO is expected to affirm a pledge of roughly €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with allies committing to sustain at least equivalent levels into 2027. Yet the summit convenes amid reports that Italy has been resisting parts of the Ukraine funding language in the draft communiqué, exposing cracks in what NATO officials insist remains a “unity summit.” President Trump is scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines, following recent phone calls in which Trump suggested renewed prospects for a negotiated peace — even as fighting continues largely unabated and Zelenskyy has publicly flagged what he considers European inaction.

Ankara’s Trade-Off Amid the US-NATO Rift Over Iran

The most consequential subtext of this summit may be the still-raw rupture between Washington and its allies over the Strait of Hormuz. Since the US-Israel war against Iran erupted in late February — triggered by the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — Iran’s closure and periodic re-closure of Hormuz has convulsed global energy markets. When Trump called on NATO, China, Japan and South Korea to help secure the strait militarily in March, every ally declined; Germany’s defense minister flatly stated it was not Europe’s war. Trump responded by calling NATO’s refusal a “very foolish mistake” and describing the Alliance, without American backing, as a “paper tiger.”

That rift has not healed; it has merely gone quiet enough to allow a summit to proceed. A ceasefire and blockade-lifting memorandum signed in June eased the crisis, but Iran has since signaled it will impose transit fees on Hormuz shipping, with “special treatment” reportedly reserved for friendlier states — a policy Washington rejects as unworkable for any lasting deal. Strait security is now formally on this week’s NATO agenda, even though the underlying disagreement over burden-sharing on Iran was never resolved, only overtaken by events. This is the trade-off Turkish politicians are positioned to exploit: Ankara can offer itself as an indispensable interlocutor — bridging Washington’s frustration with European reluctance — while extracting defense-procurement access and diplomatic capital in return, precisely the kind of transactional leverage Erdoğan has cultivated throughout the crisis.

The Middle East Overhang: Syria, Lebanon, and a Widening Israel Rift

Türkiye’s regional posture will shape the summit’s Middle East undertone as much as any formal session. President Trump is set to hold a separate bilateral meeting in Ankara with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander now leading Damascus. The meeting follows Trump’s repeated suggestion — first floated at the G7 — that Syrian forces could take on Hezbollah in Lebanon more effectively than Israel, a proposal al-Sharaa has consistently declined, insisting Damascus seeks only economic channels with Beirut, not a military role reminiscent of Syria’s decades-long occupation of Lebanon. The subtext is unmistakable: Washington is testing whether it can redirect regional security burdens away from an Israeli campaign in Lebanon that has produced significant civilian casualties, toward a Syrian government still consolidating power after Assad’s fall — a maneuver that would simultaneously ease pressure on Israel and open a new channel of US engagement with post-Assad Syria, independent of Iran.

Layered atop this is an open diplomatic rupture between Ankara and Jerusalem. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, in a CNN Türk interview days before the summit, described Israel’s policies and mindset as “a burden that humanity can no longer bear” and called for international sanctions, accusing Israel of perpetrating mass killing in Gaza. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar branded the remarks “textbook incitement to genocide,” a charge Germany’s foreign minister also distanced himself from as unacceptable rhetoric, while President Isaac Herzog denounced the comments as antisemitic. Erdoğan, for his part, dismissed Israeli criticism as an attempt to deflect from its own conduct in Gaza. That this exchange erupted just as NATO’s Israeli-aligned members prepare to sit alongside Türkiye’s delegation adds a genuinely awkward undercurrent to an Alliance summit ostensibly focused on Russia and defense spending — and gives Ankara another card to play: positioning itself as the Muslim world’s most vocal NATO-member critic of Israel, a role with real currency across the Arab and Islamic world even as it strains Türkiye’s Western alliances.

The Palestinian Case and Arab Coordination

For Cairo, Islamabad, Doha, and Riyadh, the Ankara summit is being watched less for its Ukraine communiqué than for what it signals about regional alignment on Gaza and the Palestinian file. Egypt, Qatar, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have each played mediating or coordinating roles throughout the Iran crisis and its regional spillover — Islamabad brokered ceasefire talks during the Hormuz confrontation, while Qatar helped facilitate a Lebanon ceasefire alongside the United States and Iran. That same quartet’s coordination on Gaza reconstruction, Palestinian statehood diplomacy, and pressure against further escalation in Lebanon is likely to intensify in the summit’s aftermath, particularly if Fidan’s confrontational posture toward Israel hardens into a broader Turkish push to rally Muslim-majority states — inside and outside NATO — around a unified Palestinian position. Whether Ankara’s rhetoric translates into coordinated Arab-Turkish diplomatic action, or remains a unilateral Turkish gesture aimed at domestic and regional audiences, will be one of the more consequential open questions to emerge from a summit meant, on paper, to be about Russia and the Atlantic alliance — and that has become, in practice, a referendum on how far Türkiye’s ambitions now extend.

This analysis draws on reporting from NATO’s official summit documentation, Reuters, the Congressional Research Service, The National, The Jerusalem Post, Al Arabiya, and other outlets covering the Ankara Summit as of July 7, 2026.