With Eastern Europe and West Asia in prolonged turmoil, leaders of the 32 member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will gather in Turkey on July 6-7 for the so-called Ankara Summit.

NATO summits take place roughly once a year to impart strategic direction to the world’s most powerful alliance. Established at the beginning of the Cold War in 1949, NATO aims to safeguard its members through political cooperation and collective defence. The cornerstone of NATO, enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, or the Washington Treaty, stipulates that an armed attack against one or more of its members will be considered an attack against all. But now, alongside the military threat from its principal adversary, Russia, NATO faces demands for a more equitable burden-sharing from its principal financial contributor, the US.

Last fortnight, NATO outlined the broad themes that it expected to dominate discussions during the Ankara Summit. The first is a topic that has been contentious ever since NATO’s beginnings: Spending levels on defence by the alliance’s European members.

At last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, NATO’s European members committed to investing 5 per cent of their respective Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) into defence. This commitment covers two categories of defence expenditure. First, each member must spend at least 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence equipment........

© Indian Express