Ankara’s Summit of Fractures

The NATO summit in Ankara was advertised as a moment of unity. Instead, it laid bare the alliance’s fractures and hollow rituals: a U.S. president openly antagonistic toward Europe, a gaping missile-defence deficit, and a Turkey that has become indispensable.

A summit that showed the alliance is cracked

Ankara was set to stage NATO’s tired pageantry: polished group photos, hollow declarations, and the well-worn script of unity. Instead, despite Trump’s playful statement of “tremendous unity in that room,” the summit felt like a stress test the alliance was ill-prepared for. Donald Trump didn’t even pretend to be the guardian of the transatlantic order. Instead, he played the saboteur-in-chief, hurling threats, putting down allies, and reducing collective defence to a cheap bargaining chip. Spain was severely humiliated by Trump for refusing to join the 5% spending effort.

NATO did not collapse. But it is now standing on fractured ground. Trump’s lingering fury over Europe’s refusal to join the unlawful U.S. and Israel attack on Iran loomed over the meeting. His bizarre fixation on Greenland was less comic relief than a window into his worldview: allies are not partners, but assets to be squeezed and to get good deals. Even the summit’s indifferent final communiqué evidenced damage control rather than conviction.

Yet Trump’s threat was only the symptom; NATO’s real disease is the insecurity it tries desperately to hide. The alliance has become a club that spends more time reassuring itself than defending anything meaningful. While Trump scolded allies for not joining his illegal war in Iran, he tossed out half-promises to Ukraine about Patriot missile systems and, bizarrely, circled back to his obsession with Greenland, as if NATO were his personal real estate portfolio.

The European nightmare: missile defence, and the illusion of protection

If the summit had one strategic truth, it was this: Europe is dangerously underprepared for the kind of war it now fears most. Air........

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