Is Europe capable of securing itself?

That is the singular question NATO leaders gathering in Ankara, the Turkish capital, for a crucial summit on July 7 and 8, will have to confront. President Donald Trump and the alliance leaders are convening in Ankara at a time of profound transatlantic tensions, widening intra-European fractures over how to manage President Trump, active wars on the European continent and along its strategic periphery from Ukraine in the east to Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East in the south.

Self-doubt and self-abasement, which have defined the European approach to Trump and European security, are no substitute for strategy. Ankara must be the moment Europe stops mourning the alliance it once knew and begins building the one it actually needs.

In the short term, Europe must strengthen the collective weight of European NATO members, not the European Union members or EU as an institution alone, within the alliance. In the medium to long term, however undesirable the prospect may be, Europe needs to prepare for a security order that is not dependent on American power and the old terms of the alliance.

Europe needs a continent-wide security architecture encompassing NATO members both inside and outside the EU. It needs a reformed and expanded engagement with its Eastern neighborhood—Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans—and with its Southern neighbourhood, stretching from North Africa and the Sahel through the Levant to the Persian Gulf. 

And Europe needs an honest reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: any post-American security framework cannot simply replicate the existing NATO-centric order, which rests on strategic clarity, institutional permanence, and a shared threat perception.

A new security architecture in which the American role is reduced or redefined should move Europe to adapt to the present and prepare for the future. Europe is fearful of the future and relatively resistant to the ongoing global reordering, but the Global South is more hopeful about the future and more open to structural global change. Europe wants its future to resemble its post-World War II past. Major countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—and the US—have moved on.

Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, recently emphasized the importance of NATO’s official mantra for this summit, laying the ground for NATO 3.0—a milestone in the alliance’s history. The framework is instructive: NATO 1.0 describes the alliance’s Cold War rationale, designed to address a conventional,........

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