Turkiye’s opportunity in NATO’s crisis
Turkiye will use the NATO summit in Ankara to strengthen its place in Europe’s evolving defense architecture.
In a nutshell
- NATO’s Ankara summit comes amid a reshaping of Europe’s security order
- Transatlantic relations are strained and security concerns are increasing
- Turkiye is claiming a central role in European defense
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The run-up to every NATO summit is tense, if not nerve-wracking – and this year’s summit in Ankara on July 7-8 is no exception. Allied heads of state and government are preparing to meet in the Turkish capital to discuss global security challenges and how best to counter them.
The stakes extend well beyond the official agenda. At the heart of the summit will be the question of how to rebalance the United States’ role within the alliance, in light of Washington’s evolving priorities. At the same time, decision-makers are trying to ensure that widening divergences across the Atlantic do not erode NATO’s cohesion or the transatlantic bond.
For Ankara, the summit is an opportunity to make the case that Europe’s deteriorating security environment has increased Turkiye’s strategic value and that the country must have a central place in any new order.
Turkiye assumes greater responsibility in NATO
This week will be the first time in over 20 years that Turkiye hosts a NATO summit. The last one was in Istanbul in 2004, when NATO was still adapting to post-Cold War realities. The alliance had recently enlarged to 26 members, expanded its mission in Afghanistan and strengthened its partnerships through initiatives such as the Mediterranean Dialogue. Amid bitter divisions associated with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, it also launched the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative to promote relations between NATO and Middle Eastern countries.
Despite those tensions, neither the durability of the transatlantic community nor the cohesion that had come to define NATO were in question. Today, however, those comfortable assumptions are less certain. Washington is scaling back its role in Europe’s conventional defense; it is on the verge of announcing a significant reduction in its military commitments as it turns its attention to its own hemisphere and to other priorities, particularly the Indo-Pacific region. In response, NATO members – namely Canada and European countries – find themselves obliged to accelerate efforts to assume greater responsibilities.
This shift is taking place in a broadly deteriorating global security environment. The number of armed conflicts worldwide has reached record levels, while global arms transfers continue to surge. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine continues unabated, while the Middle East is shaken by conflicts with far-reaching consequences.
NATO has so far responded to these crises in a familiar fashion, reviewing its deterrence and defense posture and ensuring that the necessary plans and capabilities to defend alliance territory are in place. Yet, the challenge does not stop there. The alliance is also undergoing an internal stress test, something not necessarily unique to this moment but one that is manifesting itself more profoundly than ever before. Political disagreements over trade, technology and U.S. involvement in European domestic politics, not to mention U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated interest in seizing Greenland from Denmark, reflect the increasingly strained atmosphere across the Atlantic.
It is precisely at the intersection of these two dynamics – a more dangerous strategic environment and a reduced American military role in Europe – that Ankara sees opportunity. Turkiye believes that its geostrategic location, sizable military, expanding defense industry and growing ability to project power leave it well positioned to strengthen NATO’s European pillar. Demonstrating that potential will be Turkiye’s principal objective at the summit and is likely to shape its policies within and beyond NATO in the years ahead.
NATO adapts – Turkiye already fits
Since its inception, NATO’s ability to adapt has been one of its defining characteristics. The organization successfully navigated the Cold War, using nuclear deterrence, conventional defense and political diplomacy to effectively counter the Soviet Union. It then expanded its contributions to international security in the post-Cold War era by adding new roles to its portfolio, including crisis prevention and management, as well as cooperative security through a network of new partnerships.
NATO is now entering a new phase of adaptation, described by U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby as NATO 3.0, reflecting American priorities in flux and the expectation that Europe assumes “primary responsibility for its own conventional defense.”
The traditional wisdom that guided NATO thinking in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, dubbed NATO 2.0, was very different. The prospect of war on the European continent had at that point become a distant possibility, and with a few notable exceptions, such as France and the United Kingdom, European allies embraced the peace dividend. Defense spending was curtailed and militaries were downsized. Meanwhile, the emphasis within NATO shifted from territorial defense to lighter, expeditionary forces designed for crisis-response operations beyond alliance territory. The necessity to be prepared for a major conventional war and the utility of static military formations came to be viewed as relics of an earlier era.
Turkiye never fully shared those assumptions. Unlike many European allies, Ankara felt it could not afford to fully relax into the post-Cold War dividend because of persistent security challenges along its borders, leading it to retain sizable conventional forces and maintain a high level of readiness. At the same time, Turkiye invested heavily in its indigenous defense industry, capturing an important niche and eventually becoming the 11th largest supplier of arms globally.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the lessons learned from this battlefield fundamentally altered many of the assumptions that underpinned NATO’s post-Cold War mentality. The return of industrial-level warfare highlighted the importance of manpower, territorial defense, ammunition production at scale and speed, and the ability to sustain high-intensity warfare over long durations. These objectives are all reminiscent of NATO’s Cold War thinking. At the same time, the decisive role of unmanned drones, precision-strike capabilities and resilient command-and-control networks became abundantly clear. Old and new war dynamics were at play together, and more importantly, Europe no longer seemed immune to conflict.
Read more on Turkiye from Turkish affairs expert Alper Coşkun
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- Turkiye’s role in the European defense pillar
This sudden realization caught Europe off guard. Years of optimizing the military and national defense industries for peacetime realities became a sudden and difficult-to-reverse handicap. In contrast, Turkiye entered this environment in much better shape. Its inability to capitalize on the post-Cold War peace dividend, combined with its decision to preserve large-scale, combat-ready armed forces and steadily develop an indigenous defense industry, meant that it was prepared to meet this moment in the continent’s deteriorating security paradigm. That is the advantage Ankara will seek to use at this critical juncture for European security.
Turkiye steps up
Ankara’s designation to command NATO’s premier rapid response mechanism, the Allied Reaction Force (ARF) for 2028-2030, can be seen as part of this strategy. The same logic applies to its active participation in Exercise Steadfast Dart 2026, involving the ARF which is currently under Italy’s command. Turkiye contributed one-fifth of the exercise’s approximately 10,000 participating troops, while also fielding several critical enablers required for modern joint operations, including the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu, unmanned systems and other high-value capabilities.
Such steps are not merely practical – Turkiye is using them to make a broader strategic statement. It is displaying its willingness and ability to deploy, sustain and command joint forces under demanding operational conditions in distant geographies. Ankara is thereby trying to redefine its place within the alliance. Defense Minister Yasar Guler’s recent assertion that Turkiye has evolved from being a flank ally to one aspiring to be a central power within NATO encapsulates that ambition.
This is Turkiye’s punchline for the summit, and Ankara’s calculus is broad. Its thinking goes beyond retaining a strong place for Turkiye within NATO, aiming also to preempt an unwanted scenario in which a European Union-centered security order that excludes Turkiye prevails. These two objectives go hand in hand, and will define Ankara’s enduring commitment to NATO and its expectations from the upcoming summit.
Scenarios
Most likely: Turkiye sustains and deepens its NATO engagement
Ankara’s tense relations with the U.S. and its Western allies over the years, together with its interest in expanding defense and security cooperation with partners in the Middle East and elsewhere, have led some to question whether Turkiye is gradually disengaging from the Western security architecture. This is unlikely. NATO remains the cornerstone of Turkiye’s defense, security and deterrence. Conflicts surrounding Turkiye and the latest developments in the Middle East, including its growing rivalry with Israel, have only reinforced this thinking in Ankara.
Turkiye will therefore sustain its strong engagement in NATO, while seeking to assume a more central role within the alliance as transatlantic strains shift the burden of defense toward Europe. As NATO becomes increasingly Europeanized, Turkiye most likely will not only remain a committed ally but also aim to establish itself as one of the alliance’s leading military powers and a central actor in Europe’s evolving security architecture. Turkiye will use the Ankara summit as an opportunity to advance this objective.
Less likely: Turkiye fails to capitalize on NATO’s Europeanization
This scenario could occur if Ankara gradually reduces the priority it assigns to NATO membership and begins to rethink the value of shaping the future European security order through the alliance. This trajectory could be coupled with Ankara prioritizing alternative security arrangements with other actors, at the expense of its role in the alliance and the European security order.
This amounts to an unlikely scenario for Turkiye, first and foremost because of the value Ankara places on NATO membership, irrespective of its complementary pursuits in defense and security with other actors. Moreover, Turkiye would not willingly forfeit its ability to shape the continental security order, which can realistically only be achieved through its strong role in NATO.
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