NATO's Ankara Summit was more of a warning than an escape

It was Baron Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s military advisor and NATO’s original secretary general, who first described the organization as an alliance to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. Last week’s summit was devoted almost entirely to the second task, which is not a healthy sign.

The bar for success at the two-day gathering of 32 world leaders was just institutional survival. It was about having Donald Trump not throw further doubt over American commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Article V collective defense clause, which is the bit that keeps the Russians out. They achieved that aim, but it was touch and go.

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On arriving in Ankara, Trump returned to his theme of demanding US ownership of Greenland (a territory that belongs to fellow member Denmark). He described other unspecified members as “weak,” “pathetic,” and disloyal (for not joining the war with Iran he didn’t consult them about). True, by the time the summit was over he was praising alliance unity, but it should disturb NATO's military planners deeply that this narrow escape should pass for success.

Rather than opportunities to hash out strategies to meet future threats, these events have become moments of self-inflicted risk that create a stage on which Trump may or may not gut the alliance. The leaders — wisely — decided to skip repeating the ordeal next year, pushing the next gathering to 2028.

But this is process, whereas that future risk is real. As the scholar of Russian military affairs Michael Kofman writes in the latest Foreign Affairs magazine, however the war in Ukraine ends, Russia will emerge with an armed force that is significantly larger, more sophisticated, more experienced, more modern and better armed than it was in February 2022, when it invaded Ukraine. And it will fight the next war differently.

Not all the NATO news is bad. No one worries any more about keeping the Germans down; NATO allies want more Luftwaffe, not less. In Ankara, there was still plenty of attention paid to deterring Russia by ensuring continued support for Ukraine. And there's no doubt that the fear of Trump simply walking away from NATO has accelerated the trend for European governments to spend more as they try to build up a non-US deterrent that Moscow would respect.

Trump didn’t, this time, revert to spouting Kremlin propaganda about the war. He even said he’d license Ukraine to build Patriot air-defense missiles. That prospect may face formidable hurdles, but at this point, when Kyiv has in five years turned a $750 million arms industry into one with a capacity above $30 billion, it would be unwise to dismiss the potential.

There are at least two further lessons to take away from this summit, beyond the evident ones about the need to build up Europe’s industrial and military capacity.

The first is that complying with Trump’s demands for burden sharing will never be enough. His policies to date may have had the effect of accelerating Europe’s response to the threat from Russia, but the way he pocketed last year’s acceptance of a 5% of gross domestic product target for defense spending and then just moved on to other pet peeves about the alliance suggests a deeper hostility. Trump just doesn’t like or see the point of NATO and has been saying so since the 1980s. He will always find reason for complaint, with scant regard for cause or consistency.

The second lesson is that, unlike during Trump's first term, contempt for NATO is no longer confined to the president. European and NATO planners are crying out for a schedule of US troop and asset withdrawals, so these can be prepared for and replacements made ready. Instead, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is doling out the cuts on short notice and as though they were punishments.

Hegseth’s undersecretary for defense policy, Elbridge Colby, has set out the intellectual framework for this transformation agenda, which he calls NATO 3.0. There’s nothing wrong with the broad outline he gave to other defense ministers in February, saying NATO needed to return to its original Cold War ethos, when European members shouldered a big part of the burden of keeping tanks, troops and artillery pieces in the field to deter a potential Soviet attack. But this is no longer debated. Likewise a downsized US role from the 44% of NATO threat response it provides today, to perhaps 30%. This is inevitable and priced in by allies. The question is how the US withdraws.

If the administration did – as Elbridge said in his speech – aim to make Europe more secure and NATO stronger, it wouldn’t just start pulling out critical assets until the Europeans have made or bought replacements. Nor would US leaders indulge in fantasies about how the Kremlin wants peace, or pose as neutral. It would instead help prepare its allies for the future threat that Kofman describes, including by facilitating new command structures in which the US plays a downgraded role.

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Elbridge did convene a select group of NATO members to discuss the transformation’s planning in Bergen, Norway, in June. He said he invited Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK only, to reward NATO’s standout contributors. Something more divisive looks to have been involved. The Baltics, Denmark (of Greenland infamy) and Greece all spent more as a percentage of GDP on defense than the bulk of invitees, including the US. The UK has among the slowest rates of budget increase, but was included. France wasn’t, despite having some of the strongest capabilities in NATO, including its only non-US-dependent nuclear deterrent, and despite leading the charge for the greater European autonomy Elbridge supposedly wants.

Europe’s NATO members do need to spend more and better on defense. They need to consolidate procurement and end their dependency on US critical enablers, starting with so-called ISR, the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance that is the essential ingredient in all modern warfare. And in an alliance this large there will need to be a variable geometry of country groupings and commands, ready to take the lead in facing the potential theaters that affect them most once the US steps back and a more European way of defense emerges. All this is by now well understood within NATO. And all of it needs to be done on the likely five- to seven-year timeline for Russian military reconstruction.

The question for Colbridge should be how to embed the US drawdown into that process, not how this ideologically driven administration can use NATO as leverage to coerce and reward allies that it as Vice President JD Vance has so eloquently explained in fact considers foes in the culture wars it cares about most.

The question for the rest of NATO, meanwhile, is how to ensure the alliance can transition before Russia reconstitutes, if faced with a US administration that doesn't seem to want to leave NATO stronger, but rather just to leave it.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author)