NATO leaders are meeting in Ankara, Turkiye on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The summit gets underway as US President Donald Trump renews pressure on member states over defence spending. European nations are expected to respond with billions of dollars in new military contracts.
At the NATO summit last year, members agreed to increase their target to 5 percent of GDP: 3.5 percent on military spending by 2035 and 1.5 percent on security-related needs.
Leaders from all 32 NATO member states are at the summit in Turkiye this week.
Two non-alliance heads of state will also be there: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung.
Australia, Japan and New Zealand are sending defence or foreign ministers, as are Gulf countries affected by the US-Israel war on Iran: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is not expected to attend the summit but is holding a bilateral meeting with Trump in Ankara.
Trump has questioned NATO’s value since his first presidential campaign. He argued that the US carried an unfair share of the costs. At the time, only five countries spent the agreed two percent GDP on defence.
His questions about shared defence responsibility have produced some results in recent years within the alliance as member states pledged an increased defence budget.
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the German Marshall Fund’s regional director for Turkiye, believes NATO this year will focus on implementing its promises from last year. “NATO allies just decided to increase their defence spending to five percent last year at The Hague and European allies took action to upgrade their defence industries,” he said. “This year in Ankara the discussion will be on how to translate spending to capabilities. It is therefore stronger than it was last year.”
But Paolo von Schirach, president of the Global Policy Institute, noted that any capability gains from increased spending are years away, saying that more orders mean more military hardware but only eventually. “You can spend a lot and obtain not too much,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is meeting Trump for a bilateral meeting on Wednesday. Ukraine is not a NATO member.
Zelenskyy will be using his face-to-face with the US president to request additional Patriot air defence systems as Russian attacks are intensifying on Ukrainian cities. A drone attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv killed at least 11 people on Monday morning.
Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute said that Ukraine is looking for ongoing political and military technical support from alliance members, to signal to Russia “that this support will be sustained”.
The idea, he said, was “to show Russia that there will be no diminution in its defensive capacity over the next 12-24 months”.
“There is a direct correlation between the number of interceptors supplied to Ukraine and the damage that Russia can inflict with ballistic missiles,” says Watling.
The billions in contracts expected to be announced by European nations at this summit are seen by some analysts as trying to appease the Trump administration.
When European nations didn’t join the war on Iran, Trump stated he didn’t want their money, just their “loyalty”. He added he might not have attended the summit if it wasn’t hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey has in recent years not only increased its defence spending, it also has grown into one of NATO’s largest military exporters.
For now, the tone around defence spending remains sharp. On the eve of the summit, Trump called Germany’s defence spending “ridiculous”. Chancellor Friedrich Merz defended his country’s budget, saying that “this is the greatest effort we have ever made to strengthen our defence capabilities”.
Meanwhile, the US has gone a step beyond rhetoric and announced a phased withdrawal of warplanes, destroyers and submarines from NATO countries. “Less US infantry or armour in Europe has an impact on messaging but little else,” Watling said. But, he added, “the withdrawal of US air power has a more tangible impact”.
Whether the alliance can project unity amid the rhetoric and withdrawals is a key question, said analysts.
“The main value of this summit is political, it shows that the allies are still talking, still meeting, still trying to project unity, even if the underlying disagreements and doubts haven’t disappeared,” von Schirach of the Global Policy Institute said. “Ankara is more about reassurance and signalling than about concrete, immediate changes on the ground.”
