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When NATO's leaders gather in Ankara on 7 and 8 July, the real agenda will not be printed on any official programme. It is to keep Donald Trump inside the alliance. After a year in which Washington threatened to disengage, criticised allies who stayed out of its war with Iran, and signalled it would pull back both troops and its role in any future crisis, the summit has become an exercise in reassurance - and Secretary-General Mark Rutte is the one running it.
Rutte has built a reputation as the one European leader who can manage Trump, and he arrives in Ankara determined to let Washington leave claiming a win. His pitch is simple: Europe is finally paying up. European allies and Canada raised core defence spending by roughly 139 billion dollars last year - close to a fifth in a single year - and at last year's summit in The Hague members committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. For the first time, Rutte will also report on progress toward a separate 1.5% target covering areas like military mobility and civilian resilience.
The framing has a name: "burden shifting." "Burden shifting, interestingly, will be mentioned in the NATO Summit declaration for the first time," said Oana Lungescu, a former long-serving NATO spokesperson now on the RUSI Europe Advisory Board. "It shows the direction of travel towards what people in Washington like to call NATO 3.0." In plain terms: Europe takes over more of its own conventional defence while the United States steps back - the outcome Trump has demanded, repackaged as alliance strategy.
The communique being drafted is substantial. Allies are expected to formally label Russia a threat and to commit Europe and Canada to around 70 billion euros in military aid for Ukraine every year in 2026 and 2027 - some 140 billion euros over two years. Rutte has trailed "tens of billions" in new defence contracts, many of them transatlantic, that let European governments buy capability quickly while keeping American industry in the loop. That last point is the quiet core of the whole event: NATO's argument is that Europe still cannot produce enough on its own, and that deeper industrial cooperation with the US is the only realistic bridge - a message that irritates allies who would rather spend the money at home.
Consensus is not locked. In the days before the summit, allies were still wrangling over key details. Poland is pushing NATO to help finance a roughly 28 billion dollar overhaul of eastern-flank infrastructure, including the extension of Cold War-era fuel pipelines - even as Warsaw signals caution about pledging yet more of its own money to Kyiv. The Ukraine figure itself is contested: a large slice of the promised 70 billion euros a year is meant to come from an EU loan worth around 30 billion euros annually, and not every capital is comfortable with the arrangement. Turkey, meanwhile, is lobbying for attention and funding for its own pipeline plans. In Berlin this week, Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosted Baltic leaders as last-minute coordination moved into higher gear.
Hosting matters. Turkey fields NATO's second-largest military, runs one of the alliance's fastest-growing defence industries, and is led by a president with unusually warm ties to Trump - all useful to a summit designed to flatter Washington. Yet the setting also exposes an awkward truth for the EU. Brussels increasingly depends on Ankara for security, migration control and regional stability, even as accession talks stay frozen and concerns about democratic backsliding keep Turkey at arm's length. The EU's long-running "strategic ambiguity" toward Ankara - neither embrace nor rejection - is getting harder to sustain precisely as Turkey's leverage grows.
Ankara is a stress test dressed up as a celebration. If it goes to plan, NATO emerges with a credible story - Europe spending and doing more, the US still anchored, Ukraine funded through 2027 - and the alliance edges from dependence toward a more balanced partnership. If Trump reopens the fight over Iran, or the haggling over money and pipelines spills into public view, the summit could instead confirm the alliance's fragility at the worst possible moment. Either way, the direction is now set: the burden of defending Europe is shifting onto Europe itself. The open question is whether Europe can build fast enough to carry it.
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