WASHINGTON — Had it been held anywhere else, Donald Trump says he would not have bothered to go.
Two weeks before the July 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara, the American president told his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he was attending only “out of respect” for the Turkish leader personally. “I wouldn’t have gone to it,” Trump said last week, without elaboration, and without apparent discomfort at the implicit message: that his commitment to the 77-year-old alliance depends less on Article 5’s mutual-defense guarantee than on which country happens to be hosting that year.
The remark landed during a fraught stretch for the alliance. Turkish police arrested at least 209 people in Ankara between June 22 and 23, including political activists, lawyers, an academic, and a journalist identified by Human Rights Watch as a prominent LGBTQ rights activist, in raids carried out under anti-terror warrants issued by Ankara’s prosecutor’s office. HRW published its account of the arrests on Wednesday, the same week Trump hosted Rutte at the Oval Office and Erdogan said a bilateral meeting at the summit was “most likely.” The Ankara governor’s office subsequently banned all public assemblies and leafleting from midnight June 28 through July 10, the day the summit closes.
These are not the optics a host country ordinarily presents to an alliance whose founding values include freedom of speech and assembly. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who visited the White House on Tuesday for pre-summit talks, made no public comment on the arrests. Neither did Trump.
What the two men did discuss, according to official readouts, was burden-sharing and the summit’s security agenda: coordinating continued support for Ukraine, implementing new defense-spending commitments, and managing what Rutte described as one of the most consequential NATO gatherings in recent memory. Turkey is pushing to reach a target of 3.5 percent of GDP on defense spending by 2030, a benchmark that would place it among the alliance’s highest contributors if met.
Behind those agenda items sits a fracture that no communiqué language will easily conceal. When Trump launched military operations against Iran on February 28, alongside Israel, he asked NATO allies to join a mission securing the Strait of Hormuz. Most declined. Germany’s defense minister put it plainly in March: “This is not our war. We have not started it.” France, Spain, Italy, Estonia, Britain, Australia, South Korea, and Japan all initially rejected the request. Trump called them “cowards” and threatened to reconsider U.S. commitments to the alliance. Some later shifted position and agreed to contribute to the Hormuz effort, but the underlying grievance (that allies had been drawn toward a conflict without prior consultation) has not been resolved.
Inside the Senate, that grievance has produced its own political fallout. Republican senators who had initially backed a war powers challenge to Trump’s Iran campaign reversed course within hours after the president called one of their colleagues a “lunatic” on social media, according to NBC News, illustrating how thoroughly the Iran campaign continues to define the domestic politics of U.S. alliance commitments.
What Turkey has received from the Iran war period is something different from what European members received: proximity to a president who rewards personal loyalty with tangible concessions. The Trump administration notified Congress last week that it was moving ahead with a sale of roughly $700 million worth of F-110 jet engines for Turkey’s indigenous KAAN fighter aircraft program, a deal stalled since 2020 under CAATSA sanctions imposed after Turkey purchased Russia’s S-400 missile system. When reporters asked Trump whether he intended to bring a “big gift bag” to Ankara, he said he would probably “do something that’s going to make him very happy,” referring to Erdogan.
The engine sale had been in congressional review for years before the Trump administration announced it was proceeding despite the CAATSA framework, according to Al-Monitor. The decision is a significant diplomatic signal: that Turkey’s value to Trump as a host, a personal relationship, and a partner who did not join the European chorus of objections to the Iran war outweighs the sanction regime the previous Congress put in place to deter adversary weapons purchases.
Erdogan, for his part, told reporters that a private bilateral meeting with Trump was “most likely” during the summit and that he expected substantive progress on the defense relationship between the two countries. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who concluded a Gulf tour last week with messaging on the Iran situation that diverged from Trump’s own public statements, called the Ankara gathering “the most important NATO summit in history,” a framing that reflected how much the alliance’s internal dynamics have been reshaped by the Iran campaign launched less than four months ago.
The question the Ankara summit cannot, and will not try to, answer is what exactly Trump’s attendance means for the alliance as a whole. Independent Turkish journalists have already been told they cannot cover it: journalism groups filed formal objections last week after outlets were denied press accreditation for the event. Turkish authorities have not publicly explained the denials. An alliance summit held in a country where 209 people were arrested to pre-empt the meeting, where the press has been selectively barred, and where the American president says he would not have come without a personal relationship with the host’s leader is not a summit that projects institutional coherence outward.
What it projects, instead, is the shape of the alliance as Trump has reconstructed it: bilateral, personal, and contingent. Whether that is enough to coordinate a collective response to a still-unresolved conflict in Iran, or to sustain credible deterrence in Europe while a Russian operation continues in Ukraine, is the question neither Trump, Rutte, nor Erdogan is yet prepared to answer out loud.
