Abstract:
The 2026 NATO summit in Ankara produced a paradox its official communique does not name. The summit's declared purpose was to formalize allied burden-sharing after the Iran war exposed which members would and would not support American military operations. Its most consequential bilateral outcome rewarded the NATO member that opposed the war most strategically, said the least publicly, and extracted the most. Turkiye condemned the February 28 strikes, shares a land border with Iran, maintained the Russian S-400 system for which it was expelled from the F-35 program in 2019 and sanctioned under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in 2020, and declined to provide bases or airspace for American operations. At the Ankara summit, Trump announced the removal of all CAATSA sanctions and opened the path to F-35 access, describing Ankara as much more loyal than other countries, while threatening the allies that had hosted American bases with troop withdrawals and trade consequences. This article argues that the Ankara summit is the clearest demonstration in recent NATO history that geographic leverage, strategic ambiguity, and willingness to host the adversarial meeting are more effective alliance tools than decades of military cooperation.
Main Article:
An alliance built on collective defense is also a political economy in which the distribution of rewards does not always match the distribution of costs. At the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, the gap between these two distributions was large enough to constitute the defining story of the meeting, and was not addressed in any official document the alliance produced.
The official outcomes of the Ankara summit were significant in their own right. All thirty-two NATO members met the two percent of GDP defense spending benchmark in 2025, a target that only three members met in 2014. [1] NATO allies pledged seventy billion euros in military equipment, training, and assistance for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to sustain at least equivalent levels in 2027. The alliance announced more than fifty billion dollars in new procurement agreements and committed twenty-seven billion euros for fuel infrastructure modernization, including pipelines extending to the eastern part of the alliance. [1] Secretary General Rutte described the outcome as a transformed NATO, a NATO 3.0 in which Europe assumes greater responsibility for its own defense while the United States remains firmly rooted in the alliance. The formal communique was, by the standards of NATO documents, substantive and forward-looking.
Beneath it was a political economy that the communique did not describe.
Trump arrived in Ankara having publicly singled out Britain, France, Germany, and Italy for failing to support the US and Israeli war on Iran. He called Spain a terrible NATO partner and a hopeless wasted cause, announced he might order a halt to trade with Madrid, and told reporters that he was very disappointed with NATO and had almost not attended the summit at all. [2] His message to allies that had declined to authorize offensive use of American bases on their territory, or that had publicly opposed the war as illegal, was explicit: loyalty to American military operations is the metric by which NATO membership will be evaluated, and the metrics have consequences. The threat of troop withdrawal from Europe was revived. The threat of reduced American security guarantees was implicit in every statement he made about burden-sharing and loyalty. [2]
This was the stick. The allies who had been beaten with it, Italy most publicly after the disclosure by Rutte that five hundred American planes had flown from its bases during a war it said it was not supporting, gathered in Ankara to demonstrate their commitment to defense spending and to hope that the combination of increased budgets and the presence of the summit itself would satisfy the patron whose protection they still require. They spent. They pledged. They signed procurement agreements. They did everything a loyal ally is supposed to do. And the largest bilateral concession of the summit went to the country that had done none of these things and had not been asked to.
Turkiye was expelled from the F-35 program in 2019 after purchasing the Russian S-400 air defense system over sustained American objection. The S-400 is the system the F-35 was partly designed to defeat. Operating both in the same alliance creates the possibility that Russia could use the S-400 to collect data on the stealth signatures, radar cross-section, and emission profiles of the F-35, potentially compromising one of the most sensitive military technologies the United States has ever produced. [3] Washington imposed CAATSA sanctions on Ankara in 2020 specifically for this purchase, targeting the Presidency of Defense Industries and its senior officials with asset freezes and export license restrictions. Turkiye rejected the characterization, proposed joint technical working groups, never disposed of the S-400, and waited.
During the Iran war, Turkiye condemned the February 28 strikes as a violation of international law. It shares a 534-kilometer land border with Iran, making it the NATO ally most geographically exposed to any Iranian military response. It is a Strait of Hormuz state in the sense that it controls the Bosphorus, through which Russian Black Sea naval assets must pass to reach the Mediterranean, giving it pivotal leverage in any scenario involving Russian naval movement. It did not provide bases or airspace for American operations. It did not endorse the war publicly in any forum. And it hosted the NATO summit at which the consequences of the war for alliance politics would be worked out, at the palace compound of Erdogan in Ankara, on its own terms and timeline.
At the bilateral meeting that opened the summit, Trump announced the removal of CAATSA sanctions: we are going to be taking the sanctions off, we do not want to sanction friends. He described Turkiye as much more loyal than other countries that we think would be loyal. He opened the F-35 question for consideration, calling it the best plane by far and certainly something we will consider. [3] Erdogan stated publicly that Trump had previously promised five F-35s and always keeps his promises. The Belgian defense minister, attending the NATO Industry Forum, said he hoped to see Turkish-made drones in Belgian airspace, a comment that described the scope of what Turkiye had become in allied defense calculations. Trump separately indicated support for US maintenance and upgrade assistance for engines powering the KAAN fifth-generation fighter jet of Turkiye jet, developed precisely because Ankara was excluded from the F-35 program.
The concession did not pass without opposition. Netanyahu publicly opposed it the day before the summit, telling Fox News that Turkiye should not be given F-35s or the engines for their fighter jets, calling Ankara a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood whose leader openly threatens to destroy Israel. [4] He framed the sale as a destruction of the power balance in the Middle East, which he said was ultimately guaranteed by Israeli air superiority. The objection of Netanyahu is not incidental to the analysis: Israel is the only current F-35 operator in the Middle East, and its air superiority over every regional power, including Turkiye, rests partly on that monopoly. Trump approved the Ankara concessions while Defense Secretary Hegseth broke away from the summit delegation to fly to Tel Aviv specifically to manage the Israeli reaction. [5] The approval of a strategic concession to Turkiye over Israeli objection, at a summit attended by the leader who has shaped more American Middle East policy than any foreign head of government in the current period, is a data point about the actual hierarchy of American regional priorities that official statements do not acknowledge.
Greece also opposed the F-35 sale, citing the threat posed by Turkish military capabilities to Aegean sovereignty. Bipartisan congressional opposition existed before the summit and was not resolved by it. A 2020 law requires certification that Turkiye no longer possesses or operates the S-400 before any F-35 sale can proceed, and Turkiye has not provided any such certification. [3] The legal obstacles mean that the Ankara announcement is a political commitment, not an operational transfer, and its conversion into an actual aircraft delivery will require either congressional action or a legal determination that overrides the existing statute. What the announcement accomplished regardless of these obstacles is a reset of the political baseline: the question is no longer whether Turkiye will eventually re-enter the F-35 program but what mechanism will be used to accomplish it.
The broader strategic implication of the Ankara outcome is what the Fikr framework documents across every chapter of this period: states with geographic leverage can extract from alliance politics rewards that exceed what their formal contributions warrant. Turkiye controls the Bosphorus. It borders Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran simultaneously. It has the second-largest military in NATO. It manufactures drone systems that European allies now want access to. It hosted the summit at which the post-Iran war restructuring of the alliance was formalized. And it has demonstrated, across the period from 2019 to 2026, that the United States will eventually negotiate with a NATO ally that buys Russian weapons, opposes American wars, hosts the adversarial meeting, and waits long enough for the political cost of the stalemate to exceed the political cost of the concession.
The lesson for every state in the orbit of the alliance is legible in the sequence of events. The allies that provided bases and absorbed Iranian retaliation were lectured about loyalty and threatened with troop withdrawals. The ally that declined to provide bases, condemned the war, kept its Russian missiles, and hosted the summit was rewarded with the removal of sanctions and the opening of an advanced weapons program. Alliance politics in 2026, stripped of its communique language, is the politics of geographic indispensability managed through strategic ambiguity. Turkiye has practiced this more skillfully than any other NATO member for more than a decade. At the Ankara summit, it collected the dividend.
References:
1. NATO. "The Ankara Summit Declaration." July 8, 2026. Official text at nato.int. Also NATO. "NATO Summits." Updated July 8, 2026.
2. Al Jazeera. "Five Key Takeaways from the NATO Summit in Ankara." July 8, 2026. Also Dawn. "Trump Says He Will Lift Turkiye Sanctions, Decide on Selling F-35s." July 7, 2026. Also Time. "Trump Renews Threat to Annex Greenland at NATO Summit." July 7, 2026.
3. Al Jazeera. "Trump Says Will Lift Sanctions on Turkiye, Consider Selling F-35s." July 7, 2026. Also PBS NewsHour. "At NATO Summit, Trump Pressures Allies on Loyalty, Defense Spending and Greenland." July 8, 2026. Also Defense News. "US Will Lift Sanctions on Turkey, Possibly Sell F-35 Fighter Jets, Trump Says." July 7, 2026.
4. Times of Israel. "Ahead of Trump's Trip to Turkey, Netanyahu Says Ankara Should Not Get F-35 Jets." July 6, 2026.
5. CNN. "July 7, 2026: US Hits More Than 80 Iran Targets, Reimposes Oil Sanctions." July 7, 2026.