Commentary & Analysis

The 36th NATO summit, held in Ankara between July 7th and 8th , convened heads of state and government to discuss an agenda with familiar themes: defense investment, industrial production, and Ukraine. The summit marks the second time Turkey has hosted alliance leaders since Istanbul 2024 and was underpinned by three core priorities that revealed several overlapping stories. The discussion focused on the transatlantic relationship strained by an unpredictable American administration, an alliance attempting to reorganize its own burden sharing, Moreover, it prompted discussion on a NATO whose southern gaze is, if not should be, pulled toward the Gulf. The presence of ICI member countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE) sheds light on the latter.

Turkey: The Paradoxical Host

Turkey’s hosting role reflects a position that reflects a structural role within NATO that is both challenging to minimize and challenging for numerous allies to fully embrace. Ankara hosts the alliance’s second-largest army, and its geographic positioning places the country at the convergence of almost every theatre currently occupying NATO’s strategic attentionincluding, but not limited to, the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. “Turkey’s paradox” emerged, as such, to define a member state whose military and geographic significance is essential to the alliance's collective stance, despite its domestic politics, its links with Moscow, and its past propensity to leverage NATO's consensus-driven decision-making, which causes persistent unease among other allies. The Swedish and Finnish accessions, in 2024 and 2023 respectively, which took place only after a prolonged diplomatic process during which Turkey blocked or threatened to block NATO initiatives unless Turkish demands were addressed, showcased a scenario of NATO’s consensus procedures exploitation.

This has caused underlying tension that remains unresolved despite superseding events and circumstances. Moreover, the renaissance of territorial defense at the center of NATO’s strategy amidst Russia’s war on Ukraine has elevated the Black Sea to a first-order theatre of concern as well as Turkey’s relative weight within the alliance’s calculus. This dynamic raised various interpretations of the summit’s outcomes and the level of Ankara’s influence on the direction of its agenda.

The Europeanization of NATO’s Defense Base?

The summit’s visible frictions remain underlined by an arguably more consequential shift. Building on the investment pledge made at the Hague summit in 2025, the Ankara summit further cemented NATO’s continued movement toward a European-led defense-industrial base. The 2025 $139 billion investment pledge has become more concrete and transactional in character in Ankara, where allies announced more than $50 billion in new procurements, committed to expanding collective manufacturing capacity and working with industry to accelerate innovation.

NATO Secretary General Rutte termed this operational expression “NATO 3.0: stronger Europe in a stronger NATO.” Under this new framework, Canada is expected to assume significantly greater responsibility for conventional defense. It is undeniable that this momentum is a response to immediate political pressure from Washington, but the real challenge is the durability of this structural rebalancing, as the U.S would not be displaced from the alliance’s core and its challenges will remain.

Trump: The Disruptor-in-Chief

While the commitments, both industrial and financial, made in Ankara showcased an extent of alliance discipline, the public narrative was rather shaped by the erratic and adversarial stance of Trump toward the very allies whose burden-sharing his administration has long demanded. Rather than using the platform to consolidate or commemorate this new transatlantic consensus, Trump devoted much of his engagement to provocation and grievance. Trump reiterated his interest in Greenland, emphasizing its strategic importance to the U.S. Expectedly, the Danish Prime Minister also restated that Greenland remains not for sale. This left the EU compelled to intervene directly, asserting that the determination of Greenland's future lies solely with the Greenlandic and Danish populations, while referencing the established norms of territorial integrity and sovereign inviolability as recognized tenets of international law.

More consequential is Trump’s displeasure with the allies’ refusal to intervene in the recent USIsrael war on Iran, asserting he was “very upset with NATO” for declining to assist what he characterizes as the leading state sponsor of terrorism. These dynamics revealed a pressing question regarding the alliance’s collective defense commitments and burden-sharing in contingencies beyond the Euro-Atlantic theatre. Moreover, it also highlights that despite attempts at demonstrating alliance cohesion, NATO remains politically unsettled at the level of leadership rhetoric. More importantly, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the role a “defensive” alliance such as NATO should play.

NATO’s Gulf Moment

The most structural novel developments in Ankara occurred largely on the margins of the summit. On the sidelines, NATO foreign ministers convened a special session with ICI member countries to exchange on regional security developments, the security of maritime routes, and the evolution of the partnership framework established in 2004. This was a substantive significance underscored by an unprecedented regional development. The Strait of Hormuz featured in a NATO declaration for the first time, with allies reaffirming Tehran’s need to respect freedom of navigation and the impossibility of acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The inclusion of ICI countries reflected the accumulated Iranian pressure and culminated in the launch of a new set of Flagship Projects with GCC partners, spanning nuclear defense, maritime security, counterterrorism, and countering uncrewed aerial systems. These projects build on more than two decades of cooperation under the ICI framework, first launched at the 2004 Istanbul summit. The nature of Gulf involvement in Ankara was notably proactive. Qatar's foreign minister underscored the significance his nation places on enhancing collaboration within the initiative, whilst Kuwait's foreign minister advocated for a collective ministerial assembly of ICI states and NATO members to be held in Kuwait in 2027. This juncture is indicative of a "new security equation" evolving in the Gulf and the formation of an additional layer of collaboration with Europe, Turkey, and NATO at large, progressing concurrently rather than supplanting the US security framework.

However, the constraints of this development deserve equal attention. The ICI is inherently imbalanced: Saudi Arabia and Oman are not formal members despite their significant role in Hormuz security, and the initiative has consistently failed to meet its objectives, with fewer than fifteen percent of suggested NATO-ICI activities executed over the past twenty years. Despite intra-GCC differences, the bloc is expected to emerge from the ongoing regional instability as a more unified entity; However, this does not necessarily mean that NATO-Gulf collaboration would progress through a consolidated GCC framework and not bilaterally. Ankara, in this context, signifies not the establishment of a NATO-GCC security framework but rather its hesitant, inconsistent, and potentially reversible inception.

*Houda Barroug is a Researcher at the Gulf Research Center (GRC)