What Turkey wants as host of the NATO summit

Along the road linking Ankara’s airport to the city center, sky-blue banners printed with NATO insignia are pinned to half-built towers, as if the alliance’s summit in the Turkish capital is embellishing an ongoing construction boom.

“NATO Summit in Ankara, key to security, key to peace,” read the posters – part of citywide preparations for the first time Turkey has hosted the meeting since 2004, when the world and the security challenges it faced were very different.

Police are present at almost every intersection – some of the 56,000 security guards stationed for the event – ​​and adapted protocol personnel huddle next to every remotely connected building.

Faced with a divide between the United States and Europe in NATO, a fragile ceasefire in the Iran war and a European race to strengthen security after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Turkey is seeking to use its role as host to prove itself indispensable.

The summit will feature U.S. President Donald Trump’s first visit to Turkey under his second administration, allowing Turkey to leverage its strong relationship with his administration to bring together NATO allies who are at odds over Middle East policy and the war in Ukraine.

Turkey wants to present itself as a critical supplier of defense and security equipment and as a key member state closest to the biggest challenges facing the alliance, former officials and analysts said. The National before the two-day summit.

“Turkey views this summit as an opportunity to consolidate its position as an indispensable NATO ally and translate that status into concrete defense gains,” said Riccardo Gasco, foreign policy coordinator at the Istanbul-based think tank IstanPol. The National.

Regions in crisis

Turkey – between Ukraine and Russia on one side, Iran to the east, and Syria and Iraq to the south – has NATO’s second-largest armed force after the United States and will use the summit to drive home the need to look out for threats from all directions.

It was NATO defenses that shot down missiles launched from Iran that approached Turkish airspace in March, sparking a tense standoff and questions over Turkey and the alliance’s response to the Iranian attack. Last month, Mr. Trump took credit for keeping Turkey out of the conflict.

Turkey has a “land border of more than 1,800 km with regions in crisis,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told officials from NATO member countries in a speech last week. The country has a “strong army, modern military capabilities and an advanced defense industry”, which places it “at the forefront of allies contributing to NATO security”, he said.

Turkey will strive to flesh out a “360-degree” approach, “not in words, but in deeds, to address the alliance’s challenges coming from all directions,” said Mehmet Fatih Ceylan, Turkey’s former ambassador to NATO. The National. “This is why it is important to involve, for example, the Gulf countries during the summit. »

The foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait were invited to a meeting on Tuesday with those from NATO as partners in the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, a platform for NATO security cooperation with the Middle East, launched in Istanbul in 2004.

It is unclear what will come of this meeting or what will result from Turkey’s desire to take concrete action to confront threats coming from all directions.

At the same time, Ankara wants to manage tensions between the United States and European NATO members, born from what Washington sees as Europe’s refusal to help during the Iran war and its reluctance to spend enough on security.

“I assume Ankara will do its best to bridge the transatlantic divide to the best of its ability,” Mr. Ceylan said. “If the summit does indeed give greater weight to the provision of capabilities for a rebalanced NATO, it will certainly be a great achievement for Ankara. »

NATO and European officials insist they are on track to meet defense spending targets. At a news conference in Ankara on Monday, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte praised Mr. Trump for expressing hope that “we spend the same as the United States.”

Turkey sees the burden-sharing debate within NATO as an opportunity and a risk, Gasco said. Mr Trump’s pressure on Europe to spend more is benefiting Turkey’s thriving defense industry sector. At the same time, Ankara still views the United States as the key to deterrence.

“Turkey welcomes an increase in European defense spending, but would be concerned about a serious US disengagement from NATO,” Gasco said.

As for its own relations with the United States, Turkey seeks to build on its relationship with the Trump administration to overcome long-term obstacles hampering its own defense capability. Mr. Erdogan is pushing for the United States to sell $700 million worth of F-110 engines to Turkey, and Ankara continues its quest to be allowed back into the F-35 fighter jet program. Turkey was removed from the program after purchasing Russian S-400 air defense systems in 2017.

A booming defense industry

Turkey’s defense capabilities will be on full display at an industrial forum to be held alongside the NATO summit in Ankara. The forum will focus on progress toward members’ goal of spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense, and how to translate that money into production.

NATO is well aware of the potential for Turkish munitions makers to supply European countries seeking to bolster their defenses against Russia and assuage U.S. concerns that they are not doing enough.

Turkey’s defense and aerospace exports fell from $200 million in 2002 to $10.6 billion last year, the head of the country’s public defense operations said this year.

Turkey has “around 3,000 companies that produce the kits and defense industrial production every day that our men and women in uniform need to defend ourselves,” Rutte said on Monday.

A complication is that as a non-EU country and a NATO member, Turkey cannot benefit from defense funding open to EU members. “Because Turkey is not a member and a clear thread of EU spending policy is to buy from within the bloc, Turkish companies – and officials in Ankara – fear being left behind,” the conflict resolution organization Crisis Group said in a briefing note.

Turkey has attempted to circumvent this problem by entering into joint ventures and defense spending agreements with individual members rather than cooperating at the bloc-ally level.

Nonetheless, a formal framework for cooperation between Turkey and the EU is unlikely to emerge at the summit, as clarity on what that would be “remains elusive”, Ceylan said.

Concerns about democracy, the rule of law and institutional predictability also determine how far European partners are willing to go to deepen their cooperation with Turkey. Human rights organizations have criticized Turkey for arresting hundreds of people, including political activists, lawyers, an academic and a journalist, in the run-up to the NATO summit.

For EU partners, many of whom have not publicly criticized the crackdown on political opposition to Mr. Erdogan’s government in Turkey, the key to defense cooperation is the longevity of the agreements beyond the country’s current leadership, led by Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party since 2003.

“Sustainable defense cooperation requires confidence that agreements, institutions and political commitments will outlast individual leaders,” Gasco said.