The spending commitments, the Ukraine pledges, the bilateral deals that summits are supposed to produce were all delivered at the Ankara summit; but the most revealing moment was Trump saying he might not have come if Erdogan had not been hosting, a statement that comes closer than any communiqué to revealing what NATO has become: an alliance whose coherence is now less dependent on shared values than on the personal relationship of one man.
Trump said it himself, almost in passing, in the way that the most revealing things tend to get said. He might not have attended the Ankara summit, he told reporters, if it was not being hosted by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The leader of the most powerful military alliance in history, attending its most important annual gathering, as a personal favor to one member state’s president. That sentence did not make the main headlines. The F-35 announcement did, and the spending numbers, and Zelenskyy’s bilateral with Trump on day two. But the Erdogan comment is the one that will age best as a description of where NATO actually stands in the summer of 2026.
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