Ankara Summit: NATO's Test of Transition from Intent to Capacity

The NATO summit in Ankara is taking place at a critical juncture where the Alliance must demonstrate what it can achieve in its new security era. Previous summits had thoroughly defined conventional and non-conventional threats. The central issue in Ankara, however, will be whether the political will built to counter these threats can be transformed into military, industrial, and institutional capacity. In this sense, the summit serves as a performance test for NATO. The defining concept of the summit is NATO 3.0.

^{2026 Ankara NATO Summit logo}(NATO)

NATO 3.0 is emerging not as a fully formalized doctrine but as a concept describing the Alliance’s search for alignment with its new security environment. It signifies NATO’s transformation into a more resilient, more productive, more Europe-centered, and higher-intensity security competition-ready structure. We can say that the backdrop to this transformation is the destabilization of the European security order. Lessons drawn from Russia’s war against Ukraine have shown many NATO countries that their old assumptions are no longer valid. European security can no longer be managed within a framework of low cost, limited risk, and heavy reliance on the strategic weight of the United States. In this context, the debate on NATO 3.0 represents a search for a new balance in which American power remains central but European allies assume far greater responsibility in conventional defense.

The first dimension of NATO 3.0 is for Europe to carry a greater share of its own defense burden. This does not mean the United States withdrawing from NATO. As long as the American nuclear umbrella, strategic capabilities, and political weight remain fundamental pillars of the Alliance, Washington’s expectations of Europe are changing. European allies are now expected to produce significantly greater land forces, air defense systems, munitions, unmanned systems, logistical infrastructure, command-and-control capacity, and rapidly deployable military power. Thus, NATO 3.0 signals a reallocation of responsibilities.

The second dimension concerns the transformation of defense spending into capability. While strong political will has emerged in recent years to increase defense budgets within NATO, the central question of the new era is what these expenditures are being converted into. Without concrete progress in areas such as air and missile defense, munitions stockpiles, long-range strike capacity, critical infrastructure security, and production continuity, high budget targets will appear incapable of generating strategic impact.

The third dimension is the integration of the defense industry into strategy itself. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern warfare is heavily dependent on production depth and supply continuity. In this regard, NATO 3.0 expresses the Alliance’s intention to move beyond its peacetime defense industry model and adopt a production framework suited for prolonged competition and, when necessary, high-intensity conflict.

The fundamental challenge NATO faces today is not the need for allies to spend more money. The target of investing 5 percent of gross domestic product in defense and security by 2035, adopted at the 2025 The Hague Summit, already outlined the financial framework for NATO’s desired transformation. This year in Ankara, the focus will shift to how this target can be translated from a political symbol into tangible capability. Therefore, the center of gravity of the summit will not be defense spending but defense production. The real issue is whether these expenditures will generate genuine deterrence in areas such as air and missile defense, munitions stockpiles, unmanned systems, long-range strike capability, cyber resilience, logistical depth, and military mobility. NATO’s parallel defense industry initiative can be read as a key indicator of this shift.

The Ankara Summit will provide important signals regarding how realistic a roadmap Europe has for reducing its dependence on the United States. If Europe’s intention to assume greater responsibility is genuine, we can expect the summit to highlight steps toward joint planning, shared procurement, and strengthened collaborative production capacity. For this reason, the defense industry can be regarded as one of the strategic core axes of the Ankara agenda. The defense industrial infrastructures of NATO countries, shaped over decades by low-intensity crisis management logic, have not yet fully adapted to the new reality. One of the key messages to be delivered in Ankara will therefore be the political will to scale up defense production. Joint procurement mechanisms, multinational production models, financing of defense industry investments, protection of critical supply chains, and rapid fielding of new technologies will determine the future of NATO’s deterrence architecture.

This transformation also holds special significance for Türkiye. Türkiye is one of the few allies capable of simultaneously reading both the eastern and southern security frontiers. The Black Sea, the Straits, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern geopolitics position Türkiye as a strategic crossroads within the Alliance. Areas emphasized by NATO 3.0—defense industry, unmanned systems, and regional crisis management—directly align with the capability accumulation Türkiye has developed in recent years.

For Türkiye, the summit is also an important opportunity to secure stronger recognition of its security priorities among allies. Counterterrorism, security risks stemming from Syria, irregular migration, energy corridors, the Eastern Mediterranean, the balance in the Black Sea, and defense industry restrictions will feature prominently on Ankara’s agenda. While NATO’s security perception remains centered on Russia and Ukraine, Türkiye’s fundamental expectation is that threats from the south will no longer be treated as secondary concerns. The importance of the southern flank is growing due to instability in Iran, Gaza, Syria, and the Eastern Mediterranean region.

Türkiye’s defense industry and bilateral relations agenda will also be among the summit’s key topics. In this context, it can be said that Ankara’s expectations from its allies include greater inclusion in European defense projects. Whether NATO views Türkiye’s growing defense industry capacity as an asset within the Alliance or as an area requiring cautious management will be one of the factors determining the summit’s success.

Ultimately, we can say that the Ankara Summit will be a test of whether NATO can move beyond grand rhetoric and begin generating real capability. The Alliance has defined threats, set ambitious targets for defense spending, and declared its continued support for Ukraine. Yet success in the new security environment will be measured by how effectively these goals are realized on the ground. If the summit can narrow the gap between promises and capacity, concretize Europe’s responsibility-sharing process, make support for Ukraine more predictable, and more effectively leverage Türkiye’s role as a bridge between eastern and southern security frontiers, then the Ankara Summit will be recorded as a critical threshold in the Alliance’s adaptation to a new era. Otherwise, even the strongest declarations from the summit will fail to resolve NATO’s capacity challenges.