Trump opens NATO summit in Ankara with allies under fire

Donald Trump arrived in Ankara on Tuesday with NATO allies watching for a harder question than the summit choreography: whether American security guarantees can still be treated as stable policy when the U.S. president is signaling doubt. He opened the two-day meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even as allies worried that his resentment over their defense spending and their response to the Iran war could strain the alliance.

That uncertainty cuts into NATO’s core purpose. The alliance was founded in 1949, when 12 countries signed the Washington Treaty in Washington, D.C., and it now includes 32 members in Europe and North America. Its collective-defense pledge under Article 5 has long rested on the assumption that the United States will treat allied security as a binding commitment, not a transactional choice.

The summit came with Russia still pressing its military aggression in Ukraine, keeping deterrence, support for Kyiv and burden-sharing at the center of the agenda. In The Hague last year, allies agreed to spend 5% of gross domestic product annually on defense and security-related needs by 2035, including at least 3.5% for core defense requirements. NATO said in its 2025 annual report that all allies met or exceeded the original 2% benchmark, and that three were already at the new 3.5% level.

Trump’s remarks in Ankara sharpened the doubts. He again criticized NATO allies for not helping the United States in the Iran war and for spending too little on defense, while also saying he was considering selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey and lifting sanctions. That combination matters because Turkey remains one of the alliance’s most sensitive cases: Washington imposed CAATSA sanctions in December 2020 on Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries after Ankara bought Russia’s S-400 air-defense system.

Any move toward fresh F-35 sales would signal a possible reset with Ankara, but it would also test Washington’s leverage over an ally that has already shown it can push against U.S. restrictions. For NATO leaders in Ankara, the immediate concern was not protocol but deterrence: whether the United States is still willing to enforce alliance discipline while keeping the security guarantee at the center of European defense planning.