NATO summit begins: Who is attending and what is at stake?
NATO leaders are meeting in Ankara, Turkiye on Tuesday and Wednesday. The summit gets underway as US President Donald Trump renews pressure on member states
NATO leaders are meeting in Ankara, Turkiye on Tuesday and Wednesday. The summit gets underway as US President Donald Trump renews pressure on member states over defence spending. European nations are expected to respond with billions of dollars in new military contracts. At the NATO summit last year, members agreed to increase their target to 5 percent of GDP: 3.5 percent on military spending by 2035 and 1.5 percent on security-related needs. Who is there and what is at stake? Leaders from all 32 NATO member states are at the summit in Turkiye this week. Two non-alliance heads of state will also be there: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung. Australia, Japan and New Zealand are sending defence or foreign ministers, as are Gulf countries affected by the US-Israel war on Iran: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is not expected to attend the summit but is holding a bilateral meeting with Trump in Ankara. What Trump wants from NATO allies Trump has questioned NATO’s value since his first presidential campaign. He argued that the US carried an unfair share of the costs.
At the time, only five countries spent the agreed two percent GDP on defence. His questions about shared defence responsibility have produced some results in recent years within the alliance as member states pledged an increased defence budget. Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the German Marshall Fund’s regional director for Turkiye, believes NATO this year will focus on implementing its promises from last year. “NATO allies just decided to increase their defence spending to five percent last year at The Hague and European allies took action to upgrade their defence industries,” he said. “This year in Ankara the discussion will be on how to translate spending to capabilities. It is therefore stronger than it was last year.” But Paolo von Schirach, president of the Global Policy Institute, noted that any capability gains from increased spending are years away, saying that more orders mean more military hardware but only eventually. “You can spend a lot and obtain not too much,” he said. What Ukraine needs from this summit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is meeting Trump for a bilateral meeting on Wednesday. Ukraine is not a NATO member. Zelenskyy will be using his face-to-face with the US president to request additional Patriot air defence systems as Russian attacks are intensifying on Ukrainian cities.
A drone attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv killed at least 11 people on Monday morning. Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute said that Ukraine is looking for ongoing political and military technical support from alliance members, to signal to Russia “that this support will be sustained”. The idea, he said, was “to show Russia that there will be no diminution in its defensive capacity over the next 12-24 months”. “There is a direct correlation between the number of interceptors supplied to Ukraine and the damage that Russia can inflict with ballistic missiles,” says Watling. What European nations are trying to solve for The billions in contracts expected to be announced by European nations at this summit are seen by some analysts as trying to appease the Trump administration. When European nations didn’t join the war on Iran, Trump stated he didn’t want their money, just their “loyalty”. He added he might not have attended the summit if it wasn’t hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey has in recent years not only increased its defence spending, it also has grown into one of NATO’s largest military exporters.
The BriefWire