NATO's heads of state and government meet in Ankara on July 7 and 8 for the alliance's 36th summit, its first in Turkey since the 2004 Istanbul gathering. The venue is the Presidential Complex, and the agenda that has taken shape is a familiar trio for the alliance: deterrence and defense, faster defense-industrial cooperation, and continued support for Ukraine.
The through-line is money. At last year's summit in The Hague, members committed to raising annual defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, a steep climb from the 2% benchmark agreed in 2014. Ankara is the first summit at which allies have to translate that headline into plans, and the target has been broadened along the way to count not only traditional military outlays but critical-infrastructure protection, energy security, cyber defense and supply-chain resilience.
The structure of the summit reflects where the pressure is. A full day on July 7 is given over to the NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum, the alliance's high-level event on transatlantic defense production and investment — more hours, in the schedule, than the leaders' meeting that follows. That emphasis is a tacit acknowledgment that the constraint on European rearmament is now industrial capacity as much as political will.
Ukraine will again dominate the leaders' session. The alliance is expected to reaffirm military support and to frame the aid in terms of sustainability — the recognition, after more than three years of war, that assistance improvised annually is harder to plan around than assistance guaranteed for the long term. How far allies go toward making that support durable is one of the summit's open questions.
Among the sidebar initiatives is one The Fold reported last week: a Canada-led Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, pitched by Prime Minister Mark Carney's government as a multilateral lender to finance defense projects and pull in so-called middle powers. Ankara is the venue at which the roster of founding members is expected to firm up, and the identity of the roughly ten nations that sign on will indicate how much appetite exists for financing rearmament collectively rather than nation by nation.
Hosting carries its own subtext for Turkey, a member with the alliance's second-largest military and a long record of steering NATO business toward its own priorities. For the alliance as a whole, the test in Ankara is narrower than the rhetoric: not whether to spend more, which is settled, but whether the money, the factories and the aid can be organized fast enough to matter.