The first day of the NATO summit in Ankara, hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was dominated not by the practical business of European rearmament but by President Trump’s public criticism of allied governments. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” and singled out Italy, Germany, and France for refusing to support the United States in the Iran conflict. He also repeated his claim that Greenland should be under American control, prompting Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to respond that allies must respect sovereignty and that Greenland was “not for sale.” On the Ukraine file, Trump said he believed “both sides want to make a deal” and confirmed he had spoken with Vladimir Putin ahead of the summit; a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was scheduled for Wednesday. Norway pledged approximately $306 million for Ukraine’s ballistic missile defence. Only five NATO members were projected to meet the 3.5 percent of GDP defence spending target in 2026.
The received wisdom
The transatlantic mainstream view is that Trump’s behaviour at Ankara is simultaneously a distraction from serious business and a genuine danger to the alliance’s cohesion. European defence establishments are trying to do the hardest thing in peacetime democratic politics — persuade populations to spend more on armed forces in a period of fiscal constraint — and they are doing so against the backdrop of a US president who publicly humiliates their governments for decisions that were made, in part, to avoid being drawn into a conflict they did not authorise and cannot control. The rearming-Europe agenda — new Airbus transport aircraft, Sweden’s GlobeEye AWACS replacements, joint missile development — is substantive and necessary. But Trump’s transactional fury makes it harder to pass in European parliaments, because his critics can plausibly argue that European spending is being demanded not for collective defence but to subsidise American strategic adventures in which Europe has no voice.
A different read
Trump’s theatrics are real. So, however, are the underlying grievances he is expressing, however clumsily.
The NATO free-rider problem predates Trump by decades. The 2 percent of GDP defence spending commitment was made at the Wales Summit in 2014 with a ten-year horizon; twelve years later, most European members still aren’t there. Germany spent decades cutting its Bundeswehr to fiscal ribbons while simultaneously exporting energy dependence on Russia and lecturing Washington about multilateralism. France maintains an independent nuclear deterrent and occasional expeditionary posture while resisting any EU defence architecture that might compromise its sovereignty — a perfectly coherent position, but one that makes joint action difficult. The bill for this comfortable arrangement has always been paid in American defence appropriations and forward basing. Trump is not wrong that the account is in arrears; he is simply deploying that insight with maximum destructive force at maximum inappropriate moment.
The Greenland comment deserves separate treatment. It is easy to dismiss as Trumpian bluster, and Denmark’s response was entirely correct: territorial sovereignty among allies is a foundational NATO principle, not a negotiating chip. But the geostrategic logic behind the interest in Greenland — Arctic shipping routes, rare earth resources, forward positioning against Chinese and Russian naval expansion in the north — is not frivolous. A post-Trump administration pursuing the same goal through partnership and investment rather than annexation rhetoric would be acting entirely rationally. The problem is the method, not the strategic concern.
The Iran dimension is the most politically loaded. European allies declined to join what was, from their perspective, a war launched without consultation by an ally who then expected their military infrastructure and political cover. Britain, to its credit, did permit US strikes from British bases — and received a public rebuke from Trump anyway for the manner of the offer. The lesson European governments are drawing from this is that there is no amount of cooperative deference that will satisfy Trump; participation is demanded unconditionally, and gratitude is not a currency he trades in. That lesson, if widely internalised, produces exactly what the alliance most needs to avoid: strategic decoupling in which European capitals begin developing independent threat assessments and independent responses, making coordination progressively harder.
There is a historical analogy worth pressing here. The Suez crisis of 1956 was, among other things, a moment when the United States used its financial leverage to terminate British and French military operations it opposed, humiliating its two senior European allies in the process. The lesson European strategists drew from Suez was that independent European capacity was indispensable — and that lesson drove, eventually, the creation of the European Monetary System, the single currency, and the incremental construction of European institutional autonomy. Trump’s behaviour may be accelerating an analogous process. The European Defence Fund, the rearmament agenda, the Swedish AWACS purchase, the Canada-Germany submarine deal — these are not Trump-friendly. They are Trump-proofing.
What to watch
The summit communiqué on defence spending targets will indicate whether the 3.5 percent figure becomes a hard commitment or remains aspirational language. Watch Turkey’s positioning: Erdoğan is using his hosting role to extract sanctions relief and a reconsideration of F-35 sales, and his success or failure will define the transactional limits of Trump’s alliance management. Watch Germany’s response to the Iran criticism: Olaf Scholz’s government is under electoral pressure and a major public commitment to NATO spending on Trump’s terms would be politically costly. Finally, monitor Zelensky’s bilateral with Trump on Wednesday — Ukraine’s air defence shortfall is acute, and whether Trump endorses additional interceptor deliveries will determine whether the diplomatic spectacle produces any material benefit for the alliance’s most exposed member.
— J