Heads of state and government from all 32 NATO countries, including U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will attend as an invited guest, are set to gather at Ankara’s Beştepe Presidential Complex for the alliance’s summit on July 7-8, 2026.
The meeting will be judged not by another declaration of unity, but by whether NATO can turn its commitments into the forces, industrial capacity and digital resilience needed to deter Russia. These questions were at the center of a June 23 press briefing held by the Center for European Policy Analysis, which NV English attended.
The NATO summit in Ankara is unlikely to produce the kind of grand strategic reset that has defined some recent alliance gatherings. That is precisely the point.
After several years of reorienting NATO from crisis management toward collective defense, allies have already made many of the political decisions that mattered most: a 5% defense investment benchmark, capability targets, regional defense plans and a renewed focus on Russia as the central threat to European security. The test in Ankara, expected in early July, is whether those commitments can become deployable forces, functioning supply chains and resilient civilian infrastructure before the security environment gets worse.
“The question for the Ankara summit,” former NATO Assistant Secretary General David Cattler said during a June 23 CEPA briefing, “is not whether NATO remains the world’s strongest alliance, obviously it does.” It is whether allies can turn consensus, investment and innovation into operational capability at the pace demanded by strategic competition.
That framing captures the summit’s real significance. Ankara will be less about announcing NATO’s next era than about determining whether the alliance can execute in the one it has already entered.
The most visible benchmark will be the 5% pledge, divided between 3.5% for core military spending and 1.5% for infrastructure and resilience. The numbers matter, but the harder question is what they buy. Defense budgets must now translate into the capability targets embedded in NATO planning: air defenses, ammunition stocks, mobility, logistics, command networks and forces able to reinforce the alliance’s eastern flank quickly.
Jan Lipavský, the former Czech foreign minister, argued that the debate over money inevitably leads back to military planning. NATO’s success will depend on whether national purchases fill alliance requirements rather than simply satisfy domestic political priorities. An EU-funded factory, railway upgrade or weapons order becomes strategically meaningful only when it helps deliver a defined NATO capability.
That is also where the changing U.S. role becomes unavoidable. Washington is not withdrawing from NATO crisis planning, as Cattler emphasized. But it is revising what it is prepared to provide immediately in a crisis and pressing European allies to assume more responsibility for the high-end capabilities that remain disproportionately American.
Those capabilities are not interchangeable. They include large-scale logistics, command and control, aerial refueling, ballistic missile defense and special operations forces. U.S. bases in Europe sit at the center of that system, providing access, sustainment, prepositioning, command infrastructure and the ability to move forces across the continent at speed. Their value lies not only in the troops stationed there, but in the network they anchor.
Europe cannot replace that ecosystem quickly. It can buy platforms, raise spending and expand industrial output, but replicating the U.S. ability to coordinate major movements, fuel air operations, integrate intelligence and sustain combat formations requires years of investment and institutional change. Ankara should therefore be read as a summit about a new division of labor, not American abandonment. The United States remains inside NATO’s core military architecture, including through the U.S. officer who serves as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. But Europe is being told that it must become far more capable of carrying the initial burden of a crisis.
The future rhythm of NATO summits may itself reflect that shift from political theater to implementation. In response to a question from Demian Shevko of The New Voice of Ukraine about reports that the alliance could hold leaders’ meetings less frequently after Ankara, Lipavský said he had no information on when the next summit might take place. Cattler noted that NATO summits had historically alternated every other year, while defense ministers, foreign ministers and chiefs of defense continued their regular work between leaders’ meetings. With the alliance’s major strategic decisions already taken — including the 5% commitment, capability targets and regional defense plans — he argued that a summit should be convened when leaders have decisions requiring their guidance, rather than by calendar habit. He suggested that a meeting in 2029 could be likely after the 2028 U.S. presidential election, while stressing that this was speculation. Jason Israel made the broader point that summit frequency is not a meaningful measure of NATO’s strength: deterrence depends on the capabilities allies build and the decisions they implement between meetings, not on how often 32 leaders gather.
That is why defense industry will occupy such a large share of the summit agenda. A full day on July 7 is set aside for an industry forum, giving production, procurement and technological integration more time than the formal leaders’ session. The symbolism is meaningful: NATO’s center of gravity is moving from communiqués to factories, procurement systems and testing pipelines.
The war in Ukraine has made that unavoidable. Ukraine has shown that military power depends on the ability to innovate, produce, repair and adapt faster than an opponent. Russia has learned the same lesson, improving and scaling systems such as Shahed-type attack drones over the course of the war. In a long conflict, industrial capacity is not a supporting function. It is combat power.
The industry discussion in Ankara is expected to focus not only on output, but also on how governments bring private companies into the defense ecosystem. NATO plans to launch a “Front Door for Industry,” an AI-enabled tool intended to connect firms with procurement and testing opportunities. It is a practical response to a persistent problem: startups and commercial technology companies often have relevant products but no clear route into the alliance’s acquisition system.
Technology will be another measure of whether NATO is adapting fast enough. The alliance has long treated interoperability as a question of compatible ammunition, radios and procedures. That remains important, but it is no longer sufficient. “Interoperability is becoming a software problem just as much as it has historically been a hardware problem,” Cattler said.
The next level of interoperability will depend on cloud architecture, secure data sharing, communications at the edge and AI-enabled systems that can work across national boundaries without exposing sensitive information. Allies may own advanced platforms, but they will lose much of their advantage if those systems cannot share data quickly and securely in a contested environment.
That is where Ukraine has become more than a partner receiving Western support. It is NATO’s most important laboratory for the future of war. Ukraine has demonstrated how quickly commercial technologies can be adapted for military use, how drone systems can be modified in response to battlefield changes, and how software, AI and intelligence can shorten the cycle from sensing a threat to striking it.
Laura Galante described Ukraine as a blueprint for AI-enabled warfare: the ability to sense the air, sea and cyber domains, adapt inexpensive commercial tools and iterate rapidly. The alliance’s challenge is to scale that culture across 32 members with different procurement rules, classification systems and political constraints. NATO is increasingly studying Ukraine not merely because Kyiv is fighting Russia, but because Ukrainian forces have developed a model of adaptation that traditional defense bureaucracies struggle to match.
The most consequential part of the summit may concern systems that once sat outside conventional defense planning. Undersea cables, railways, airports, energy networks and data centers are now part of the alliance’s military operating environment. Much of this infrastructure is privately owned, while its disruption can slow military mobility, interrupt command networks and create panic without a single conventional strike.
That makes Article 3, which commits allies to maintaining the individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack, as important as the better-known Article 5 mutual-defense guarantee. Resilience is no longer a civil preparedness issue at the margins of NATO policy. It is a requirement for fighting through disruption.
Russia’s campaign below the threshold of open war makes the point. Cyberattacks, election interference, sabotage and attacks on infrastructure are not isolated incidents. They are tools for probing weak points, testing political cohesion and raising the cost of collective action. The Baltic region is widely seen as a possible theater for further testing, while 2029 has increasingly been cited in European discussions as a possible timeframe for Russia to rebuild sufficient capacity to challenge NATO more directly.
No one at the Ankara summit can know whether Moscow will choose such a confrontation. But NATO cannot base its readiness on the assumption that Russia will not. The alliance must prepare for a spectrum of threats, from information operations and digital disruption to a localized military crisis that strains decision-making in multiple capitals at once.
The success of Ankara should therefore not be measured by the length of its communiqué, the tone of its leaders’ statements or even the frequency of future summits. What matters is whether the alliance can deliver forces, munitions, infrastructure, software systems and industrial capacity between meetings.
The decisions to watch are concrete. Do allies set credible timetables for the 5% commitment? Do European governments identify how they will replace or supplement U.S. enablers? Does the industry forum produce procurement mechanisms that speed production and testing? Does NATO make resilience, secure data and civilian infrastructure central to defense planning rather than secondary concerns?
Ankara may not settle those questions. But it may show whether NATO understands that its next test will be won not by declaration, but by delivery.
Photo: Source
*Editor’s Note: This article and photo originally appeared in the New Voice of Ukraine on 29 June 2026. The terminology, framing, and opinions expressed herein are those of the original author and do not necessarily align with the editorial line of The Levant Files.