Nato survived the Ankara summit - but it still lacks a second fist Submitted by Omar Ashour on Mon, 07/13/2026 - 20:24 The alliance's future depends on turning European spending into combat power, while Washington remains politically unpredictable US President Donald Trump and Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte attend the Nato summit in Ankara, Turkey, on 8 July 2026 (Saul Loeb/AFP) Off In November 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron declared: “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of Nato.” Seven years later, the largest and most successful defensive alliance in modern history is still standing. The harder question is whether it can fight with two equally capable fists: an American one and a European-Canadian one. Nato’s latest estimates put US core defence expenditures at roughly $1.03 trillion in 2026, around 57 percent of the allies’ total.
Yet Washington’s share of Nato’s common-funded budgets is only 14.9 percent, equal to Germany’s. The deeper dependence is operational: Europe still relies heavily on the US for strategic intelligence functions, air-to-air refuelling, ballistic-missile defence and airborne electronic warfare. The wider dependency extends into cyber, maritime surveillance, space awareness, logistics for large-scale operations, and secure communications.
Most of Nato’s recovery was produced by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic blunder in Ukraine. Moscow appears to have expected another Crimea-style fait accompli: limited sanctions, hesitant diplomacy and a frozen-war framework resembling the Minsk years. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Instead, the full-scale invasion enlarged Nato, reinforced its eastern flank, and turned Ukraine into the operational centre of European security.
The road to the Ankara summit nevertheless looked more like crisis containment than alliance management. US President Donald Trump again argued that Greenland should come under American control, pressuring the territory of Denmark, a smaller founding ally. Earlier reporting suggested that Danish contingency planning included explosives to deny key runways in the event of an American attack.
What once sounded preposterous had become a live alliance-security problem. Continuity over rupture The war on Iran exposed another fault line. Trump was angered when European allies did not join t…
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