ANKARA, June 24 (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that he would “most likely” hold bilateral talks with U.S. President \u200cDonald Trump when the U.S. leader comes to Ankara for \u200ca NATO summit next month.<\/p>\n
Turkey will host 32 NATO leaders, as well as officials from \u200bthe alliance’s partners in the Gulf and Asia-Pacific region, on July 7-8 amid tensions within the alliance over burden-sharing, defence spending, and U.S. complaints over allies’ involvement on re-opening the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S.-Iran war.<\/p>\n
Erdogan \u200chas previously said Trump’s attendance \u2060at the summit was important to show unity within the alliance.<\/p>\n
Asked by reporters in parliament if the two leaders \u2060planned to meet separately outside of the summit on July 7-8, he said “it will most likely happen”, but did not elaborate further.<\/p>\n
The two leaders have \u200bforged a \u200bclose relationship since Trump returned to \u200bthe White House in 2024, \u200cincreasing cooperation on a range of regional issues and resolving some outstanding disputes like Turkish state lender Halkbank’s sanctions-evasion case.<\/p>\n
Burhanettin Duran, Erdogan’s communications director, told representatives of Turkish media in Ankara that burden-sharing would be among the key agenda points at the Ankara summit.<\/p>\n
“The changing security architecture is \u200cpushing NATO allies to re-evaluate their defence \u200bspending. In that framework, Turkey aims to \u200breach the 3.5% + 1.5% target \u200bby the end of 2030,” Duran said, according to \u200ca readout of his comments on \u200bWednesday.<\/p>\n
Representatives of the \u200bIstanbul Cooperation Initiative, a partnership forum with some Middle Eastern countries, as well as Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Australia – known \u200bas the Indo-Pacific Four – \u200cwill also attend the summit at the foreign ministers level.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bHuseyin Hayatsever and Jonathan Spicer; Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing \u200bby Daren Butler and Louise Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANKARA, June 24 (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that he would “most likely” hold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[543,56,57,7,287,2579,466],"class_list":["post-3403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-ankara","tag-defence-spending","tag-donald-trump","tag-nato","tag-nato-allies","tag-tayyip-erdogan","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}