Donald Trump will arrive at next week’s Nato summit in Ankara to find an alliance that has spent the past year doing almost everything he asked of it.
European defence spending is rising at its fastest rate in decades. Arms factories are expanding. Governments are signing huge weapons contracts. European officers are taking over senior commands once held by Americans, while European governments are assuming greater responsibility for its defence and support of Ukraine.
The question is whether any of this will be enough to make the US President happy.
Europe spending more after Trump backlash
For all the meticulous summit choreography, Nato remains an alliance on edge, with much depending on Trump’s mood when he arrives in the Turkish capital. The gathering may not be the existential affair of last year’s summit in The Hague, when allies feared Trump might undermine Nato’s Article 5 mutual defence guarantee or even announce that America would pull out from the alliance, but the past year has hardly been reassuring.
Trump has threatened Greenland, territory belonging to fellow Nato member Denmark. The US has pulled troops from Europe, cut hardware assigned to Nato defence plans and launched a review of its military presence on the continent. Most recently, the Iran war has reopened a bitter argument over what America owes Europe – and what Trump believes Europe owes America.
Jeremy Shapiro, who heads the Washington DC office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), says it was a mistake to even have the summit.
“All the planning around the summit seems aimed at reducing exposure to some kind of blow up. There’s still a risk that it’ll be a car crash, but the best outcome of this summit is nothing happens, he says.
As for Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, he wants to show that despite the turbulence, Nato is indeed becoming stronger – and that Trump deserves much of the credit.
Nato chief Mark Rutte attempting to please President Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office last month (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
His argument is that Trump’s relentless criticism has achieved what decades of polite American diplomacy could not: forcing Europeans to spend more, produce more weapons and assume more responsibility for their own defence.
According to Rutte, European allies and Canada have spent an additional $1.2trn on defence over the past decade, while their spending rose by almost 20 per cent last year alone. He argues that they are now on course eventually to match the United States in overall defence spending.
More important, however, Ankara may show that Europe is moving beyond simply writing bigger cheques.
Nato becoming more European
European allies are taking on greater responsibility within Nato’s command structure. They are bolstering conventional deterrence on the eastern flank, in the Baltic and Arctic regions, and increasingly leading the effort to arm Ukraine. Rutte presents this not as an American retreat but as a rebalancing of the alliance.
The official message at the summit will be optimistic. Behind it lies a more uncomfortable reality: Europe is taking greater leadership of Nato partly because America increasingly wants to do less.
Jamie Shea, Nato’s former spokesman and now a senior fellow at the Friends of Europe think-tank, is less sanguine. He divides alliance summits into two categories: transformative gatherings that take Nato in a new direction, and damage-limitation exercises that leaders wish they had never scheduled but cannot cancel.
“Unfortunately, I think Ankara is still in the first category: the damage-limitation type,” he says.
Shea accepts that Nato has a much better story to tell than a year ago, with rising defence spending and Ukraine in a stronger position on the battlefield.
“The problem with Trump is that, whatever you do, he wants more,” Shea says.
The deeper concern, he argues, is that Europe still does not know the eventual scale of the American retreat.
“What Rutte would dearly like is some kind of stability,” Shea said. “Europe has no clear vision of where it can rely on the United States to provide certain capabilities in Europe in the future and where it cannot.”
The problem of America’s receding influence is one of timing: Washington fears Europeans will move too slowly to replace American capabilities, while Europeans fear the US will withdraw vital assets before they can replace them.
The change is no longer theoretical. Europeans have now taken command of all three of Nato’s regional Joint Force Commands from American officers. From next year, some defence analysts estimate, the United States may provide only around half of Nato’s combat power. The question is therefore becoming less whether Nato will become more European than how quickly – and whether Europe can build the political leadership and military muscle to match its new responsibilities.
That is the paradox Ankara will expose. Nato is becoming militarily more balanced at precisely the moment when it is becoming politically less cohesive. Europe is stepping up because Trump demanded it, but also because it increasingly fears it may not be able to depend on him.
The emerging model would leave Europeans responsible for most of the conventional defence of their continent. The US would maintain its nuclear umbrella and some conventional presence, but no longer provide the backbone of European defence.
Britain’s role in Nato
The UK remains one of Nato’s most militarily significant European members: a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a country with important leadership roles on the alliance’s eastern and northern flanks.
But Britain’s importance in the emerging European security architecture increasingly goes beyond its military hardware. Alongside France, Britain has taken the lead in organising the “coalition of the willing” behind Ukraine and is spearheading a de-mining operation in the Strait of Hormuz.
The initiative has demonstrated what the Europeanisation of Nato could mean in practice: European powers taking the political initiative, convening allies and building coalitions rather than waiting for Washington to act.
Joint military exercises including forces from Poland, the US and the UK in eastern Poland this year. Britain’s role in Nato is already expanding as the alliance prepares for a diminshed American presence (Photo: Artur Widak/Getty)
Britain also leads the ten-nation Joint Expeditionary Force, bringing together Northern European and Baltic allies, and is taking over Nato’s Norfolk command, responsible for securing the Atlantic routes through which American reinforcements would have to reach Europe in a crisis.
Britain can work with the EU’s growing financial and industrial muscle while using Nato and smaller coalitions to provide military and political leadership.
Ankara may therefore offer a glimpse of a role Britain has struggled to define since Brexit: not standing apart from Europe, but becoming one of the principal organisers of its defence.
Problems on the continent
Sir Keir Starmer’s recent defence announcement has helped ease immediate concern among allies about Britain’s direction, but the UK is still only around two-thirds of the way towards Nato’s 3.5 per cent core defence-spending target, and questions remain over how – and when – the promised increases will be financed.
Britain is not alone. Across Europe, governments face the same uncomfortable choice between military spending and expensive welfare systems built during decades when American protection allowed defence budgets to shrink.
For Britain, the additional difficulty is that its ambitions are extensive while some capabilities are wearing thin. The danger is that existing ships, aircraft and other equipment reach the end of their service lives before replacements are ready.
Across Nato, Rutte himself admits that spending alone is not enough. The alliance lacks the weapons and equipment it needs “at the scale or speed that our security requires”. Russia is devoting around 40 per cent of its budget to defence and producing military equipment around the clock, while China, North Korea and Iran are expanding their capabilities and cooperating more closely.
The Iran war has added urgency – and bitterness – to that debate.
Trump remains unpredictable
European governments were angered that they were not properly consulted before the US entered the conflict, while Trump was enraged that several allies refused to support American operations. The disagreement ruptured some of the personal relationships Trump had developed with European leaders and prompted fresh attacks on the alliance from Washington.
The conflict has also highlighted a more practical danger. America and Europe are drawing on limited stocks of missiles and ammunition at the same time that Ukraine still needs huge quantities of weapons. Ukraine will provide the most immediate test of whether Trump’s attitude towards Europe has genuinely shifted or is merely passing through a more favourable phase.
At the recent G7 summit, Trump showed that he could be persuaded. His talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were more constructive than many Europeans had feared, while Ukraine’s improved battlefield position has complicated the President’s previous insistence that Kyiv holds no cards.
European leaders hope Ankara can turn the improved mood into practical decisions: faster weapons deliveries, continued financing for Ukraine, renewed pressure on Moscow and perhaps support for producing more American-designed systems in Europe.
There is already a model for a more European-led effort. European governments are increasingly paying for American weapons for Ukraine, allowing Washington to maintain production while shifting the financial burden across the Atlantic.
If Rutte gets his way, Trump will praise the spending increases, claim credit for forcing Europe to act and leave Turkey satisfied. That would count as success.
But beneath the presidential management and carefully drafted communiqué, a more consequential transition is accelerating. Nato is gradually becoming an alliance in which Europe, including Britain, will be expected not only to pay more for its own defence, but to command more of it, supply more of it and eventually lead more of it.