CSIS Press Briefing: Previewing the NATO Summit

This transcript is from a CSIS press briefing hosted on July 1, 2026.

Nina Prieur: Hello, everyone. And welcome to the CSIS Press Briefing “Previewing the Upcoming NATO Summit.” I’m Nina Prieur, communications director at CSIS. And I’m joined today by a great lineup of experts who will share their insights into what we’re looking for going into the NATO summit, what we can expect to come out of the summit, and more.

Just a couple housekeeping notes before we get started. Each of our speakers will give several minutes of introductory remarks, after which we’ll turn to your questions. If you want to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A window or raise your hand to ask it verbally. We’ll be distributing a transcript of today’s call shortly after its conclusion, and the transcript will also be made available on CSIS.org.

With that, let’s go ahead and get started. I’ll turn first to Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department and Harold Brown chair at CSIS. Seth, over to you.

Seth G. Jones: Thanks, Nina. I’ll try to be brief to everyone. And thank you all for joining.

What I’d like to briefly talk about is actually an analysis that we have coming out later today. I can’t get into specifics because it won’t get released until around noon today. But what I can talk about is, you know, our overall judgments on the state of the war in Ukraine, which are expected, in our conversations with senior European defense officials and NATO defense officials, will be an important part of the conversation is how to continue to aid Ukraine. I mean, in some ways for NATO this is a good story over the last couple of months.

A couple of things just to highlight. I think it is – it is – I’ll just put this in my – sort of from my perspective because CSIS doesn’t take positions itself on these issues, and we may get some slightly different views among panelists here. My view is that the Russians are not winning the war. And because they’re not winning the war, I think one can make an argument that they are losing. What we’re seeing is significant casualties, even over the course of 2026, and fatalities. We’ve seen actually a decline in Russian control of territory. We’ve seen really significant challenges, in Russian casualty rates now surpassing recruitment rates for Russian soldiers. We’ve seen a major increase in the Russian-Ukraine casualty rates, the ratios. Which, according to our assessments, have risen from somewhere between two-to-one to three-to-one for most of the war – that is two Russian or Ukrainian casualties – sorry – two Russian casualties for every one Ukrainian or three-to-one, depending on which month – rising – you know, nearly tripling for the last couple of months in 2026. So, again, we’re releasing numbers shortly on the exact battlefield deaths, casualty rates, ratio numbers, average rates of advance.

But overall, what the data indicates is the Russians are performing terribly in 2026. They are losing ground, their blood costs are the highest they’ve been of the war, and I think when you also overlay that with some of the economic challenges that the Russian population faces – sputtering economy, higher prices on groceries and other expenses, tax increases, significant internet restrictions, oppressive crackdown on freedom of speech – I think the overall indication is that the Russians are at least at this point – and no war is ever linear – the Russians are actually losing right now.

I think this is an important opportunity to backstop the – and support the Ukrainians. There are going to be challenges as our CSIS analysis – analyses have talked about on, and Jerry may talk more about this, the U.S. has burned through some of its offensive munitions and certainly defensive as part of Epic Fury.

So it will create some challenges on how much it can provide, for example, for Patriots or for THAAD, but Patriots, for example, which the Ukrainians are asking for in air defense systems.

But I think there is a strong rationale to continue to provide the Ukrainians help. One big area I think which will be an important part of the NATO discussions are all of the materiel that’s going into Ukraine’s industrial base, particularly for short-, medium- and long-range strike. The campaign that the Ukrainians are striking, we’ve got – we’ve got over 20,000 strikes that we’ve got in a database of Ukraine against Russian targets.

We’re seeing energy infrastructure hit – oil refineries, pumping stations, fuel storage facilities – industrial base targets – missile and drone production facilities – logistics targets – rail lines, roads, bridges – and then military bases and military targets such as command and control facilities, ships, including in the Black Sea, and then a range of the targets we’re seeing now from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Crimea as being actually quite effective in air interdiction as the Ukrainians have now substituted strike aircraft, which is the traditional classic platform in air interdiction, now with drones and domestically-produced missiles.

So a range of different aid that I think NATO countries will continue to provide. I’ll be in theatre, you know, actually with Jerry shortly to look at some of these actions. This I think’ll be a part of the NATO discussions we’re hearing at the summit and, again, the story I think that NATO is looking at right now for Ukraine is a Ukraine that is having some effects – some significant effects on the battlefield and some of the worst historical numbers on rates of advance of battlefield casualties that I have ever seen, certainly since World War II, that the Russians are now facing.

So with that, Nina, I’m going to hand it back to you. Happy to take any other questions on defense or other related issues, but that’s kind of an overview of some of our kind of news breaking analysis we’ve got coming out at noon today.

Dr. Prieur: Thanks very much, Seth.

Next, we have Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program in the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European studies at CSIS. Max, please go ahead.

Max Bergmann: Thanks, Nina. Thanks, Seth.

So NATO summit coming next week. This represents – I think the Europeans feel pretty good about having gotten through the G-7 summit and now turning to NATO, hoping to get through it with it being a fairly boring, technocratic summit with not a lot of drama for you all to cover – at least, that’s the hope. It’s never quite clear with President Trump what will transpire at these summits. He’s showing up as well as Hegseth and Rubio, so we have the full slate of senior U.S. officials going.

You know, on offer or on the agenda is a fairly technocratic agenda. NATO normally does not have summits every year. The NATO summits usually happen somewhat sporadically. Usually at the beginning of a new presidential administration we’ll have a summit, then there might be a gap. We’ve been in this sort of unusual pace, partly because of – largely because of the war in Ukraine – that since 2022 there’s been a summit ever year. There was a summit, obviously, here in Washington in 2024, to mark the 75th anniversary. The summit last year was seen, especially by the Trump administration, as a major breakthrough, as Europeans committed to spend 3 ½ percent on core defense spending, and then 5 percent on sort of additional defense-related stuff. Which, you know, is a fairly wide – has sort of a wide aperture.

And one of the topics for this summit is going to be defense spending again, as well as defense procurement. And we’ll see how that goes, because some European countries have spent more, particularly Nordic countries that have a lot of fiscal space. Other countries have not, such as France and especially the U.K., which is about to announce – or it’s just announced a new defense investment pledge, but that defense investment pledge not being as large as the outgoing Defense Secretary Healey had wanted prompted his resignation, as well as perhaps other political considerations as well. But so you have a lot of political turmoil in the U.K. Not as much progress in increasing defense spending as the Trump administration might want. And so I think, you know, we’ll see how that issue is treated at this summit.

The other major topic is going to be this, quote/unquote “NATO 3.0,” which the Trump administration is talking about. Essentially, this is about implementing burden shifting, as they call it, to shift the onus of military responsibilities from the United States to Europe for the defense of Europe. And a lot of this is more in the kind of technocratic, military planning domain of, you know, how many forces are Europeans providing, increasing the, you know, NATO defense planning, increasing the share that Europe is supposed to provide. And I think all of that generally is well and good. There is a larger, though, political question. So as much as, you know, military planners can be devoted to kind of shifting the balance here, is NATO is structured around the United States – is fundamentally structured around the United States, and has been for the last 77 years.

And that’s how we have wanted it. That is how we have insisted on NATO being structured. And so what you have is you have, you know, 31 countries dependent on docking into the United States. And so if you pull the U.S. back – or maybe not fully out, but back – how do these countries work together on defense? It is a really important political question, one that Europeans are currently reckoning with. Because what we see in Europe is not a lot of European defense cooperation. While Europeans cooperate in basically every other sector and are integrated in every other sector through the EU, that is not the case on defense. That we have told the EU not to get involved in defense.

And so what we have is a situation where it’s not clear how this actually all fits together, if the U.S. is going to play a much more distant role. And so there’s big questions about how distant a role will we play? How much are we going to pull back from our participation? And you see, I think, a real concerted effort from the Secretary General Mark Rutte to keep the U.S. engaged as much as possible, to really engage with President Trump. And so there hasn’t been a lot of talk of a, quote/unquote, “plan B” in NATO of what should Europe do if the United States decides that it does not want to be engaged, if the president decides he does not want to be engaged in defending Europe. If 200,000 Russians appear on the border of the Baltic states in 2028, how does Europe respond to that?

And this is causing a lot of consternation amongst European military planners, European leaders. And I think we’re beginning to see a lot of machinations in Europe about how to structure their defense operations and foreign policy in a world where they’re not going to be turning to the United States for leadership. Now, a lot of uncertainty, but that’s sort of the backdrop in which the summit is happening. And one interesting aspect that is not going to be on the agenda, which is actually quite shocking, is one of the big obstacles to increasing NATO-EU cooperation is Turkey – is the Turkey-Cyprus conflict, which has prevented basic bureaucratic cooperation between NATO and the EU. They can’t really share classified information.

So now that we have the EU spending billions of euros – and in fact, one of the issues about Ukraine support involves the EU, which allocated 90 billion euros to support Ukraine now that we are not financially supporting Ukraine anymore, is the EU is going to provide money to NATO through this PURL Initiative to buy some of the precious weaponry that the U.S. is running out of, and Patriot interceptors and other such systems, to supply to Ukraine. So this would strike me as a real opportunity for NATO and the EU to begin to work better together to remove some of the kind of constraints on the cooperation, because now there’s real money at stake and the EU, frankly, is now leading the way in providing the financial support to Ukraine. So this is, I think, a big – a really interesting summit in how some of those technocratic questions evolve.

Again, maybe to close, most European leaders are just hoping that the summit has a generally feel-good atmosphere and that it’s essentially focused on the small stuff. I should say that it would not surprise me if this is, frankly, the last NATO summit of the Trump administration, of Trump’s presidency. There is talk from the U.S. side of trying to cancel the summit that was tentatively planned for next year in Albania. Frankly, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think a lot of European leaders would jump at – jump at that. And then there’s a question of whether there would actually be a summit in 2028 during a U.S. election year. So this may be – this may be the kind of last hurrah. And, if so, then that may raise the stakes for what does President Trump, what is the message that he wants to convey.

Maybe I’ll leave it there.

Dr. Prieur: Thank you, Max.

Next we have Jerry McGinn, director of the Center for the Industrial Base and senior fellow at CSIS. Jerry, the floor is yours.

Jerry McGinn: Great. Thanks, Nina.

Yeah. So we’ve been doing analysis on the – on the industrial base, principally the U.S. but also some of the European industrial bases, NATO countries, specifically focusing on in November of last year Secretary Hegseth called for the U.S. – for the industrial base be on a, quote, “wartime footing.” So we’ve done analysis to understand, OK, it’s been eight months; you know, how are we doing?

So, in terms of – we looked at defense spending. We’ve looked at the shape of the industrial base, munitions as Seth alluded to, supply chains, and then cooperations with allies and partners. So I’ll touch on each of those sequentially.

So in terms of defense spending, you know, the – you know, we’ve looked at the – now the current spend data, not the – not the planned spending. You know, the NATO summit called for, you know, the 3 ½ percent on defense, and many of the member countries are, you know, above 2 (percent) now and reaching for that, have goals to get there. But if you look at the actual numbers through 2025, you know the U.S. has been steady at about 3 percent, right, and not barely going up; if anything, went down last year. Now, there may be a significant increase this year if the president’s budget is fully enacted, which would get us to about over 4.6 percent of GDP, which would be the highest level seen since the – really, the height of the Gulf War and after 9/11 and, really, the Reagan buildup. We’ll see if we get there. The prospects don’t look that strong. But the trend is there.

On the – looking at NATO countries in terms of defense spend, the core NATO countries, most of the spend the last several years is still pretty flat, but there’s a direct proximity between the borders of Russia and NATO’s defense spending. You look at the Baltics, you look at Poland, look at the Scandinavian countries, their defense spending as a percent of GDP has significantly upticked. And the projections for other countries have been going up, but the spending thus far has not matched – not matched the proclamations.

If you look at the actual shape of the industrial base, there’s been a – this is focusing on the U.S., but if you look at – the U.S. industrial base has had a – despite the past decade of efforts to bring in new entrants into the defense industrial base, there’s been an actual decline in new entrants. That has turned around in the last couple years. We’ve had a positive uptick of new companies entering the industrial base. Some of those are from NATO countries, even, kind of foreign companies selling to the U.S., or the like. And that’s helped lead to a significant uptick in the amount of what we call nontraditional. These are the newer companies’ prime obligations. And they reached a record of 120 billion (dollars) in FY 2025.

Now, turning to munitions, munitions, there’s been significant usage and expenditure of these weapons. They were already low after Midnight Hammer. Epic Fury particularly decimated the interceptors ranks of THAAD and Patriots. But there was a significant set of a framework agreement signed earlier in the year that many of you all saw between the primes to already kind of get after these challenges. Some of these – Lockheed signed one of those deals as an actual UCA, or undefined contract action, last week. Those are going to take a while to build. And what that does is, when we talk about foreign military sales, it also reduces availability for allies and partners. But they are building those.

But the point I wanted to bring out is that, in addition to that, there’s a tremendous emphasis on what I call spreading magazine breadth. And that is different weapon systems that are kind of less expensive, lower cost, more producible. And that is things like the family of affordable mass munitions, which is really focusing on producible missiles that are lower cost, more common parts. You know, the build to print, essentially, so you can – so you can crank them out at a much higher production rate.

There’s also talk about, you know, kind of co-production of those and of traditional munitions in partner countries. You know, Patriots are already built – being built in Poland, and it’s long time been built in Japan. What are other opportunities there? And then some of the low cost – the really low-cost drones, you know, the drone dominance program, that one is well known. But the number-one provider of those is actually a U.K. company that has direct experience in the Ukraine. So anyways, that’s munitions. On supply chains, you know, it took us three-plus decades to get into some of these rare earth challenges. You know, there’s been tremendous change in scale of investment, from mine to magnet. But it’s going to be – it’s going to take years to get us out of this, even though there are significantly scaling investments.

And then finally, for allies and partners, the foreign military sales has increased almost 350 percent in the past decade. And there’s a tremendous appetite. One of the – despite the bilateral and, frankly, multi – the bad rhetoric at the top level, there’s a strong desire to increase kind of deals in the international defense collaboration space. And I think, with the establishment of an assistant secretary of war for international armies cooperation, you’re going to see more of an appetite for co-production efforts, deals such as ICE Pact, which involved, you know, the Canadians and the Finns. You’re going to see more of that going forward. And I think there’s some real opportunities there for NATO countries in in the international industrial collaboration. So I’ll stop there, Nina.

Dr. Prieur: Thank you, Jerry.

Let me quickly mention that after our next expert we’ll be turning to your questions. So if you’d like to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A window. Or you can always raise your hand to ask it verbally.

So, finally, we have Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at CSIS. Maria, please go ahead.

Maria Snegovaya: Thank you so much. So NATO summit takes place at the moment when battlefield momentum indeed attracts a lot of attention and is shifting in Ukraine’s favor. And while I absolutely agree with Seth that Russia is not winning this war, the strategic outlook still remains uncertain. And I’m sure that the NATO summit will be somewhat a reflection of these trends. So, what do I mean?

Definitely what we’ve seen, Russia’s spring 2026 offensive has generated slowest territorial gains in three years, significant, serious, extremely high Russian personnel losses, that Seth has flagged already. Crimea and the land bridge to the peninsula are under sustained Ukrainian long-range strike pressure. Ukraine has also significantly expanded production and deployment of advanced strike drones, including new platform such as the Hornet drone, which enables more effective mid-range strike operations into Russia. And on top of that, Russia is entering a period of stagnation, perhaps even borderline recession, with Ukraine’s attacks on refineries further exacerbating these trends and threatening a gasoline crisis.

All of this is true. However, the conflict remains far from over. The Kremlin, and Putin in particular, show few signs of their willingness to end the war. And just a reminder that on beyond its goals of subordinate Ukraine, Russia retains the aim of altering European security. And, somewhat paradoxically, as we show in our forthcoming report on ability to reconquer, Russia actually may be better position now to potentially represent asymmetric threat to NATO, and European allies in particular, than to battle-tested Ukraine.

We show that Russia retains the ability to adapt rapidly under combat conditions, scale in production of weapons and systems that proved effective, and combining its Soviet-style resource allocation with selective marketing mechanisms that allowed it to sustain over four years of this very extreme war, with all the serious losses. And the critical Western vulnerabilities that remain therefore represent potentially an advantage – an opportunity for Russia going forward. So all of that is likely to be a factor during the discussion at the NATO summit.

Hopefully, we will see growing allied unity, which we already witnessed at G-7 with the United States recently adopting a more allied-oriented posture, including supporting deliveries of long-range capabilities to Ukraine, allowing U.S. defense firms potentially to license production directly to European and Ukrainian manufacturers, and potentially incentivizing behind the scenes a stronger posture of Ukraine. All of that is true. But simultaneously, one should probably anticipate that under the NATO 3.0 approach the U.S. will be emphasizing allied burden sharing and even shifting, rather than making direct bilateral contribution to new funding mechanisms.

So what does it mean for Ukraine going forward and for NATO posture vis-à-vis Ukraine? First of all, we are likely to see growing emphasis on longer-term support in Ukraine – for Ukraine, understanding that Ukraine’s sustainability is also the matter of European security, given this symmetrical advantage that Russia has been accumulating vis-à-vis NATO that I flagged. However, that will likely to stop well short of offering pathway to near term NATO membership as there are still divisions among the allies on this particular issue. Ukraine is increasingly becoming a catalyst for NATO’s own transformation and offering very useful battle-tested advice, given its ability to refine its operational practices and strategic thinking in its war with Ukraine.

Key issues to watch in particular, deepening security integration of Ukraine with NATO institutions. We also likely to see more financial commitments of the NATO allies for Ukraine. There’s already a draft NATO summit document released that envisioned about $80 billion, or 70 billion euros, in military support for Ukraine in 2026 and 2027, that totals for two years over $160 billion, or 140 billion euros, in combined financial aid that comes from EU loans backed by proceeds from frozen Russian assets, and additional bilateral allied contribution. On top of that, in terms of nonlethal assistance, NATO’s comprehensive assistance package has already mobilized over 1.4 billion euros, or $1.6 billion, for Ukraine.

We’re also likely to see Black Sea security emphasized, given the location in Turkey and Ukraine’s recent advantages in that regard. Likely an announcement also will include NSPA-managed procurement of Patriot interceptors, continued delivery of ammunition, artillery, drones for Ukraine. For example, the U.K. already committed to provide about 150,000 drones and over 350 air defense missiles and radar systems by the end of 2026 for Ukraine. Increased support for Ukraine’s domestic defense innovation ecosystem, as Ukraine, indeed, is becoming a tech leader in the field of security. Greater coordination of allied purchases of U.S.-manufactured defense equipment.

Altogether, we are likely to see more emphasis on economic and military sustainability of Ukraine in light of this understanding that Russia continues to represent a very serious asymmetric threat to not just Ukraine, but NATO allied security. The key question for me personally will be – is whether allies are going to place greater emphasis on strengthening Ukraine’s air defenses, particularly in light of the upcoming winter. I’m yet to hear more, you know, concluded points on this matter and we should – the NATO allies probably should realize how serious the challenges that Ukraine is facing remain.

And I’ll stop here. Thank you.

Dr. Prieur: Thank you, Maria, and thanks to all of our speakers.

At this time, we’ll go ahead and open up for some questions, and as a reminder, if you want to ask a question please type it in the Q&A window or you can always raise your hand.

And I see we have a few that have come in already, so let’s kick off with a question here from George Condon. Max, you may want to take the lead on this one and then we’ll open it up. George asks: Can you talk about any damage done to the alliance by President Trump’s anger over help he wanted in Iran and his many public comments that we don’t need NATO and don’t get anything from it?

And can you put this into some historical perspective? How does it rank as a crisis compared to past flareups over missile deployments in France, limiting its role?

Mr. Bergmann: So it’s a very good question.

I mean, I think the – to just go back earlier just a few weeks before was the crisis over Greenland where you had a NATO member, Denmark, very concerned that the United States posed a threat to NATO territory, and that, I don’t think, was an abstract threat. It wasn’t seen as a joke, and I think they were seriously concerned and nervous that the United States might – that was considering military action to make Greenland a part of U.S. territory.

So in that sense, we posed a threat to NATO and that was – has been seen by many European countries. I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like that in the history of the alliance. You could argue that when de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s military command and kicked NATO out of the headquarters in Paris and NATO had to, in a year, move to Brussels, that that was a major crisis.

The way that crisis was treated at the time was, you know, LBJ basically took it in stride that didn’t want to – that if the United States picked a big fight with France that would actually, you know, play into de Gaulle’s hands. So everyone just sort of moved on quickly.

And part of the reason why France and de Gaulle were reacting is because that NATO was fundamentally an American-led alliance; they were reacting against that. So France pulling out, in fact, I think, in the end, just showed the weakness of France there and further consolidated the alliance around the United States. In some ways, I think it was a move that very much backfired.

And so – and because we were so central I don’t think it really threatened the alliance. You could go back with the Iran crisis, I think, to post-Iraq 2003 where, obviously, France and Germany decided to not join with the United States in that war and the alliance was very much divided.

I think that’s probably the most comparable crisis in terms of Iran. I think that was in some ways far more serious, just given the extent of the military operation that we were conducting as well as, you know, the sense that what is NATO’s purpose in the kind of post-Cold War era was very much up for discussion, particularly since Russia didn’t seem as much of a threat.

So I think the Iran crisis is very much a crisis but it’s in a crisis in the context of the Trump administration already de-prioritizing NATO, and in the context of Trump not seeing NATO as much of an asset to U.S. national security as other presidents.

I think for the Europeans it further exacerbated the tension that already existed because the president was sort of asking Europe to solve the Strait of Hormuz when they weren’t consulted about this war.

No one told them it was going to happen. The U.S. did not think that Europe was necessary, did not ask them or really work with Europe about basing and takeoff rights, and all sorts of other things that then Europeans suddenly found themselves basically involved in a conflict, maybe not directly in doing the fighting but indirectly in supporting U.S. military operations, which their publics found – most of their publics found – were against, and so put European leaders in a very tough political spot. And then it’s caused, you know, huge economic disruption.

So, you know, I think European leaders are very miffed about that. They may not express that at the NATO summit because, again, I think their goal is to just sort of get through this summit without much disruption, but that’s part of the reason why they’re not – we see fewer European leaders coming to Washington than we did, for instance, in 2025. And I think that’s a clear sign of how Europeans are right now feeling and thinking about Washington.

Dr. Jones: This is Seth Jones. I was just going to add a couple of points to George’s question. I know we’ve got others to move on to.

But first, I think I would argue that the Russian threat – still for many European countries the Russian threat in that 2029 to 2030 period – and I realize there’s a little bit of what looks like almost an oxymoron between the Russian struggles in Ukraine and assessments that over the next four to five years that the Russians could potentially recover with Chinese help and could pose threats, particularly to countries like the Baltics. So I think based on concerns about the Russian assessments, and frankly European and NATO intelligence assessments about the Russian threat in that ’20 to ’30 timeline, some of which have been released publicly, I think the role of the United States is important both from a conventional standpoint, particularly with brigade combat teams and some of the long-range strike capabilities, as well as the role of U.S. nuclear forces in Europe, still important to deter Russian actions. And so I think that the role – despite the president’s comments, despite Greenland, the Russian threat and U.S. military capabilities I think will still be important because of concerns about the Russian threat.

Second, very briefly, is there is a reality, and it’s sort of a difference between how some of the political figures talk about this – so the president, the vice president, Secretary Hegseth’s comments in Europe, including at Munich – and what I think is a relatively good day-to-day relationship between general flag officers, including in places like European Command, and actually U.S. intelligence agencies, which continue to have close relationships/working relationships with European and NATO countries. So I think there’s still a level of close working relationships that continues despite the political fray that I think is important to highlight.

But there are three – there are two issues – the third point – two issues to keep an eye on. One is kind of next-generation weapons systems. We’re hearing a lot of NATO countries now turning inward to either the Europeans, or in some cases to the Koreans or the Japanese or others, for next-generation weapons systems, which is something to keep an eye on – this touches on Jerry’s area – which could impact what the Europeans are willing to buy, especially next generation.

The second issue, which is in discussion right now within the Pentagon, is U.S. force posture in Europe. There is certainly a possibility that the U.S. force posture continues to decline in Europe after U.S. assessments, which would have concerning development, particularly if they’re brigade combat teams as well as air and naval capabilities that would be important to deter, or if deterrence fails to fight the Russians.

So, you know, those are a couple of things just in addition I think that are just helpful context. And, Nina, I’ll hand it back to you.

Dr. Prieur: Thanks, Seth.

Jerry, Maria, anything to add on this question?

(Pause.)

All right, we’ll move on to our next one. We have a question here from Jill Dougherty. She says: What is the level of development of Europe’s so-called drone wall? With spoofed drones violating European national borders, how prepared is Europe to protect against this? How integrated is the defense? Should NATO lead this? Max or Seth, you want to kick us off?

Dr. Jones: I mean, I can start.

Mr. Bergmann: Yeah, go ahead, Seth.

Dr. Jones: This is Seth. A couple of comments.

One is I would put all of this into a broader category of Russian sabotage and subversion. The drone incursions have been part of a much larger – we’ve got a dataset on this: number of Russian bombings in Europe in NATO countries; Russian assassinations, including against Russian defectors in countries like Spain; Russian attacks and threats against rail lines transporting weapons to Ukraine, undersea fiber optic cables, pipelines. So the this is all happening below the threshold of conventional war. During the Cold War, these Russian or Soviet efforts were called active measures, participated largely by the KGB. Now they’re largely by the GRU, the main intelligence directorate of the Russian Federation, but also some efforts led by the SVR and the FSB.

I think just briefly in answer to your – and I actually think with Russian struggles we’re probably going to see more of these kinds of activities. I find it actually likely that the Russians are going to expand these sort of what you might call horizontal attacks. They can threaten nuclear weapons and they have saber-rattled, but – boy, it would be a real gamechanger if the Russians were to use tactical nuclear weapons – but what they can do is expand these kinds of actions. And according to our numbers anyway, they have dramatically increased over the course of the war in Ukraine. I think we’ll probably see more of these kinds of actions.

I think there are individual member state efforts to increase their counter-drone capabilities and even air defense systems from Finland through the Baltics, Poland, and further south. Some of these are being done under the NATO auspices. NATO has, obviously, been important in conducting a range of operations like Baltic Sentry that have been involved in keeping an eye on critical infrastructure threats that the Russians pose. So I think – I think there should be an important role for NATO for continuing to protect its territory within Europe against Russian threats.

NATO’s got a structure to do this. Obviously, there are – there’s some – there’s some developments happening in the European Union as well. But I actually expect these kinds of actions, frankly, to probably increase as the Russians struggle in Ukraine.

Over.

Mr. Bergmann: Yeah, maybe just quickly. I mean, the “drone wall” phrase was used by Ursula von der Leyen last fall in her annual State of the Union address. And like the American president’s State of the Union, you sometimes throw out sort of big-sounding initiatives and then – (laughs) – and then the bureaucracy has to sort of race to keep up. You know, the EU now has a defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius. He’s the first defense commissioner the EU has had. And the EU has funding. And so a part of the drone wall was to initiate the EU taking kind of a research-and-development and defense investment focus on drone production.

Now, the drone innovation is moving so quickly that it might be moving, I think, maybe too fast for kind of an EU-led defense procurement program. But what the EU is doing is providing significant funding into Ukraine’s defense industry, particularly their drone industry. The EU, I think, just announced 3 billion euros, or roughly around that, into Ukraine’s defense industry for drone development. And so a lot of this is directed at kind of developing Europe – and by Europe, I am including Ukraine in that – its broader defense, its drone defense industrial production capabilities.

And as Seth mentioned, part of the reason for the drone wall concept was that Russia fired more than 20 Shahed drones into Polish – into Poland last fall. That was quite concerning. The Poles considered it perhaps the largest territorial attack on NATO in its history. It didn’t create much of a sound here in Washington or the Trump administration. The drones were unarmed, but it was a clear test of NATO’s capacity, capabilities. A lot of airports have been shut down by Russian drone activity.

So this is a major concern. And I think, especially if the war – as the war starts floundering increasingly in Ukraine, I think these are sort of things that we can expect to see more of from Russia. So there’s a lot of focus on drone development. Whether it matches the kind of drone wall concept outlined by von der Leyen, I think still remains to be seen.

Dr. Prieur: Thanks, Max.

Maria, any further thoughts on this one, or should we go to the next question?

Dr. Snegovaya: I think we’re good. Thank you.

Dr. Prieur: All right. Thank you.

We have a question here from Lara Jakes from New York Times. Jerry, you may want to kick us off here. Laura asked to please discuss expectations and potential deliverables from the industry forum that is apparently the headline event on the seventh.

Dr. McGinn: Yeah, no, great question. Yeah, this forum started, I don’t know, about better part of a decade ago now. And this is kind of – they’re really amping it up for this summit. I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of deliverables formally from this. This is generally a discussion forum. And the attempt for this one is to highlight progress towards the 5 percent goal, 3 percent on defense. So what I would look for on this would be instead of, like, talking about, you know, budgetary plans, but what are the real concrete opportunities that NATO countries or the alliance talks about in this forum? Like, what are their plans for, you know, addressing things like the integration of C2 technologies for the drone wall, or something? You know, places where NATO really can make a difference – collective procurement, or, you know, some of the areas, like, you know, cyber defense. So I would expect more of, you know, where you’d see kind of national kind of announcements on panels, or kind of NATO-wide kind of efforts at this effort – at this forum.

Mr. Bergmann: Yeah, maybe just to add quickly, you know, I think one thing to just watch out for is – and the Trump administration is not unique in doing this – as sort of deliverable inflation, so to speak, where deals that were probably already done or may have even been announced get sort of repackaged, or sort of notional deals are announced and agreed to but the specifics and details aren’t really actually, you know, worked out. And so, you know, some things that are announced may not actually, you know, happen or be real. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s trying to deceive anything, but there’s sort of – you know, a lot can evolve in arm sales negotiations. So we’ll see.

You know, the Trump administration, I think, has announced a big deal with Turkey. So there could be – there could be some very sizable announcements. And, you know, they probably – some of these might have been worked up already, but then you wait till the summit to announce them. But I think – to just echo what Jerry said – I think it’s, it’s more about the signals and direction of where things are headed in terms of co-production and broader defense industrial – transatlantic defense industrial cooperation.

Dr. McGinn: Yeah. And if I could just go back on this, I mean, like I said in my outline of opening remarks, the key, I think, is there could be real significant deal looking opportunities from the U.S. side going forward with this creation of this undersecretary of warfare international armaments cooperation. They’re going to be looking to do efforts. They’re not going to be big, multilateral. They’re mostly going to be bilateral. But I could see definitely more attention going to that. I’m not sure how much you’ll see July 7th, but I would just watch that space. Over.

Dr. Prieur: Thanks, Jerry and Max.

We have a question here from Elsa Ohlen, who asks: What will Turkey’s agenda be? And where are they going to use their leverage as host?

Mr. Bergmann: That’s a great question. Look, I think for Turkey part of this is to demonstrate the centrality of Turkey to the alliance. When countries host summits, they tend to want to shift the focus to some of the regional concerns or other issues that they may have. And so there may be more of a focus on Iran and Syria. But that’s not necessarily the sense that I’m getting. You know, if this were held in another Mediterranean country I could see more focus on the Mediterranean. But I think because Iran is so contentious, I’m not sure that will be a major focus. We’ll see. I think that’s one thing to watch, of how Erdoğan plays that.

But I think we have to acknowledge the domestic political situation in Turkey, where the opposition party’s headquarters are being raided, opposition political leaders are being jailed. There’s a consolidation of power around Erdoğan. Turkish democracy is being, in some ways, rolled back. And so this is sort of a great legitimizing opportunity for Erdoğan, to host a NATO summit, have everyone there, all the European leaders, and in the hopes that no one says anything about it, and it’s sort of therefore a quasi-endorsement of him and his administration. So I think that’s one aspect.

One thing not being discussed, as I mentioned, is the Turkey-Cyprus issue, which then prevents, you know, basic cooperation on the EU and NATO side. I haven’t seen any indication that that is going to be discussed. And you would think that a summit in Ankara would sort of put that at the top of the agenda of trying to figure out how can we move forward here. But so what you see, I think, is a sort of a deliberate effort to not rock the boat in any kind of – any direction. And we’ll see. You know, sometimes it gets windy when these summit start and the boat starts rocking. But we’ll have to see how that gets navigated.

But I think for Turkey – the one other thing I should say, I think Turkey does have a lot of defense industrial interests of trying to promote its defense companies, and so will probably try to leverage that. There’s also a lot of Turkish concerns, similar to the U.S., that the EU, by having now lots of money to spend on defense and defense procurement, and Turkey not being in the EU, will be shut out of European defense procurement, in part because EU is going to incentivize countries to start spending together on European producers. And so, you know, what we could see some – a push there. So I think defense procurement, legitimization of the regime are probably the core goals from Turkey.

Dr. Jones: Can I just add one other item, very briefly, that will likely come up? At least, you know, there’s a reasonable chance it will. Kind of along these lines. President Erdoğan has been working to get Turkey back in and readmitted to the F-35 fighter program, which the U.S. is apparently reviewing right now. Just for those who don’t remember, the Turkish decision to buy the Russian S-400 crossed many lines, including U.S. lines. And so I think part of the – you know, part of the hope in the not just the summit, but is that the Turks could buy the F-35, which is frankly proven itself incredibly useful in U.S. operations in Venezuela, last year in 2025 during Midnight Hammer, and then certainly this year in getting air dominance in Iran during Epic Fury, as the best fifth-generation platform that exists in the world today.

Dr. Prieur: Thanks, Seth. We are getting close to time here, so I think we’re going to have time for just one more question. We’ll see how it goes. But I’ll say in advance that I am sorry to anyone whose questions we didn’t get to this morning. Please, of course, feel free to reach out to us by email or phone following this briefing and we’ll be happy to connect you with our experts.

Question here from Mike Brest, opening for any of our scholars to jump in on this one. He asks: What does a successful NATO summit look like for European countries? What about specifically for the eastern flank? Max, do you want to kick us off?

Mr. Bergmann: Sure. So I think success for the eastern flank, in particular, is a United States that – is a summit that sort of there’s not much for you to write about, that looks very normal, where the president has expressed a commitment to NATO, support for Ukraine, and shows solidarity with Article Five. I think that’s one thing I would be watching. Last year, Trump said something very interesting about Article Five, which I think should be quite concerning to Europeans. When he was asked about it he said it, quote, “depends on your definition,” because Article Five, the text of it, does not actually require the United States to go to war to defend an ally. It says we will do things to help, but it doesn’t necessarily obligate us. And we had wanted to ensure that when we got NATO, the treaty, ratified in 1949.

So something that points to, you know, more of the rhetoric that you hear from previous presidents about ironclad commitment, other things like that, that’s what the Eastern Europeans are after, and a continued sort of sense from the U.S. that we will – that we will still keep U.S. forces in Europe. I’m not sure they’re going to get that. In fact, I would expect something more muddled where there’s a lot of trumpeting that Europe is taking over for the U.S. role, that Europe is stepping up and look what the Trump administration has accomplished in getting Europe to step up, but the U.S. remains committed as Europe is stepping up.

So I think there’ll be something in that range and I think, frankly, if that’s the end result that’s a success. I think Europeans view President Trump as quite combustible and are quite nervous that – and they know, I think, how his – I think they’re nervous that the way he feels about NATO is that this is not in – fundamentally, in U.S. interests and so are nervous that the summit could be more calamitous, especially now as there’s more, you know, domestic political pressure on European leaders to be seen as standing up to Trump.

That’s something we oftentimes don’t take into account in the United States, but European leaders have their own domestic constituencies. So, you know, some of it is if Trump acts in a certain way to certain European leaders, whether it’s Friedrich Merz who has, you know, tough state elections coming up this fall, Emmanuel Macron, others, about how they get on. The G-7 it all went fine so I think the expectation is this will go fine.

But so I think the hope – the basic hope for European leaders is that it’s basically kind of a normal sort of Thanksgiving dinner style summit. There’s maybe some passive aggressive or rude comments thrown around here or there but nothing explodes into an actual sort of fight so – and I think that would be deemed a success.

I think from – just quickly a last point on Seth’s point about the technocratic level, the working level, is quite – everything is moving quite in a solid direction. Totally agree. And so I think from their perspective, it’s a sign – you know, get leaders to sign off on the plans that everyone’s been working hard on.

And so if that happens and then there’s no big political blowups, I think this would be seen as a political success by European leaders and by the Trump administration as well.

Dr. Jones: I mean – this is Seth – just very briefly to reinforce Max’s point, I think the bar is quite low for the NATO summit, that as long as there aren’t major blowups – a Greenland-style blowup – there are going to be some comments, I’m sure. People are expecting comments about not enough European and NATO assistance during Epic Fury or defense spending that’s not as high in some countries – Spain, the U.K. – as some officials would like to see.

Maybe even some references to far-right political parties. I mean, there are lots of options, but no blowups I think would be the low bar that many would at least hope for.

Dr. Snegovaya: I agree with everything that’s been said by previous colleagues.

I will flag that, first of all, the U.S. posture on Ukraine has shifted quite dramatically in the last couple of months and I hope that continues, which plays a huge role in signaling NATO alliance, which has been flagged by previous speakers, really, of a very low bar to demonstrate the success of this alliance.

Mark Rutte plays an especially important role here. It seems like he’s found the right way to communicate with the U.S. administration in a way that essentially sustains this lack of public open disagreements.

But I will flag one more thing. It’s very important that the NATO allies pay attention to the forthcoming winter and Ukraine’s air defenses. So far I’ve not seen much of the public debate about it. The NATO discourse is focused traditionally on the lethal/non-lethal assistance to Ukraine.

But to the extent that this particular issue is addressed and there’s a certain path forward to solving it for Ukraine come next winter, I would definitely judge that meeting, that summit, a success. Thank you.

Dr. McGinn: Yeah, and I’ll concur as well.

The one thing I’m hoping for is that we don’t need another speech by Hegseth like he did at the defense ministers’ recent summit. You know, those are not counterproductive. But if that’s all that we get, then that’s – I think folks will just – you know, just move on. But yeah, I think we’re hoping for a kind of a low event kind of event.

Dr. Prieur: Thank you, Jerry. Thank you to all of our speakers and to our participants for joining us today for this call.

We are just getting to time here, so let me close by saying that we really do welcome all of the participants on this call to please reach out to us for anything we can do to be a resource on this issue. We’re here to help. And as I mentioned at the top of the call, we’ll have a transcript distributed to all of you, and it will also be available on CSIS.org.

So, with that, I hope everybody has a great rest of your day, and thanks again for joining us.

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