Make the Ankara Summit About European Defense Autonomy

When NATO convenes in Ankara this week, it will do so at a low point in the alliance’s modern history. The transatlantic relationship has already careened toward a breaking point on multiple occasions in 2026. The lowest ebb came earlier this year when the United States threatened to seize Greenland, the territory of a fellow NATO country.

Compounding the political turbulence is a sobering military reality: Serious doubts persist about Europe’s ability to deter, let alone repel, a Russian act of aggression on the alliance’s eastern flank. As the Ankara summit may be the last annual NATO gathering for some time, now is the moment to chart a more sustainable path for Europe’s defense—a path that allows Europe to take charge of the continent’s conventional defense and become a more capable ally to the United States.

The End of Wishful Thinking

European leaders should recognize that a return to the previous status quo is unlikely. Even under a more accommodating administration, the structural forces behind Washington pushing Europe to take responsibility for its own defense will grow. The Iran war has badly depleted U.S. stockpiles of air defense interceptors and precision munitions, and the Pentagon will likely spend years prioritizing replenishment over foreign military sales to European partners. Strategic competition with China continues to animate U.S. trade, technology, and defense policy across both parties, and the Indo-Pacific theater, as well as other theaters, will absorb a growing share of Washington’s attention. Moreover, the Trump administration’s hostile approach to Europe will likely continue, whether on defense, technology, or economic policy.

Europe should therefore move with urgency to prepare for a future in which the United States plays a minimal role in the conventional defense of the continent. Rather than approaching Ankara as another exercise in placating President Trump with symbolic communiqué language and short-term concessions, NATO’s European allies should make clear that they are ready to take the reins. Doing so requires more than the headline defense spending pledges of recent summits, whose effects on Europe’s readiness to fight remain unclear and whose implementation continues to assume substantial U.S. enabling support.

European allies should instead aim to advance three overarching priorities in Ankara.

Develop a Transition Plan to Implement Burden Shifting

First, European allies should present the Trump administration with a comprehensive burden-shifting plan for transatlantic defense. Europe needs a credible roadmap to assume responsibility for its own conventional defense, with clear timelines and milestones for taking over the critical enablers that currently underwrite NATO operations (for example, command and control, intelligence and targeting capabilities that facilitate long-range strike, airborne early warning capabilities, and aerial refueling). These capabilities cannot be developed in a crisis, and the United States has signaled that it will not indefinitely provide them. 

One pragmatic option, as recently presented by Luis Simón and Stephen G. Brooks in Foreign Affairs, entails a structured arrangement through which European allies cofinance the U.S. enabling infrastructure underpinning NATO’s collective defense. Payments delivered in phases, conditioned on continued full U.S. provision, would literally raise the cost of disengagement: Cutting off Europe would mean forfeiting a lucrative long-term funding stream. Integrating subregional coalitions of European countries into NATO’s command structure would also be a worthwhile agenda item in Ankara to hedge against U.S. disengagement.

A Roaring European Defense Industrial Base

Second, Europe’s major powers should use the Ankara summit to formalize a political compact placing the European defense industrial base on a wartime footing. Defense industry executives have been clear about what they need to expand capacity at the speed required: long-term contracts that justify capital investment, predictable demand signals across multiple budget cycles, and government action to shore up supply chains for critical raw materials and components. Crucially, this effort must truly incentivize consolidation through European capitals ceding some national control over procurement, as national biases have been a key driver of inefficient spending. Europe’s highly fragmented defense industry has thus produced a myriad of duplicative platforms, making it difficult to achieve speed, affordability, and interoperability at scale. For example, analysis by McKinsey suggests that supply chain consolidation of four critical upstream segments could deliver €45 billion in cumulative savings by 2030.

For the most acute capability gaps, such as in air defense munitions and long-range precision fires, Europe should leverage the latent organizational and fiscal capacity of the European Union to launch crash production programs. A burden-shifting roadmap should also include long-term European commitments to Ukraine’s defense and economic recovery, with particular emphasis on building Ukraine’s domestic defense industry and integrating it with the European defense industrial base. Ukrainian production lines, hardened by three years of war, represent an opportunity Europe cannot forgo.

This kind of political agreement among the continent’s principal military powers would do more than any communiqué to convince industry, allies, and adversaries alike that Europe is serious and committed to a cohesive and coordinated rearmament process. It would also send a useful signal to Washington: European leaders are not seeking to prolong a dependency Americans increasingly resent, but to manage its unwinding responsibly.

Address the Turkey-EU Question

Third, Ankara itself offers a natural venue to address the question that Turkey poses to European defense, which has long been an obstacle to deeper European defense integration. In particular, tensions between Turkey and Cyprus remain a key obstacle to more productive NATO-EU relations. 

Allies should revisit the Berlin Plus agreement, which provides the foundation for cooperation between the European Union and NATO in crisis management and enables limited use of NATO structures by EU member states. Berlin Plus was negotiated in the aftermath of the 1999 Washington summit, when the United States was reluctant to engage in military operations in the Balkans and the sense was that Europe might need to act independently. Not wanting the European Union to recreate or duplicate NATO command structures, it was agreed that the bloc could draw on NATO military assets for crisis management missions.

However, the current Berlin Plus framework is no longer fit for purpose. It is a nonbinding political declaration adopted chiefly with out-of-area peacekeeping operations in mind, provides NATO a de facto “right of first refusal,” and requires unanimous NATO approval for the use of alliance resources in EU operations. Turkey’s vetoes through NATO have previously delayed the use of alliance assets in EU military operations on several occasions, such as in the European Union Police Mission (EUPOL) Afghanistan and the EU-led Operation Concordia.

One potential plan B for Europe if the United States is not fully committed to NATO is obvious: to provide EU member states greater access to NATO structures, with or without the United States, for a broader range of military scenarios. In a crisis contingency, NATO assets could prove crucial to a military operation that the United States doesn’t want to engage in.

Accounting for undue duplication of crisis management resources in the NATO-EU relationship has mostly been very sensible. But the need for unanimous NATO agreement to enable the European Union to take greater responsibility for European defense needs to be addressed. NATO should also be much more coordinated and engaged in EU defense initiatives, for example by ensuring that the European Union’s institutional advantage in funding and military mobility schemes is leveraged to its full potential. Finally, NATO and the European Union should be able to share classified information to a far greater extent—a prospect that remains opposed by some nonmember states in both organizations.

Show of Resolve

None of this amounts to capitulation to the Trump administration or wishful nostalgia for a pre-2016 alliance. These priorities would, rather, serve as a concrete program for the accelerated burden shifting that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic now privately acknowledge is necessary. They would also offer European leaders, many of whom are contending with restive electorates and accusations of strategic drift, a tangible demonstration of resolve and effectiveness.

Through a series of minor crises, NATO’s European members have so far managed to avoid a catastrophic and potentially irreversible rupture with Washington. By not developing a backup plan to defend themselves, they are pushing their luck. Moreover, the Trump administration should recognize that Secretary General Mark Rutte’s deferential overtures toward President Trump are undermining efforts to deliver on burden shifting.

The Ankara summit is, in all likelihood, Europe’s last opportunity to shape an orderly transition of responsibility for the defense of Europe—rather than have one imposed on it by a revisionist Washington.

Max Bergmann is the director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Otto Svendsen is an associate fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS.