NATO Modernizes What It Builds Together, and Fractures Who It Arms

The Ankara summit produced a set of multinational procurement projects that are, by all appearances, real. The Airbus A400M military transport program spans seven nations ^[1]. A new initiative called Front Door is meant to cut the procurement red tape that slows joint purchasing ^[2]. Turkish defense firms Aselsan, Roketsan, and TÜBİTAK are designated the backbone of the alliance's deterrence architecture ^[1]. Secretary General Mark Rutte calls these projects "genuinely made in NATO," and at the level of who builds what together, that is not an empty phrase ^[1]. But every signature security decision at the summit was bilateral, made entirely outside that procurement framework, and mostly by one man talking to another. Start with the sharpest case. Trump plans to restore Turkey's access to the F-35 stealth fighter program, reversing the ban he himself imposed in 2019 after Turkey bought Russian S-400 missile defense systems ^[3][4]. The ban was a congressional mandate requiring "verifiable cessation" of the Russian system. Turkey still has the S-400s. Its defense minister proposed using them "as standalone units without NATO network integration," which is to say: keeping them ^[4]. The restoration is not a NATO decision. Erdogan told reporters that Trump had given Turkey "a separate promise on the F-35 issue" ^[5]. Trump framed a related $700 million jet engine sale as a personal reward for Erdogan staying neutral during the Iran war.

Erdogan is a great leader, a very strong person… Everything I’ve ever asked from him, he’s done. — Donald Trump

The State Department bypassed Congress entirely on the arms sale, providing no written rationale and refusing briefings. Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the department "did not even attempt to justify its decision" ^[6]. The bilateral channel evaded both legislative and alliance oversight. And the objections came from both sides of NATO's border. Greece, a fellow member, protested the F-35 restoration on Aegean military-balance grounds ^[3]. Israel, not a member but the alliance's closest non-member partner, went further. Netanyahu personally urged Trump to block the sale, warning it would upset the regional power balance and erode Israel's qualitative military edge ^[7]. A non-NATO ally objecting to a NATO member's rearmament inside the alliance's own summit is unusual enough. What makes it stranger is that Erdogan, the leader receiving the F-35s, openly declared that "Israel must be stopped" ^[8]. The same weapon that one U.S. partner says threatens it is being handed to another U.S. partner who says that first partner should be stopped. Greece's response to Turkish rearmament shows how the bilateral pattern replicates itself. Unable to get NATO's procurement framework to mediate the Turkey-Greece military balance, Athens is building its own defense architecture entirely outside the alliance. It is constructing the €3.5 billion Achilles Shield system with Israeli-supplied anti-drone and anti-ballistic missile capabilities, turning to a non-NATO partner for protection against a fellow NATO member ^[3]. And in April, Greece and France renewed a €3 billion bilateral mutual-defense pact, including 24 Rafale fighters, four frigates, and a permanent French deployment in Cyprus, partly as a counterweight to Turkey and partly as a hedge against American reliability ^[9]. That pact predates the F-35 restoration announcement, but the S-400 and F-35 tension has been building since 2019. The pattern, not the single event, is what drives Greece's hedging. Meanwhile, the United States is simultaneously cutting its collective fighter presence from the same continent. The Pentagon is withdrawing roughly 50 fighter jets, 11 reconnaissance aircraft, eight refueling tankers, a carrier, a submarine, and a bomber group from NATO Europe, redirecting them to the Indo-Pacific ^[10]. The bilateral arms channel to one member is expanding as the collective U.S. fighter commitment to all of them shrinks. NATO's top commander says European allies have "largely filled the gaps" in a matter of weeks, and the UK has increased its own F-35 and carrier readiness ^[11]. That is a genuine counterargument: the de-Americanization may be working at the capability level even as it frays at the political level. But capability substitution is not the same as political coherence, and it does not answer the question of who decides which member gets which weapons. The same bilateral pattern runs through the summit's other headline decisions. Trump ruled out Ukrainian NATO membership, overriding the alliance's stated position, and is using the Ankara gathering as the stage for bilateral U.S.-Russia-Ukraine peace diplomacy that excludes NATO from the outcome ^[12][13]. European support for Ukraine is fragmenting along national lines: Italy blocked the 2027 financial pledge, the Netherlands declared it was "at our limit" after €9.1 billion spent, and Poland and the Czech Republic voiced similar exhaustion ^[12]. Ukraine, reading the room, has pivoted its own diplomacy toward Turkey and the Gulf states for drone technology and peace mediation, building bilateral security relationships outside both NATO and the United States ^[14]. Even Rutte's "NATO 3.0" modernization framework, the umbrella over all the procurement achievements, is held together by personal flattery of Trump. Rutte called him "the leader of the free world" and presented a gold-lettered report titled "The Trump Trillion" ^[15]. Trump's stated demand has shifted from money to personal loyalty. The alliance's modernization architecture, in other words, rests on a bilateral personal relationship, not on institutional strength that outlasts the individuals in the room. Turkey's own defense minister, hosting the summit that enshrines a 5 percent spending target, undercut that premise by saying "spending money alone does not produce deterrence" ^[1]. It is an honest observation from the country that is simultaneously being made the alliance's indispensable industrial partner and rewarded with F-35 restoration outside the alliance's own framework. Turkey is unveiling a new military hub at the summit and preparing to lead the Allied Reaction Force in 2028 ^[16][1]. The same country that still operates Russian air defenses and whose president says Israel must be stopped is now the summit's central player. There is a split among allies on how to handle this. Belgium signed nine defense agreements with Turkey and pushed for Turkish inclusion in the EU's €150 billion SAFE defense initiative, with Brussels calling it "a main goal for the upcoming NATO summit" ^[17]. Greece threatens to veto that same inclusion ^[18][9]. The Turkey-Greece fault line runs through every layer of European security architecture, and the alliance has no mechanism to resolve it because the decisive arms decision was never an alliance decision to begin with. What the Ankara summit reveals is not a failing NATO. The procurement projects are multinational and, by the evidence, functional. What it reveals is a structural split between what NATO builds together and who NATO arms together. The procurement framework modernizes the alliance's industrial base. The security decisions, one after another, are bilateral, transactional, and made over the objections of the very allies the procurement framework is supposed to protect. The same weapons, the same summit, the same alliance, doing both things at once. The next observable test is whether Greece carries through on its veto threat against Turkish entry into the EU defense initiative, and whether the F-35 restoration survives a congressional challenge when lawmakers return. Both will show whether the bilateral channel can hold against the institutional pushback it bypassed to get this far.