The Summit With Two Tracks and Only One That Works

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte framed the Ankara summit as delivering three things: "transformation in defence investment, revolution in defence industry, affirmation of our enduring support to Ukraine" ^[1]. The first two are measurable. The third is a word. Turkey will unveil a military hub at the summit ^[2]. Canada will launch a $133 billion Defence Bank ^[3]. A defense industry forum is expected to produce signed multi-billion-dollar contracts ^[4]. The Ukraine component has no comparable deliverable — only what Rutte himself called "affirmation," a statement of feeling, not a contract ^[1]. That word choice is not carelessness. It reflects a gap that has widened across months of simultaneous effort on two tracks — one to make European allies spend more on defense, the other to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine — that the Ankara summit puts on the same stage for the first time. The spending track has a complete incentive structure. The carrots are concrete: days before the summit, the Trump administration notified Congress of a $700 million jet engine sale to Turkey, using a process that bypassed the normal congressional review. Trump framed the sale as a reward for Erdogan's compliance — he stayed out of the Iran conflict when Trump asked ^[5].

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

The sticks are equally concrete. The Pentagon drafted a memo suggesting Spain's suspension from NATO after it refused the 5 percent spending target, and the US threatened to relocate its bases from Spain to Morocco ^[6]. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the transaction explicit: where allies do not spend with urgency, American dues contributions will go down ^[7]. The Pentagon has already begun cutting its force contributions to the alliance ^[8]. US Ambassador Whitaker called the summit a "report card" — allies must show roadmaps to 5 percent ^[9]. And the spending track produces results. Allies committed $250 billion in additional spending over two years, $90 billion of it last year alone ^[4]. Bulgaria committed to raising its spending from 2 percent to 5 percent ^[4]. The pressure is deep enough to change constitutions, not just budgets: Lithuania is moving to repeal its constitutional ban on nuclear weapons and foreign bases, a step requiring two parliamentary supermajorities, while Finland ended its nuclear restrictions the day before ^[10]. In the UK, both the Defence Secretary and the Armed Forces Minister resigned over the funding gap created by the scramble to produce a Defence Investment Plan before the summit ^[7]. The mediation track has none of this. No carrots, no sticks, no roadmaps, no report card. Trump's own language on Ukraine is the language of trying, not compelling ^[11]. His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, named the impasse plainly: each side is asking for things the other will not give up ^[12]. Russia characterized the peace process as a "situational pause" and demanded Ukraine's surrender as a prerequisite for talks ^[13]. Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia exchanged massive strikes ahead of the summit — Russia launching 2,200 drones in a single week, Zelenskyy reduced to pleading for Patriot interceptors, warning that any delay with air-defense missiles means lost lives ^[14][15]. Months of phone calls between Trump, Putin, and Zelenskyy have produced zero territorial progress. Here is where the contradiction becomes institutional, not accidental. Even within the spending track — the one that works — the single component that would directly fund Ukraine's war was killed. Rutte proposed that each NATO ally dedicate 0.25 percent of GDP to Ukraine aid, a plan worth roughly $143 billion a year. Five allies — the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Canada — blocked it under NATO's unanimity rule, which lets any single member veto alliance-wide decisions ^[16]. So the allies who comply on the general 5 percent defense target refuse to pay for Ukraine's war specifically. The instrument that works doesn't serve Ukraine. The instrument that serves Ukraine doesn't work. The NATO 3.0 strategy, endorsed at the B9-plus-Nordic summit in Bucharest in May, explains why. It explicitly frames European rearmament as enabling "the United States to pivot toward other strategic theaters" ^[17]. The spending track's stated purpose is burden-sharing to free the US for other priorities — not Ukraine's defense. Zelenskyy attended the B9 summit as a supplicant seeking resources, not as a beneficiary of the spending track's outputs ^[17]. Trump has also weakened the one lever he retained on Russia. In April, his administration extended a sanctions waiver on Russian oil, a move Zelenskyy condemned as giving Russia $10 billion to fund military strikes ^[18]. The waiver serves a domestic purpose — stabilizing energy prices — but it drains pressure from the mediation track at the moment that track most needs it. The Ankara summit puts both tracks on one stage, and the asymmetry is visible in the agenda itself. The spending track delivers signed contracts, constitutional changes, spending roadmaps, and institutional launches. The mediation track delivers phone calls. Rutte's own framing confirms the hierarchy: "transformation" and "revolution" for spending, "affirmation" for Ukraine ^[1]. What follows from this is a question the summit will not answer. If the alliance can coerce its own members into changing their constitutions but cannot produce a single enforceable outcome for Ukraine, then the enforcement mechanism and the war it is supposed to support run on separate rails. The Ankara summit does not bridge that gap. It makes it harder to miss.