Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column.
As NATO leaders head home from their annual summit in Ankara, it seems they concluded these meetings really aren’t worth the effort — so long as Donald Trump is U.S. president.
They said just as much, ending the summit with a vague: “We look forward to our next meeting,” rather than reaffirm they would come together in Albania next year, as planned.
And they are right. Ankara, in many ways, was a lost opportunity.
The grandly named “Ankara Summit Declaration” is a one-page, six-paragraph boilerplate statement that isn’t worth the paper it was written on. And while reports from inside the three-hour leaders’ meeting suggested Trump was genial and even praised allies for increasing their defense spending, he unleashed a fusillade of invectives against those very same countries as soon as the cameras were on.
He scolded Britain, France, Germany and Belgium for not helping during the war in Iran. He called Spaniards “hopeless, bad people,” ordering an immediate halt to all trade with the country. And he once again said Greenland should be part of the U.S., claiming it was “very important” for America, “but it is not important for Denmark.”
It’s little wonder many NATO leaders now believe making these gatherings an annual ritual was a mistake, and that the alliance needs to go back to convening its summits only occasionally.
This was the norm not so long ago. It was under former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg that summits first became an annual affair. As a former Norwegian prime minister, he believed the organization’s work required convening his peers on a regular basis. His successor, Mark Rutte, shared that belief. Until now.
The former Dutch prime minister bent over backward to make sure Ankara would go smoothly. He defended Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran, against the views of nearly all other NATO countries. He twice traveled to Washington to convince Trump of NATO’s value. When Trump said he was “strongly considering pulling out of NATO,” miffed by Europe’s refusal to join the Iran conflict, Rutte again flew to Washington, pointing out the centrality of European bases and airspace to the war effort.
Just last month, Rutte traveled to Washington for an Oval Office presentation with gold-embossed cardboard posters, praising Trump for all he had done to encourage NATO countries to spend more on defense. Even in Ankara, Rutte urged the U.S. president to “grab the win,” having made NATO stronger by getting allies to pony up so much more.
All these efforts succeeded in achieving the summit’s core aim: A meeting that, in the words of Lithuania’s foreign minister, would “be as boring as it could be.”
But this isn’t what summits are for. And surely, 32 world leaders — and their large entourages —have better things to do than gather for two days, at great expense, only to ensure their meeting is “boring.”
Summit meetings are meant to serve a vital function for any organization. They are mechanisms for resolving differences, reaching decisions and setting the agenda for what needs to be done. NATO is no exception.
The 2022 Madrid summit forced allies to come to terms with Russia’s resurgent military threat and led to the adoption of a new strategic concept, updated for an era where all allies again recognize Moscow as the main threat to their security.
The 2023 Vilnius summit approved the adoption of new NATO plans for defending all alliance territory — the first such plan drafted by NATO military command since the end of the Cold War.
Even the 2025 Hague summit proved useful, forcing European allies to respond to Trump’s demand to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense upon his return to the White House.
The Ankara summit had no such purpose. Yes, some much-needed capability upgrades were agreed, and Rutte can celebrate the large defense spending increases that had been agreed since the previous summit. But there were no big decisions, and no new agenda was agreed.
It didn’t need to be that way. Rather than spending so much energy on trying to placate Trump, Rutte and other leaders could have spent the past year defining a roadmap for how and when Europe would take over core responsibilities for NATO’s defense.
They could have laid out when Europe would deploy the air, naval and land forces that the U.S. would need to withdraw; how it would fill gaps in the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities the U.S. uniquely provides; and what steps Europe needs to take to replace key U.S. positions within the integrated command structure.
Indeed, the idea of such a roadmap was first proposed by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius early last year, only to be dismissed for fear it would give Washington an excuse to withdraw its forces from Europe. But Trump doesn’t need an excuse to withdraw U.S. forces. He has already started.
The new reality is this: The U.S. is no longer a reliable ally. Even if a new president were to reaffirm America’s commitment to NATO and Article 5 (as Trump did in Ankara), Europe needs to take on far greater responsibility for its own defense.
Managing the transition from a U.S.-led to Europe-led alliance is job number one. And NATO doesn’t need its leaders to meet every year to get that done.
