EDITORIAL: Is Trump abandoning us? The eastern flank's fear and Europe's belated defense awakening

EDITORIAL: Is Trump abandoning us? The eastern flank's fear and Europe's belated defense awakening

Introduction: The question everyone is asking behind closed doors

The unspoken dread in every Allied capital

The question circulates in whispers through the corridors of every NATO foreign ministry, in the margins of every bilateral briefing, in the private assessments of every intelligence service on the Alliance's eastern flank. It is rarely asked in public because asking it too loudly might be interpreted as a sign of weakness — or, worse, might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But at the Ankara summit, with its glossy communiqués and carefully choreographed displays of unity, the question is inescapable: Can NATO's eastern members still count on the United States when it actually matters?

The honest answer, based on three years of accumulated evidence, is: probably yes — but with less certainty than at any point since the Alliance's founding. That qualified "probably" is not a comfortable place for countries that share land borders with Russia. It is not sufficient reassurance for Estonia, which has 300 kilometers of frontier with Russian territory. It is not enough for Latvia, which watched Russian drones fly over Polish airspace in late 2025 while the American president publicly entertained the possibility that the violation was "a mistake." The ambiguity is real. The fear is rational. And the political dynamics in Washington are not moving in a direction that makes reassurance easier.

Why this question cannot be answered with a summit communiqué

NATO has a well-developed institutional toolkit for managing American ambivalence: reassuring language in summit declarations, forward deployment of American troops as tripwire deterrence, bilateral security agreements, and the ritualistic invocation of Article 5's "solemn commitment." These tools have real value. But they all rest on an assumption — that the political will in Washington to honor those commitments survives changes in administration — that the current American presidency has placed in genuine doubt. A communiqué is only as credible as the government that signs it.

The Ankara summit faces a paradox: the Alliance needs to project unity and resolve precisely because that unity and resolve are in question. The diplomatic performance of solidarity is not the same as the strategic reality of solidarity. Europe's eastern flank states have absorbed this lesson at a cellular level. They are building their own capabilities, signing their own bilateral agreements, and preparing for scenarios in which American Article 5 commitment is conditional rather than automatic — while simultaneously and publicly insisting that the Alliance remains indivisible. They are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. That is a rational posture. It is also a historically unprecedented one for NATO in the post-Cold War era.

Hegseth in Brussels: the shock of awakening

A secretary of defense who came to deliver a message, not reassurance

When Pete Hegseth arrived in Brussels in February 2025, European defense ministers had prepared themselves for the customary ritual of managed tension — complaints about burden-sharing, demands for higher spending, pointed remarks about European free-riding — followed by reassurances about America's "ironclad commitment" to Allied defense. What they got instead was a genuinely different register. Hegseth's message was not dressed in the diplomatic language of managed tensions. It was a direct statement that American strategic priorities had shifted, that Europe could no longer expect Washington to be the Alliance's default first responder, and that the era of unlimited American security guarantees was functionally over.

The shock was not the content — experienced NATO watchers had seen this coming since Trump's first term. The shock was the tone. Previous American administrations had delivered the burden-sharing message wrapped in enough reassuring language to allow European governments to take what they needed from the rhetoric and discount the rest. Hegseth's delivery stripped that diplomatic cushioning away. He was not trying to manage Allied anxiety. He was trying to produce it — with the explicit intention of converting anxiety into action. Whether that was the right approach is debatable. That it concentrated European minds is not.

The structural shift behind the rhetorical shift

Hegseth's Brussels message reflected something deeper than personal style or political preference. It reflected a genuine structural shift in American strategic priorities — toward the Indo-Pacific, toward the competition with China that American strategists increasingly view as the defining challenge of the 21st century, toward a domestic political coalition that is skeptical of open-ended commitments to European security. This shift predates Trump and will likely outlast any particular administration. The American pivot to the Pacific is real, bipartisan in its strategic logic, and driven by capability constraints that make genuine two-theater primacy increasingly difficult to sustain.

European allies who dismiss the Hegseth message as political theater are making a strategic error. Even if the most extreme implications of Trumpian nationalism are moderated by institutional guardrails and bureaucratic inertia, the underlying reorientation of American strategic attention is a durable trend. Europe needs to build defense capacity that doesn't assume American first-response availability — not because America is abandoning NATO, but because the honest assessment of American strategic planning shows a declining prioritization of European contingencies relative to Indo-Pacific ones. That is the uncomfortable truth that Ankara must metabolize.

Russian drones over Poland: the test Trump failed

The incident that revealed the ambiguity

In late 2025, tracking systems confirmed that approximately 20 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace during operations targeting Ukrainian territory. The violation was unambiguous — a clear breach of NATO territorial integrity, a direct challenge to the Alliance's foundational security guarantee. Poland scrambled interceptors. The incident was logged, reported, and escalated through Alliance channels. The response from Washington was a presidential statement suggesting the violation "may have been a mistake." No condemnation. No ultimatum. No public threat of consequences. A shrug dressed in diplomatic language.

The reaction in Warsaw was controlled fury. Polish officials understood exactly what the non-response meant: the American president was unwilling to escalate a confrontation with Moscow over a drone incursion into Allied airspace, even when the violation was documented and undeniable. The message to Moscow was equally clear: the threshold for American response is higher than a drone overflying an Allied capital's radar perimeter. For a country that shares a land border with Russia's Kaliningrad exclave — from which those same bombers conduct Baltic strike rehearsals — the calculus was deeply unsettling.

The pattern of non-response and its strategic implications

The drone incident was not an isolated failure. It was part of a pattern. Trump's muted response to Russian hybrid operations in the Baltic — GPS jamming, undersea cable sabotage, repeated airspace violations — has created an environment in which Moscow can probe Alliance resolve at low cost. Each non-response establishes a new baseline for what is tolerable. Each shrug recalibrates Russian risk calculations upward. The cumulative effect of this pattern is a gradual erosion of deterrence credibility that is more dangerous than any single dramatic incident would be, precisely because it is gradual, ambiguous, and deniable.

The strategic logic of deterrence requires clarity about thresholds. Ambiguity about what triggers an Article 5 response is not a feature — it is a vulnerability. Russia's military planning culture is sophisticated enough to identify and exploit zones of ambiguity in Allied commitment. The Estonian intelligence assessment that Russian reconstitution could produce a serious conventional threat to NATO territory as early as 2028 makes the clarification of those thresholds urgent. Ankara has an opportunity to provide that clarity. The question is whether the Alliance's largest member is willing to let it be provided.

Eastern flank resilience: a two-tier strategy

Building defense capacity without waiting for Washington

Faced with an American partner whose reliability has become genuinely uncertain, the eastern flank states have not surrendered to fatalism. They have adopted a rational two-tier strategy: maximum investment in national and regional defense capacity, combined with maximum effort to preserve and strengthen the institutional architecture of American commitment. The logic is straightforward — build what you can build independently, while working to ensure that the American commitment, however strained, remains structurally in place. The two tracks are complementary, not contradictory.

The scale of the investment is striking. Poland's commitment to over 4% of GDP in defense spending, the Baltic states' investments in national defense structures, the Spring Storm exercise in Estonia involving 44,000 troops from 12 Allied nations, and Germany's decision to station a full brigade in Lithuania — these are not symbolic gestures. They represent a fundamental reorientation of defense planning that would have been politically unthinkable before 2022. The eastern flank is not waiting for Ankara to tell it what the threat requires. It has already decided.

Regional defense architecture beyond NATO

The two-tier strategy also involves building regional defense arrangements that would retain functional value even in a scenario where American commitment to NATO was significantly degraded. The Nordic-Baltic security architecture — integrating Finland and Sweden's recent NATO membership with the existing defense relationships among the Baltic states, Denmark, and Norway — creates a regional defense cluster that is more than the sum of its parts. The Nordic countries bring maritime expertise, air power, and a geographic position that complicates Russian planning for any Baltic operation. Their integration into Allied defense architecture strengthens the entire eastern flank.

The Gdansk joint declaration, signed by a coalition of European leaders, represents another expression of this impulse — a political compact that asserts European responsibility for European security without dismissing or replacing the American commitment. It acknowledges, implicitly, that Europe's security cannot permanently rest on a single ally's political will. The diversification of security guarantees is not a sign of alliance weakness — it is a sign of alliance maturity. Ankara should be understood in this context: as a summit that is building resilience into the Alliance's architecture, not merely reaffirming its existing structure.

Enforced silence: the self-censorship that Moscow exploits

The institutional constraint on honest assessment

Kristi Raik, director of the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, has described a phenomenon that is both deeply concerning and entirely understandable: a wave of unprecedented self-censorship in Allied public discourse about American reliability. Officials who privately assess that American commitment is conditional will not say so publicly, for fear of either provoking the American president or demoralizing their own populations. The result is a systematic gap between official Alliance rhetoric and the private strategic assessments that actually drive defense planning decisions.

This institutional constraint is understandable — diplomacy requires managing perceptions as well as realities — but it creates a vulnerability. Public discourse that systematically understates the actual uncertainty about American commitment cannot produce the political will for the kind of investment that would reduce dependence on that commitment. European publics who are told that everything is fine will not support the defense spending increases that everything-is-not-fine actually requires. The self-censorship is self-defeating in the medium term, even if it serves short-term diplomatic purposes.

The Moscow calculation: exploit the silence

Russian strategic communication has been deliberately calibrated to exploit this dynamic. By maintaining ambiguity about its own intentions — never quite crossing the threshold that would trigger a clear Alliance response, always providing a "plausible" non-aggressive explanation for hybrid operations — Moscow has created conditions in which Allied self-censorship about American reliability becomes self-reinforcing. The more uncertain Allied governments are about American backing, the more cautiously they respond to Russian provocations. The more cautiously they respond, the more uncertain American backing appears. It is a strategic feedback loop that Russia has mastered and that the Alliance has been slow to break.

Breaking it requires exactly what Sikorski models: honest public assessment of both the threats and the strategic constraints, combined with a clear statement of what European allies will do regardless of American choices. The message is not "America is abandoning us" — that would be both inaccurate and counterproductive. The message is: "Europe is building the capacity to defend itself, and American commitment multiplies that capacity rather than substituting for it." That reframing changes the political dynamic in Washington more effectively than any amount of diplomatic reassurance.

Autonomous European defense: dream or emerging necessity?

The structural gap between ambition and capability

European "strategic autonomy" has been a phrase in French strategic discourse since at least the 1990s. It has spent most of the intervening period as an aspiration held in tension with the practical reality of European defense dependence on American industrial capacity, intelligence assets, logistics infrastructure, and nuclear deterrence. The Ukraine war has simultaneously revealed the depth of that dependence — Ukraine's survival has required American weapons, American intelligence, and American political will — and provided the catalyst for finally beginning to close the gap.

The European Defence Fund, the EDIRPA mechanism, and the Strategic Compass adopted in 2022 all represent attempts to build genuine European defense industrial capacity. The political consensus for defense investment has never been broader or deeper. Germany's constitutional debt brake modification, France's multi-year defense programming law, and the collective acceleration of European defense spending since 2022 represent a real — if belated — mobilization. The question is whether the mobilization is fast enough and coherent enough to produce genuine strategic autonomy before the American commitment deteriorates beyond the point of institutional repair.

The nuclear dimension of autonomy

The deepest expression of European strategic dependence is nuclear. European NATO without American extended deterrence has no nuclear backstop — France's independent deterrent is too limited in scope and too nationally circumscribed to substitute for the American nuclear umbrella. Macron's offer to discuss extending France's nuclear guarantee to European partners is an attempt to bridge this gap, but it faces enormous practical and political obstacles: French nuclear doctrine, the absence of burden-sharing mechanisms, and the reluctance of most European governments to have the nuclear conversation publicly.

Whether or not the Macron nuclear initiative leads anywhere practically, its political significance is real: it signals that at least one major European nuclear power has concluded that the American nuclear guarantee can no longer be treated as permanently assured. That judgment reflects a serious strategic assessment, not rhetorical posturing. The conventional defense investment represented by the 5% target is built, ultimately, on a nuclear foundation — and that foundation's reliability is a question that Ankara will not address directly, even though every delegation in the room is thinking about it.

Sikorski's honesty: the model of courageous diplomacy

Saying what others only think

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has become something of a reference point in this debate — a senior Western official willing to say in public what most of his counterparts say only in private. His formulation that Poland is a "loyal ally but not an idiot" captured something real about the current state of Allied politics: the eastern flank states will not pretend that everything is fine when the evidence suggests otherwise, but they will also not sacrifice their Alliance relationships on the altar of rhetorical purity. They are playing a sophisticated game with limited leverage, and Sikorski has articulated its logic with unusual clarity.

His broader message — that Europe must build defense capacity that functions independently of American political cycles, while maintaining the institutional architecture of American commitment — is the mature strategic position that Ankara should formalize. It's not anti-American. It is, in fact, the position that serious American strategists who understand Alliance dynamics endorse: an Alliance where European allies carry more of the burden is a more sustainable Alliance, more resilient to domestic political pressure in Washington, more credible in its deterrence posture, and more capable of managing threats that require sustained commitment rather than episodic intervention.

Courageous diplomacy as Alliance doctrine

The Sikorski model of courageous diplomacy stands in contrast to the institutional self-censorship that Raik has documented. It represents a bet that honest assessment of Alliance vulnerabilities, combined with concrete action to address them, is more likely to preserve the Alliance's coherence than reassuring rhetoric that papers over structural weaknesses. A former Lithuanian defense minister's description of the current state of NATO as a "dysfunctional family" — one that bickers constantly but remains ultimately bound by mutual interest — captures a similarly honest register.

The family metaphor is apt in another sense: dysfunctional families can survive for a long time, sometimes indefinitely, through the accumulated weight of shared history, economic interdependence, and the absence of viable alternatives. The transatlantic relationship has all of these binding forces operating on it. The question Ankara must answer is whether the Alliance can be more than a dysfunctional family — whether it can become a genuinely functional collective security architecture capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating the threats it faces. That requires the kind of honest reckoning with structural weaknesses that Sikorski exemplifies and that most summit communiqués are designed to avoid.

Europe's defense awakening: late but real

The spending acceleration in real terms

Whatever its limitations, the European defense spending acceleration since 2022 is real and significant. Germany's €100 billion Sondervermögen, Poland's commitment to over 4% of GDP, the Baltic states' sustained investment above 3%, and the broader European trend of increasing defense budgets represent a genuine shift in political priorities. The aggregate increase in European defense spending since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine amounts to hundreds of billions of euros — a historically unprecedented peacetime mobilization driven by a threat that is not peacetime at all.

The political sustainability of this acceleration is the key variable. Defense spending increases are easier to initiate than to maintain across election cycles, economic downturns, and the inevitable popular fatigue that sets in when the immediate shock of a threat fades from daily consciousness. The institutional architecture that Rutte is trying to build at Ankara — binding commitments, enforcement mechanisms, peer pressure through transparent reporting — is designed precisely to address this sustainability challenge. Whether it works depends on whether the political will that currently exists can be converted into durable institutional structure before it dissipates.

The industrial mobilization: still too slow

The spending acceleration is real. The industrial mobilization necessary to translate that spending into actual capability is lagging. Order backlogs at European defense contractors are measured in years, not months. The shell production crisis — European industries unable to produce ammunition fast enough to sustain Ukrainian consumption rates, let alone rebuild Allied stockpiles — has been only partially addressed. The combination of decades of underinvestment in defense industrial capacity and the sudden surge in demand has created a structural mismatch that money alone cannot quickly resolve.

This is why the Ankara summit's focus on defense contracts and industrial investment is strategically important beyond the headline numbers. Signing contracts signals demand; but the real test is whether those contracts are accompanied by the investment in facilities, workforce training, and supply chain resilience that would actually change production trajectories. The gap between announced contracts and delivered capability has historically been where NATO's ambitions have gone to die. Ankara has an opportunity to close that gap — but only if Allied governments are willing to treat defense industrial policy as a strategic priority rather than an economic afterthought.

Trump as necessary evil: the brutal catalyst thesis

The argument for Trump's inadvertent utility

There is a serious — if uncomfortable — argument to be made that Donald Trump has been the most effective catalyst for European defense investment in the Alliance's history. Not because his policies are wise or his methods commendable, but because the credible threat of American unreliability has produced European investments that decades of American reassurance never could. As long as the American security guarantee appeared solid and permanent, European governments had every rational incentive to free-ride on it. The moment that guarantee became genuinely uncertain, the political calculus shifted.

Germany's Zeitenwende — the seismic shift in German defense and security policy announced by Chancellor Scholz after February 24, 2022 — was triggered by Russian aggression, not by Trump. But Trump's first-term pressure on burden-sharing had already primed the German political conversation. The combination of Russian invasion and American pressure produced a political consensus in Berlin that neither alone might have generated. The necessary evil framing captures something real: Trump's methods are frequently indefensible, his instincts often dangerous, and his understanding of Alliance dynamics largely absent — but the European response to his unreliability has been more strategically beneficial than the decades of comfortable reassurance that preceded him.

The limits of the catalyst thesis

The "necessary evil" argument has a hard limit: it works only if the evil remains manageable. A Trump administration that actually withdrew from NATO, actually refused to honor Article 5 commitments in a crisis, or actually coordinated with Moscow against Allied interests would produce not a catalyst for European defense but a catastrophic collapse of the strategic architecture that European defense investment is designed to reinforce. The catalyst argument assumes that Trump's provocations stop short of actual Alliance dissolution — that they are maximally disruptive without being terminally destructive.

The greater ideological risk, in many European assessments, is not Trump himself — whose transactional worldview at least responds to material incentives like European defense spending and contract announcements — but JD Vance, whose critique of NATO appears to rest on genuine ideological conviction rather than negotiating leverage. A Vance-led American foreign policy would present the Alliance with a fundamentally different challenge than a Trump-led one: not managed unreliability that can be addressed through European investment, but ideological opposition to the Alliance's foundational premises that no amount of burden-sharing arithmetic can resolve.

What the Ankara summit must say about American reliability

The language of conditional confidence

Ankara faces a delicate communication challenge: it must reassure Allied publics without creating false impressions of certainty that don't reflect the actual state of American political will. The summit communiqué will almost certainly contain strong language about Alliance solidarity and American commitment. That language is not dishonest — it reflects genuine institutional commitments that remain in place. But it will be read against the backdrop of three years of evidence that institutional commitments don't automatically translate into political will when the American president is temperamentally and ideologically disinclined toward Alliance obligations.

The most credible communication strategy is the one Sikorski models: acknowledge the uncertainty honestly, demonstrate the European response to that uncertainty through concrete capability investment, and frame that response as Alliance strengthening rather than American replacement. The message to Washington should be clear: Europe is building the capacity to carry more of the burden, which should make American Alliance membership more domestically defensible, not less. The message to Moscow should be equally clear: European uncertainty about American first-response availability has produced accelerated European investment, not strategic paralysis. The calculus is moving against Russian adventurism even as the American reliability question remains unresolved.

The DiNanno moment: when ambiguity becomes policy

The incident in Tallinn in early 2025, when American negotiator Thomas DiNanno reportedly refused to confirm Article 5's automatic application in specific scenarios, crystallized the ambiguity problem in an unusually concrete way. Officials present described it as a moment when the gap between Article 5's treaty language and American political will to honor it became visible in real time, in a diplomatic setting, in front of the allies most dependent on its credibility. Whether DiNanno was freelancing, following instructions, or testing a concept matters less than the effect: the allies most exposed to Russian conventional pressure were left uncertain about the reliability of the commitment their security planning had been built upon.

Ankara should directly address the DiNanno moment — not by relitigating a specific diplomatic incident, but by providing the explicit, unconditional reaffirmations of Article 5 commitment that the incident's ambiguity demands. Words are not sufficient on their own; they must be backed by the forward deployments, capability investments, and institutional structures that make the commitment credible independent of any single administration's political temperament. But the words still matter. Ambiguity is a tool of deterrence when it is pointed at an adversary. Directed at your own allies, it is simply a vulnerability.

Zelensky as model: resilience without guarantees

Three years of fighting without an Article 5 umbrella

Perhaps the most powerful rebuttal to European fatalism about American reliability is the example of Ukraine itself. Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian state have fought for three years against the most heavily armed conventional military force in Europe without the protection of any Article 5 guarantee — without the automatic tripwire of collective defense, without the certainty of Allied military intervention, relying instead on a patchwork of bilateral commitments, weapons deliveries, and political will that has repeatedly been tested and sometimes found wanting. And they have survived. More than survived: they have inflicted damage on Russian military capability that no NATO member state could have anticipated at the war's outset.

Ukraine's resilience is not an argument for weakening the NATO commitment — it is an argument for taking seriously what determined, resourceful, strategically coherent defense can achieve even without the ultimate security guarantee. The lesson for European NATO members is not "you don't need the Americans." It is: "You need to build the kind of capability and institutional resilience that doesn't collapse the moment the security architecture's ultimate guarantor is uncertain." Ukraine has demonstrated that such resilience is achievable, at terrible cost, by a country with a fraction of NATO Europe's collective resources.

Zelensky at Ankara: the weight of symbolic presence

Zelensky's presence at the Ankara summit — as an observer, a partner, a petitioner — carries symbolic weight that no diplomatic protocol can fully capture. He represents a country that has paid the heaviest price in the Western security order's defense since 1945, while remaining formally outside the institutional structure of that order. His presence is simultaneously an inspiration, an indictment, and a challenge. An Alliance that can watch Ukraine fight for three years and still equivocate about its membership path is an Alliance that has some difficult questions to answer about the relationship between its stated values and its institutional behavior.

The specific question of Ukrainian NATO membership will not be resolved at Ankara. The procedural and political obstacles remain formidable. But Zelensky's presence at the summit creates an opportunity for the Alliance to go further than previous summits in articulating a credible path — tied to specific conditions, supported by specific interim security arrangements, and grounded in a genuine political commitment rather than the diplomatic formulae that have accumulated since Bucharest 2008. The marble that Rutte wants to inscribe at Ankara is incomplete without a Ukrainian chapter. Zelensky's presence is the reminder that the chapter has not yet been written.

Article 5 under the pressure of Trumpian ambiguity

The treaty text and its political interpretation

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is famously less than its reputation. The treaty text does not commit member states to automatic military intervention — it commits them to take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." This deliberate ambiguity, inserted at American insistence in 1949 to preserve Congressional prerogative over declarations of war, has always coexisted with a strong normative expectation that Article 5 would produce collective military response. That normative expectation has been the real deterrent — the assumption that crossing an Article 5 threshold means war with the full Alliance.

Trump's presidency has placed that normative expectation under the most serious stress in the Alliance's history. Not by formally disavowing Article 5 — that would be too clean and too consequential — but by creating sufficient doubt about the political will to honor it that adversaries and allies alike have begun to adjust their calculations. The treaty text has not changed. The normative consensus around its interpretation has shifted. And in deterrence, perception is reality: an Article 5 that Russia believes might be honored with hesitation or conditionality is a weaker deterrent than an Article 5 that Russia believes will be honored automatically and overwhelmingly.

"Schrödinger's NATO": the deterrence paradox

The concept of "Schrödinger's NATO" — an Alliance that is simultaneously fully committed and genuinely uncertain in its commitments, both alive and dead in its deterrent effect until the moment of crisis reveals which state it actually occupies — captures the current situation with uncomfortable precision. The deterrence value of the Alliance depends on the certainty of its response. Introducing genuine uncertainty into that response — even without formally changing any commitment — degrades deterrence in ways that are hard to measure but easy for adversaries to exploit.

The practical consequences are already visible. Russian military planning has evidently incorporated greater confidence in operational freedom of action along NATO's eastern flank. Hybrid operations that would previously have been considered too provocative are now routine. The gradient of escalation has been recalibrated upward, not because Russia has become more powerful but because the perceived cost of provoking a NATO response has declined. Restoring deterrence credibility requires addressing the uncertainty at its source — which means, ultimately, either a clarification of American commitment that binds future administrations or a European capability build-up that makes that commitment less central to the deterrence calculation.

Europe between Trump and Putin: strategic maturity as the only exit

The false binary and the real challenge

European strategic discourse has sometimes fallen into a false binary: either defend American commitment unconditionally and accept the vulnerabilities that entails, or pivot toward strategic autonomy and risk destabilizing the Alliance architecture that has kept Europe at peace for 75 years. The mature position — the one that countries like Poland, Estonia, and increasingly Germany are actually practicing — is neither. It is a sophisticated simultaneity: build European capability while preserving American engagement, acknowledge uncertainty about American commitment while refusing to let that uncertainty become a self-fulfilling prophecy, increase defense investment while maintaining the institutional structures that make American commitment institutionally costly to withdraw.

This is not a comfortable position. It requires holding contradictions that domestic political audiences find difficult to process. It requires European leaders to make the case for defense investment on grounds of self-reliance while simultaneously arguing that American commitment remains essential. The cognitive dissonance is real, but so is the strategic logic. Europe is not strong enough to deter Russia without American partnership. It is not weak enough to be helpless without American first-response availability. The honest acknowledgment of both realities is the starting point for a mature strategic posture.

The Ankara opportunity

Ankara represents the most significant opportunity in the Alliance's post-Cold War history to formalize this mature strategic posture in institutional architecture. The combination of Rutte's 5% target, the defense contract announcements, the reaffirmations of Article 5, and whatever Ukraine-related commitments emerge from the summit could — if handled with sufficient ambition and coherence — produce a genuine step-change in the Alliance's deterrence posture. The elements are present. The political will appears to exist, at least among the nations most directly threatened. What remains is the political courage to translate that will into binding commitments rather than the elegant aspirational language of previous summits.

The stakes are clear. An Alliance that emerges from Ankara with a credible 5% target, explicit commitment timelines, and a serious process for Ukrainian integration will have demonstrated that democratic institutions can adapt to existential threats without abandoning the principles that make them worth defending. An Alliance that produces another round of escalating rhetoric paired with insufficient action will have provided Moscow with another data point in its calculation that Western resolve eventually cracks. Ankara has the tools. The question, as always, is whether the people in the room have the will to use them fully.

Zelensky at Ankara and the NATO membership question

From Vilnius to Ankara: the measure of progress

The Vilnius summit of 2023 produced the strongest language on Ukrainian NATO membership since Bucharest — a clear statement that Ukraine would become a member without requiring a Membership Action Plan, paired with a package of bilateral security guarantees and enhanced partnership structures. It was progress. It was insufficient. The absence of a timeline or a concrete MAP equivalent left the commitment in the same ambiguous space that Bucharest had created — a promise without a delivery mechanism, an aspiration without a pathway. Three years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, Ukraine is entitled to ask what exactly that promise is worth.

The answer that Ankara can provide is not full membership — the procedural and political obstacles to immediate accession remain genuine. But the summit can provide something more substantial than Vilnius: a conditioned pathway with specific benchmarks, a timeline that is aspirational but not infinitely elastic, and interim security arrangements that provide meaningful deterrence against further Russian aggression during the accession process. The gap between a credible conditioned pathway and an unconditional aspirational promise is the gap between a policy and a gesture. Ankara has the opportunity to move from gesture to policy.

The negotiation dimension: Zelensky's conditions

Zelensky has been explicit about Ukraine's negotiating conditions in any eventual ceasefire or peace process: no territorial concessions under duress, no recognition of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, NATO membership as a security guarantee. These conditions are not negotiating postures adopted for tactical effect — they reflect the fundamental strategic logic that any settlement that leaves Russia in occupation of Ukrainian territory and Ukraine outside NATO's security architecture is a settlement that merely pauses the conflict rather than resolving it. The Alliance's credibility on the membership question is therefore inseparable from its credibility on the peace process question.

An Ankara summit that sends Zelensky home with stronger signals on the membership pathway — even if full membership remains conditional — would strengthen his negotiating hand in any eventual peace process and weaken Moscow's leverage. It would signal to the Kremlin that time is not on Russia's side — that the longer the war continues, the deeper Ukraine's integration into Western security architecture becomes. That signaling effect has real deterrence value, independent of any formal change in membership status. Zelensky's presence at Ankara is both a diplomatic asset for the Alliance and a moral obligation it has not yet fully honored.

Conclusion: No, Trump is not completely abandoning us — but Europe can no longer afford to wait

The honest assessment of where American commitment stands

The full and honest assessment of American commitment to NATO under the current administration is neither the catastrophist view — that America is abandoning the Alliance — nor the reassuring fiction that nothing fundamental has changed. American institutional commitment to NATO remains structurally in place. American troops are still stationed in Europe. American military assets are still pre-positioned for European contingencies. American intelligence is still being shared with Allied partners. The institutional architecture of American commitment has proved more durable than the political temperament of the current president would suggest.

But the political will to honor those commitments in a crisis — the crucial variable that deterrence actually depends on — is genuinely uncertain in ways that it has not been uncertain before. That uncertainty cannot be dissolved by summit communiqués alone. It can be addressed by a combination of European capability investment that reduces the dependence on American first-response availability, institutional reforms that make American withdrawal from NATO commitments politically and procedurally costly, and the kind of transatlantic relationship management that makes American engagement strategically beneficial to the domestic political coalition that currently controls Washington. That is the Ankara mandate. It is demanding. It is achievable. It cannot be deferred.

Europe's window — and the cost of missing it

The political conditions that currently allow for the acceleration of European defense investment will not persist indefinitely. Economic pressures, electoral cycles, and the natural human tendency to discount threats that don't materialize immediately will all eventually erode the urgency that 2022 and its aftermath have generated. The window for building genuine European defense capacity at the scale that the threat environment requires is open now. It will not remain open forever. Ankara is not the last opportunity — but it is one of the most significant, precisely because the political momentum, the institutional architecture, and the economic resources are all simultaneously available in a way that may not repeat itself.

Europe cannot afford to wait for a more convenient political moment in Washington, a cleaner set of circumstances in Ukraine, or a more cooperative Russian posture that would reduce the urgency of investment. The threat is here. The tools are available. The political will exists, fragile and contested but real. What Ankara can do — what Ankara must do — is convert that temporary alignment of political conditions into durable institutional structure. Not marble that will crack in the first frost, but architecture that can sustain the weight of the next generation of European security. That is the editorial charge that the summit carries. Its authors will be judged by whether they rose to meet it.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Sources and analytical framework

This editorial is grounded in publicly available reporting, official statements, and academic and policy analysis from recognized institutions. The incidents cited — Hegseth's Brussels visit, the Polish airspace overflight, the DiNanno Tallinn exchange, the Spring Storm exercise, the Gdansk declaration — are drawn from verified journalistic and official sources attributed in the Sources section below. The columnist's perspective is explicitly pro-Ukraine, pro-Western collective defense, and supportive of sustained European investment in defense capacity. These are stated positions, not hidden biases.

The editorial distinguishes throughout between established facts and analytical judgments. Characterizations of political motivations — the assessment of Vance's ideology, the framing of Trump as "necessary evil," the description of Russian strategic communication — are the author's analytical conclusions drawn from the public record. Readers are invited to contest those conclusions on the basis of the same record. The purpose of this editorial is not to alarm but to assess accurately. If the assessment is alarming, the responsibility lies with the situation, not with the analyst who describes it honestly.

What this editorial does not claim

This piece does not predict the outcome of the Ankara summit, the future trajectory of American foreign policy, or the timeline of any Russian military action against NATO territory. It does not claim access to classified assessments or non-public governmental deliberations. The "Schrödinger's NATO" framing and the "necessary evil" characterization of Trump's role are analytical constructs, not empirical findings. The column's value, if it has any, lies in the synthesis of publicly available evidence into a coherent analytical framework — one that readers can test against the record as events unfold. Any errors of fact are the author's own and will be corrected on the record.

The analytical and institutional dimensions of this question extend beyond what a single transparency note can adequately address. The author invites readers who wish to engage more deeply with the methodological choices underlying this analysis to consult the primary sources listed below, where the factual record on which these assessments are grounded is fully documented and independently verifiable.

Sources

Primary sources

The Guardian — NATO leaders fear they can no longer rely on US help if Russia attacks — June 27, 2026

NATO — Atlantic Council conversation with Secretary General Mark Rutte — June 25, 2026

The Guardian — Russia provocation Baltic states Poland — June 26, 2026

Secondary sources

Fox News — Russia preparing hybrid attacks on NATO's eastern flank, intelligence warns — June 2026

Army Recognition — Russia rehearses Baltic strike operations from Kaliningrad — June 2026

U.S. News — NATO's Rutte says billions in new defense contracts will be announced at summit — June 25, 2026

Swedish Government — Joint declaration from leaders meeting in Gdansk — June 2026