NATO looks away from Erdogan's Turkey on the eve of the Ankara summit

Introduction: a silence that speaks volumes

A summit, a capital, an unease

Just days before the NATO summit scheduled for July 7 and 8, 2026 in Ankara, one fact stands out with uncomfortable clarity: the 32 member states of the Atlantic Alliance have all but stopped criticizing Turkey publicly for its democratic backsliding. An in-depth Reuters investigation, published on July 1, 2026 by reporter Jonathan Spicer, documents this diplomatic shift with a clinical precision that deserves a closer look.

This summit will mark a particular moment: it is Donald Trump's first visit to Turkey since returning to the American presidency, and the occasion for a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Trump regularly calls a "friend." Relations between Washington and Ankara are, according to Reuters, "the warmest in years."

Why this silence is unsettling

This is not a scheduling coincidence. It is the result of a deliberate strategic calculation made by several Western chancelleries, which have chosen to prioritize the Alliance's military cohesion over the defense of the democratic values that are, nonetheless, written into NATO's founding charter. A choice that, on paper, is understandable given the war in Ukraine and the heightened Russian threat. But one that, at its core, leaves a bitter taste.

Because Turkey is not just another case of imperfect democracy: it is a country where political opposition is today systematically hounded through the courts, where journalists are denied access to cover an international summit on their own soil, and where an elected mayor, the president's chief rival, sits in prison.

The 2021 precedent, or how Erdogan made the West back down

A forgotten diplomatic crisis

To grasp the scale of the current retreat, it helps to recall an episode from five years ago. In 2021, ten Western ambassadors, including those of the United States, France, Germany, and Canada, jointly called for the release of Osman Kavala, a Turkish philanthropist widely regarded as a political prisoner.

Erdogan's response was swift and brutal: he ordered the outright expulsion of all ten diplomats. It took two frantic days of behind-the-scenes negotiations to defuse the crisis, with the embassies involved eventually issuing more conciliatory statements to avoid a major diplomatic rupture with a NATO member.

Kavala, still detained, still a symbol

Osman Kavala remains imprisoned to this day, after nearly nine years in detention. He faces a life sentence on charges of allegedly attempting to overthrow the government, which he firmly denies. The European Court of Human Rights has nonetheless ruled that he and others implicated in his case should be released for lack of sufficient evidence, finding that his prolonged detention was primarily intended to silence him.

That ECHR ruling, theoretically binding on Turkey as a member of the Council of Europe, remains a dead letter. No Western country has since relaunched a diplomatic initiative comparable to the one in 2021 to enforce the decision.

The crackdown on Turkey's opposition intensifies

The CHP in the government's crosshairs

The Republican People's Party (CHP), Turkey's main opposition party, has for two years faced a judicial crackdown its leaders openly call a "judicial coup."Hundreds of party officials and municipal representatives have been jailed over that period, according to Reuters reporting.

The most emblematic case remains that of Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and Erdogan's chief political rival, now imprisoned. His detention has been widely seen, including by Western observers, as an attempt to remove the only candidate capable of seriously threatening the president's grip on power. The CHP's own leader has also been removed from office through the courts.

Twenty-three years in power and a judiciary under fire

The ruling party, the AK Party, has governed Turkey for twenty-three years. It categorically rejects any criticism of its democratic record, insisting that Turkey's judiciary remains fully independent. A claim that few independent observers, in Turkey or abroad, take seriously anymore given the scale of prosecutions systematically targeting opposition figures.

Erdogan's office did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment on these criticisms, nor on the restrictions placed on media coverage of the summit.

A summit under heavy security and media lockdown

Journalists excluded, hundreds detained

Ahead of the summit, Turkish authorities denied accreditation to dozens of journalists from independent Turkish outlets hoping to cover the event. At the same time, more than 200 people have been detained by authorities, officially for security reasons tied to the summit.

Asked about these accreditation restrictions, NATO deflected, explaining that it routinely defers to the host country on this kind of logistical decision. An Alliance official simply pointed to an earlier statement stressing that it was "very important" for journalists to be able to attend events in person, without challenging Turkey's decision.

Washington's uneasy silence

The U.S. embassy in Ankara did not immediately respond when asked whether American policy toward Turkey on human rights had shifted. That silence contrasts with the tougher rhetoric that some previous American administrations used on these issues.

This muteness fits a broader pattern: since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the West has largely avoided publicly raising concerns about Turkey's record on rights and freedoms, barely a year after the 2021 diplomatic crisis, at a moment when Europe suddenly felt far more exposed to Moscow.

The strategic argument that excuses almost everything

NATO's second-largest army, a weight that cannot be ignored

Turkey fields the second-largest army in the entire Atlantic Alliance, a considerable military weight that largely explains Western caution. Ankara has also become a major exporter of armed drones, an industrial and technological capability that further strengthens its bargaining position within the Alliance.

More and more Western allies now see Turkey as an essential bulwark against Russian aggression on Europe's southeastern flank, a geographic position that gives it a strategic weight that is difficult to bypass, despite its relatively cordial relations with Moscow.

The price of a transactional relationship

According to analyst Karol Wasilewski, cited by Reuters, Western allies have "given up on values to an extent and prefer a transactional relationship," aware that Turkey remains "indispensable" to Europe's defense. He also believes that Western criticism of the crackdown on the CHP, even when voiced, "won't translate into actions."

That cold assessment sums up the dilemma facing the West: sacrifice some of its moral coherence on the altar of military efficiency against Russia, or risk weakening an alliance already strained by internal tensions in recent years, notably during the long Turkish blockade of Sweden and Finland's accession between 2022 and 2023.

David Satterfield sounds the alarm

"The trajectory is not irrevocable"

Not every Western voice has gone silent. David Satterfield, a veteran American diplomat cited by Reuters, insists on the importance of continuing to speak out about the erosion of Turkey's democratic institutions, arguing that "the trajectory is not irrevocably fixed" and that Turkey "is not beyond redemption."

In his view, it remains "important for Turks to hear others talk about their system this way," a reminder that diplomatic silence is never neutral: it too sends a message, one of growing indifference to the democratic backsliding of a country that is nonetheless supposed to share the same founding values as its Alliance partners.

A frank defense of diplomacy

Satterfield also rejected the idea that his repeated advocacy for human rights in Turkey had damaged the fundamental transactional relations between Washington and Ankara. He even suggested that the decision, made during Trump's second term, to systematically avoid discussing democratic values had not actually improved the quality of bilateral relations.

It is an argument worth hearing: silence has not necessarily bought peace or cooperation — it has simply bought the absence of visible friction, which is not quite the same thing.

The billions that buy silence

Rutte promises massive contracts

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced that industrial contracts worth tens of billions of dollars would be signed at the Ankara summit. These announcements are part of a broader strategy to strengthen the Alliance's defense industry, a sector that has become an absolute priority since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

According to Rutte, European allies and Canada spent an additional 90 billion dollars in 2025 compared with the previous year, bringing the total to more than 570 billion dollars. A massive rearmament push that makes every ally capable of producing or exporting weapons, like Turkey, all the more valuable in the eyes of NATO strategists.

Ankara wants to put its best foot forward

For the Turkish government, this summit represents a golden opportunity to showcase Alliance unity and expand its industrial defense partnerships, while deflecting attention from more uncomfortable questions about the rule of law. The contrast between this carefully staged showcase and the reality of domestic political repression, however, does not escape the most attentive observers.

The 32 leaders gathered in Ankara will above all seek to project a façade of unity against Moscow, even if that means glossing over internal tensions that could, in the long run, weaken the Alliance's cohesion far more than any public and open criticism would.

What NATO's history teaches us about its compromises

An alliance that has always lived with imperfect members

NATO's history is not free of similar compromises. Several of its founding or long-standing members have, at various points, gone through periods of authoritarian governance or democratic backsliding without that fundamentally calling their membership into question. The issue, then, is not new, but it takes on a particular resonance at a moment when the West is trying to present itself as a united bloc of democracies against rival authoritarian regimes.

The paradox is real: how can the West demand that China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea respect fundamental rights, while quietly accepting that a NATO ally imprisons its opposition and muzzles its independent press on the eve of an international summit?

A credibility test for the entire West

This Ankara summit will not just be a test for Turkey — it is also one for the normative credibility of the entire Western bloc. If the military unity on display in Ankara comes paired with total silence on the rule of law, the message sent to people fighting for their freedoms around the world, including in Turkey itself, will be unmistakable: realpolitik wins out over principle, once again.

That does not mean strengthening the Alliance against Russia is a mistake — quite the opposite. But geopolitical strength and moral coherence should not have to be mutually exclusive choices, even if the realpolitik of the moment seems to demand it.

The voices that refuse to stay silent anyway

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch keep up the pressure

Despite the relative silence of Western governments, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch continue methodically documenting rights violations in Turkey, whether the prolonged detention of Osman Kavala, the crackdown on the CHP, or the restrictions placed on press freedom.

These organizations regularly point out that the European Court of Human Rights has issued binding rulings that Turkey refuses to enforce, an open challenge to the very authority of the European human rights protection system that Ankara nonetheless remains a signatory to.

The irreplaceable role of civil society

With chancelleries staying silent, it is now these non-governmental organizations that carry, almost alone, the torch of democratic vigilance over Turkey. A role that, in a functioning Western democracy, should be shared — if not led — by governments themselves, rather than left solely to NGOs.

This shift in responsibility, from governments to civil society, shows just how much Western diplomacy has chosen to outsource its moral conscience rather than exercise it directly at the highest political level.

Can this summit still change anything

A narrow but real window of opportunity

The summit on July 7 and 8 could, in theory, offer a chance to rebalance Western messaging, even if only on the sidelines of official defense discussions. Quiet bilateral meetings between Western and Turkish leaders could allow some of these issues to be raised, however timidly, without triggering a public rupture comparable to the one in 2021.

But nothing in the signals sent so far by Western chancelleries suggests a meaningful shift in posture. The clearly stated priority remains demonstrating military unity against Russia, pushing human rights concerns to the background, if not off the official agenda entirely.

A precedent that could repeat elsewhere

This Western silence toward Turkey could also set a troubling precedent for other allies whose democratic records are deteriorating. If military realpolitik is enough to buy diplomatic impunity, what message does that send to other governments tempted by similar authoritarian drift, as long as they remain strategically useful to the Alliance?

It is precisely this logic of precedent that should alarm human rights defenders well beyond the Turkish case alone, since it strikes at the very coherence of the democratic project that NATO claims to embody and defend against its authoritarian rivals.

Ukraine, the unavoidable backdrop to this dilemma

The war that changed everything

It is impossible to understand this diplomatic shift without placing it in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine since 2022. That invasion has profoundly transformed Western strategic calculations, pushing chancelleries to prioritize immediate military cohesion in the face of a threat deemed existential, even at the cost of sacrificing certain normative demands on allies deemed indispensable.

Turkey, thanks to its unique geographic position at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and the Black Sea, occupies a strategic spot few other allies can claim, which largely explains why its democratic record receives a leniency that other countries likely would not get under the same circumstances.

The hidden price of this strategic leniency

But this leniency comes at a cost, even if it remains largely invisible for now: the cost to the West's normative credibility in the eyes of people elsewhere in the world who are watching closely to see whether Western democracies actually apply the principles they claim to defend, or whether those principles only apply selectively depending on the strategic interests of the moment.

Against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the Western argument rests largely on the superiority of its democratic model and its respect for the rule of law. Every complacent silence toward an ally that tramples on these same principles weakens that argument, and hands convenient rhetorical ammunition to the very authoritarian regimes the West is trying to contain.

Trump's ambiguous role in this equation

A credited military ally, a questionable political silence

On the strictly military front, it must be acknowledged that Donald Trump's posture has pushed European allies to invest massively in their own defense, an effort whose concrete results will be visible in Ankara in the form of industrial contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. This pressure, however blunt in form, has had the merit of forcing a sometimes-complacent Europe to shoulder a fairer share of the burden of its own security against Russia.

But that same administration, by choosing to systematically avoid any discussion of democratic values with Ankara, has also helped normalize the Western silence documented by Reuters. The contrast between tough diplomacy on budget issues and total silence on human rights illustrates the limits of a purely transactional approach to international relations.

Two files, two very different logics

It would be unfair to reduce the whole of American foreign policy to this Turkish silence alone. On the Ukrainian file, Washington continues to back a united Western front against Vladimir Putin, a stance that deserves credit. But on the Turkish file, the priority given to transactional relations over democratic principles reveals an inconsistency that undermines the overall coherence of the Western message.

This duality is nothing new in the history of American diplomacy, but it takes on particular resonance at a moment when the administration is trying to present the Western world as a coherent bloc of democracies against its authoritarian rivals.

The uncomfortable comparison with other Western files

An openly acknowledged double standard

It only takes comparing the treatment given to Turkey with that applied to other countries to measure the scale of the Western double standard. When governments deemed less strategically indispensable commit comparable violations of the rule of law, Western capitals, Washington chief among them, generally do not hesitate to raise their tone, threaten sanctions, or even suspend cooperation programs. Nothing of the sort is being considered for Ankara.

This asymmetry obviously does not escape the capitals in question, nor the populations watching, sometimes with growing cynicism, how Western democratic principles seem to apply with varying intensity depending on a country's geopolitical and military importance. A pattern that, over time, feeds the rhetoric of authoritarian regimes themselves, quick to denounce Western hypocrisy.

The risk of weakening the Western narrative against its rivals

Every time Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang can point to a glaring contradiction between Western rhetoric on human rights and actual diplomatic practice, they gain a valuable rhetorical argument to justify their own authoritarian excesses to their own populations and to their partners across the Global South. The Turkish case, in this context, offers a particularly convenient example for these regimes to exploit.

It is precisely this dimension that makes Western silence on Turkey costlier than it first appears: this is not merely an abstract moral question, but a concrete strategic stake in the battle of narratives being fought between democracies and authoritarian regimes on a global scale.

What Turkish citizens actually expect from the West

A civil society that is not asking for the impossible

It would be reductive to frame this entire issue purely in terms of calculations between governments. Behind the statistics and the reports, there are Turkish journalists barred from covering a summit on their own soil, local officials jailed simply for doing their jobs, and citizens hoping, however faintly, that some minimum of international pressure will continue to be exerted on their government.

These voices are not necessarily demanding a dramatic diplomatic rupture or new economic sanctions. Many would settle for simple rhetorical consistency: that Western governments presenting themselves as defenders of human rights on the international stage remain so even when dealing with an important military ally, and not only when facing strategic adversaries like Russia or China.

An expectation likely to be disappointed in the short term

Given the signals sent so far by Western chancelleries ahead of the Ankara summit, it is unlikely that this expectation will be met anytime soon. The priority given to demonstrating military unity against Russia will likely continue to outweigh any consideration of Turkey's rule-of-law record, at least as long as the war in Ukraine continues to dominate the Alliance's strategic agenda.

That does not mean the situation is frozen forever: the cumulative pressure of human rights organizations, combined with a possible shift in the geopolitical context, could eventually reopen a diplomatic window comparable to the one in 2021, even though nothing currently allows us to predict when that might happen.

Conclusion: a test Ankara isn't the one failing — the West is testing itself

Military unity that should not come at the cost of moral silence

The NATO summit in Ankara will be remembered as a moment of military and industrial strength for the Atlantic Alliance, with defense contracts worth tens of billions of dollars and stronger commitments against the Russian threat. But it will also stand, for those who bother to look past the official statements, as the symbol of an increasingly open Western silence toward the democratic backsliding of a strategically indispensable ally.

It is not Turkey being tested by this summit — it is the West itself, and its ability, or inability, to reconcile its collective security imperatives with the coherence of the democratic values it claims to embody against its authoritarian rivals.

Real courage would mean saying both things at once

Nothing prevents, in theory, welcoming the strengthening of Turkey's defense industry and its essential contribution to the security of Europe's southeastern flank, while simultaneously demanding the release of Osman Kavala and an end to the judicial crackdown on the CHP. Real diplomatic courage would mean holding both positions at once, without giving in to the ease of total silence.

Absent that courage, the West will keep sending an ambiguous message to its own citizens and to the rest of the world: that of an Alliance ready to sacrifice part of its moral coherence whenever realpolitik demands it, a choice that, in the long run, could well cost more than the immediate benefit it provides.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and how I worked

I am a columnist and analyst, not a field reporter: I was not in Ankara, I did not speak to any diplomat behind the scenes, and I do not claim to hold any non-public information about the negotiations surrounding this summit. This report was built from verifiable journalistic sources, foremost among them the in-depth Reuters investigation published on July 1, 2026, supplemented by documents and reports from recognized human rights organizations.

My biases are openly stated: I believe in a strong Atlantic Alliance against Russia, but I reject the idea that this strength must necessarily be paid for with total silence on the internal democratic backsliding of its members. What I do not know: the exact outcome of the bilateral discussions to be held on the sidelines of the summit, nor whether human rights will be raised there, even quietly.

Sources

Primary sources

Reuters investigation on NATO allies' silence toward Turkey — July 1, 2026

Reuters, preparations for the Ankara summit and defense contracts — July 3, 2026

Secondary sources

Human Rights Watch, international justice and human rights

Verfassungsblog, analysis on the European Court of Human Rights

HUDOC case-law database of the European Court of Human Rights

Amnesty International, documentation on Turkey

European Parliament, briefing on the 2026 NATO Ankara summit