Donald Trump arrived in Ankara with more to celebrate than any US president has had at a NATO Summit in years. His European allies were spending far more on defense, turning their historic commitments at last year’s Hague summit into real defense capabilities. Trump deserves considerable credit for that.
His July 2025 decision to continue supplying Ukraine with weaponry, though paid for now by European allies, has contributed to the country’s war gains against Russia. During his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ankara, Trump praised the leader he had previously derided, calling Zelenskyy “ingenious” for his country’s deep strikes on Russia. Trump then followed this compliment by saying he would license Ukraine to produce the Patriot air defense missiles it so urgently needs, though he conceded he hadn’t discussed the matter yet with manufacturers Lockheed Martin and RTX Corporation.
Despite all that, until Trump’s press conference at the end of the summit, NATO watchers were gnashing their teeth at statements the president made about old grievances instead of NATO’s growing achievements. Trump blasted allies—Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom, in particular—for not doing more to support him in Iran or spending sufficiently on their own defense.
“We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” Trump threatened calmly as he sat alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara on Tuesday. He also revived long-dormant assertions that the United States should control Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, something he didn’t repeat during his closed-door meeting with allies. While the US president departed Ankara on an upbeat note, calling the summit “tremendously successful” and praising NATO’s “great sense of unity,” some European allies still worry. The Pentagon is conducting a six-month force posture review that could weaken the Alliance before European countries are able to replace capabilities the United States might withdraw.
The stage is set
What Trump should not overlook now that he’s back in Washington is that Europe and Ukraine represent his greatest remaining chance at a foreign-policy legacy and the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets. Ankara marked a high point in a week that otherwise was characterized by a failing Iran ceasefire and Belgium’s ignominious defeat of the US men’s soccer team in the World Cup, despite Trump’s red card intervention.
To seize upon his NATO-Ukraine opportunity, however, he needs to convert this week’s whiplash messaging into steadier support both for the Alliance and for Ukraine.
There is no better time to turn the tide against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s murderous leader is losing more than thirty thousand soldiers each month, and his country’s economy is reeling from Ukrainian strikes on its energy infrastructure. A significant Russian setback now would have far-reaching implications for the combined efforts of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran to roll back US global influence.
Several weeks before Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, under the headline “Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize opportunity in Ukraine,” I wrote:
- “Done in the wrong way, Trump’s decisions will signal to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—the evolving ‘axis of aggressors’—that the United States is divided, distracted, and prepared to cede the global leadership that it has assumed since World War II, whether intentionally or by default.”
I added:
- “Done in the right way, Trump’s decisions can confound his critics, who see some of his early nominations for cabinet positions as evidence that he’s more interested in disruption and retribution than in building a legacy equal to that of great US presidents of the past.”
What’s undeniable is that the stage is set for his NATO-Ukraine moment in a manner that isn’t presented by any other international opportunity before him, particularly given the difficulties he has encountered regarding Iran.
The stuff of history
Consider the facts coming out of Ankara.
European nations have demonstrated that they are willing to deliver on their spending pledges, which NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte recently told me would be the historic test of the Ankara summit. The Ankara Summit Declaration noted that European allies and Canada had increased their investments in core defense requirements by more than $139 billion.
“Our investments are delivering the capabilities we need while strengthening our industrial base and resilience,” the communiqué said, noting that allies in Ankara announced more than fifty billion dollars in new procurements and committed to expanding collective manufacturing capacity and accelerating defense tech innovation.
“European countries are thinking about their own defenses in a fundamentally different way than they were a year ago,” Torrey Taussig, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, told me from Ankara. “Defense and tech companies feel the shift, procurement timelines are shortening, and allied governments are investing in a future force mix comprised increasingly of autonomous systems and advanced, artificial-intelligence-enabled weaponry.”
To be sure, there’s a long way to go. Defense trade barriers and distrust across the Atlantic hamper effectiveness, and Europe’s defense industry remains fragmented. US allies still invest too much in national pet projects instead of urgently needed capabilities. “However, there has been an undeniable sea change across the European defense industrial landscape that was on full display in Ankara,” Taussig said.
Beyond that, Ukraine, far from collapsing, is demonstrating that Russia can be checked and pushed back. “Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history,” write retired General David H. Petraeus, a member of the Atlantic Council board, and Clara Kaluderovic, a nonresident fellow with our Eurasia Center, in The Wall Street Journal. “It is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.”
Petraeus and Kaluderovic don’t expect this to destroy Russia’s war machine outright. However, they do argue that if Ukraine “can keep enough of that machine disrupted, degraded and short on fuel, it can change the strategic equation.” That would be the stuff of history for this administration, potentially putting Trump in the league of President Ronald Reagan and President George HW Bush, who brought the Cold War to a triumphant end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine is on the offensive
Nothing in Ankara signaled more strongly Trump’s embrace of Ukraine’s recent battlefield gains than his fulsome praise for Zelenskyy combined with his offer to grant Ukraine production licenses for the Patriot interceptors the country urgently needs to protect its people from Russia’s missile onslaught.
“President Zelenskyy emerged as a clear winner from the NATO Summit in Turkey,” said John Herbst, former US ambassador to Ukraine and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “This addresses Ukraine’s greatest vulnerability in the war: its limited ability to protect civilians from Russian ballistic missiles.” Trump also announced his readiness to move on the co-production of drones with Ukraine.
In his phone call with Trump on July 4, Putin reportedly threatened sharp retaliation for recent Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia. In doing so, the Russian leader was likely trying to convince Trump to press Zelenskyy to curb Ukraine’s successful drone offensive on Russia. However, Putin failed, as Trump now recognizes that only greater pressure on Putin will lead to the successful peace talks that would end the war. Ukraine’s strikes have sparked major fuel shortages across Russia, reducing supplies to Russian troops along the front. Beyond that, Ukraine’s clear advantage with drones has reduced the supply of fuel, munitions, and other supplies to Crimea, and it has led to successful strikes as deep as two thousand kilometers into Russia on fuel installations, munitions depots, and communications centers.
The Trump administration vision for the Alliance’s future was articulated earlier this year as “NATO 3.0” by US Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial in Belgium. It’s a compelling vision that has also been embraced by Rutte. For it to work, however, requires that Europe over time assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense, while the United States stays the course through that transition with political consistency and critical conventional and enabling support on the continent. Coupled with the United States serving as the Alliance’s nuclear and strategic bulwark over the long run, this approach will provide Washington with irreplaceable power projection capabilities—as recently demonstrated by the roughly five thousand sorties flown from European bases during Operation Epic Fury in Iran.
“NATO is, and will always be, a transatlantic alliance, but it is essential that we rebalance our security for the better,” wrote Rutte this week in The Washington Post. “This is NATO 3.0 in action: a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO. This transformation makes all of us more secure—the US and its allies alike.”