Along the road from Ankara’s airport to the city centre, sky-blue banners printed with Nato insignia are pinned against half-built tower blocks, as if the alliance's summit in the Turkish capital beautifies a construction boom in progress.
“Nato Ankara summit, key to security, key to peace,” read the posters – part of citywide preparations for Turkey's first time hosting the meeting since 2004, when the world and the security challenges it faced looked very different.
Police stand at almost every junction – some of the 56,000 security personnel posted for the event – and besuited protocol staff huddle beside every building remotely connected to it.
In the face of a US-Europe rift in Nato, a fragile ceasefire in the Iran war, and a European race to strengthen security after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Turkey is aiming to use its role as host to prove it is indispensable.
The summit will include US President Donald Trump's first visit to Turkey in his second administration, allowing Turkey to exploit its strong relations with his administration to bring together Nato allies who have been at odds over policy in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine.
Turkey wants to market itself as an essential supplier of defence and security equipment and a key member state located nearest to the biggest challenges facing the alliance, former officials and analysts told The National before the two-day summit.
“Turkey sees this summit as an opportunity to consolidate its position as one of Nato’s indispensable allies and to translate that status into concrete defence-industrial gains,” Riccardo Gasco, foreign policy co-ordinator at the Istanbul-based IstanPol think tank, told The National.
Turkey on the border of crisis regions
Turkey – between Ukraine and Russia on one side, Iran to the east, and Syria and Iraq to the south – has the second-largest armed forces in Nato after the US, and will use the summit to drive home the need to look for threats coming from any direction.
It was Nato defences that shot down missiles launched from Iran that were approaching Turkish airspace in March, prompting a tense standoff and questions over whether Turkey and the alliance would respond to the Iranian attack. Mr Trump last month credited himself with keeping Turkey out of the conflict.
Turkey has a “land border exceeding 1,800km with crisis regions", President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told officials from Nato member countries in a speech last week. The country has a “strong army, modern military capabilities and advanced defence industry,” placing it “at the forefront of allies contributing to Nato's security", he said.
Turkey will aim to flesh out a “360-degrees” approach, “not in words, but in deeds, to meeting challenges for the alliance coming from any direction", Mehmet Fatih Ceylan, a former Turkish ambassador to Nato, told The National. “For this reason it is important to engage, for instance, the Gulf countries during the summit.”
Foreign ministers from the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have been invited to a meeting with those from Nato on Tuesday as partners in the Istanbul Co-operation Initiative, a platform for Nato’s security co-operation with the Middle East, launched in Istanbul in 2004.
It remains unclear what will result from that meeting or develop from Turkey’s desire for concrete deeds to confront threats from all directions.
At the same time, Ankara is keen to manage tension between the US and European Nato members, which has emerged over what Washington sees as Europe’s unwillingness to help during the Iran war and reluctance to spend enough on security.
“I assume that Ankara will try its best to bandage the transatlantic rift to the best of its ability,” Mr Ceylan said. “If the summit gives indeed further traction to delivering capabilities for a rebalanced Nato, that will certainly be a big success story for Ankara.”
Nato and European officials are insisting they are well on their way to meeting defence spending targets. At a media conference in Ankara on Monday, Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte praised Mr Trump for setting the expectation that “we spend the same as the US is doing”.
Turkey sees the burden-sharing debate within Nato as an opportunity and a risk, Mr Gasco said. Mr Trump’s pressure on Europe to spend more benefits Turkey’s burgeoning defence manufacturing sector. At the same time, Ankara still regards the US as key to deterrence.
“Turkey welcomes higher European defence spending, but it would be worried by any serious US disengagement from Nato,” Mr Gasco said.
As for its own relationship with the US, Turkey is looking to build on its relationship with the Trump administration to overcome long-term obstacles to its own defence capacity. Mr Erdogan is pushing for the US to sell him F-110 engines worth $700 million, and Ankara continues its quest to be allowed back into the F-35 fighter jet programme. Turkey was removed from the programme after buying Russian S-400 air defence systems in 2017.
Burgeoning defence industry
Turkey’s defence capabilities will be on full display at an industry forum taking place alongside the Nato summit in Ankara. The forum will focus on progress towards the target for members to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence, and on how to translate that money into production.
Nato is well aware of the potential of Turkish munitions manufacturers to supply European countries looking to shore up their defences against Russia and to placate US concerns that they are not doing enough.
Turkey's defence and aerospace exports rose from $200 million in 2002 to $10.6 billion last year, the head of the country’s state-owned defence operation said this year.
Turkey has “about 3,000 companies every day churning out the kits and the defence industrial output that our men and women in uniform need to defend ourselves", Mr Rutte said on Monday.
A complication is that as a non-EU nation in Nato, Turkey cannot benefit from defence financing open to members of the union. “Because Turkey is not a member and a clear thread in EU spending policy is to buy from within the bloc, Turkish firms – and officials in Ankara – fear that they will be left out,” the Crisis Group conflict resolution organisation said in a briefing note.
Turkey has been trying to circumvent this by entering into joint ventures and defence spending deals with individual members rather than co-operating at a bloc-to-ally level.
Nonetheless, it is unlikely that any formal Turkey-EU co-operation framework will emerge during the summit, as clarity on what that would be “remains elusive", Mr Ceylan said.
Concerns over democracy, rule of law and institutional predictability also still shape how far European partners are willing to go in deepening co-operation with Turkey. Human rights organisations criticised Turkey for arresting hundreds of people including political activists, lawyers, an academic and a journalist in the run-up to the Nato summit.
For EU partners, many of whom have not publicly voiced criticism of crackdowns on political opposition to Mr Erdogan’s government in Turkey, the key when it comes to defence co-operation is the longevity of agreements beyond the current leadership of the country, which has been ruled by Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party since 2003.
“Durable defence co-operation requires confidence that agreements, institutions and political commitments will outlast individual leaders,” Mr Gasco said.
