WASHINGTON
As NATO leaders gather in Ankara next week, the Trump administration looks beyond the communiques and photo ops, and wants to know if allies will actually follow through on the spending pledges they made last year.
For Washington, the summit is expected to be the first real test of whether the 5% defense spending commitment made at NATO’s June 2025 meeting in The Hague turns into concrete action.
President Donald Trump has been pushing NATO allies for months to take on more responsibility for their own defense, and that remains the top item on the US agenda ahead of the July 7-8 meeting in Türkiye.
The administration’s main objective is to get allies moving on NATO’s new target of spending 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense and defense-related investment by 2035. The benchmark, agreed last year, is structured in two parts: 3.5% of GDP for core military spending and up to 1.5% for areas such as critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, civil resilience, innovation, and industrial capacity-building.
The pledge marked a sharp increase from NATO’s previous 2% target, in line with Trump’s longstanding argument that European allies need to contribute more to collective defense.
US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker described the Ankara summit as a chance to measure how much progress allies have made.
Speaking to reporters in a briefing on Wednesday, he said Trump “fully expects that all allies will step up immediately and get on the path to 5% and do it with urgency.”
Whitaker said some allies are already close to the target, while others are behind.
“We have countries like Poland, the Nordic countries, the Baltics, and Germany leading the way, some already at 5% or with very credible paths to be at 5% in the near term,” he said.
He rejected the idea that Washington’s push for burden-sharing means the US is stepping back from the alliance. “The United States is not going anywhere,” he said.
Trump announced in May that the US would withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany, while the Pentagon canceled a planned deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a six-month review of the full US force posture in Europe last month, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Sweden there is a broad recognition that “there are going to be eventually less US troops in Europe than there has historically been.”
There are currently about 80,000 US troops in Europe.
Beyond defense budgets, Washington wants allies to expand their defense industrial capacity more quickly.
US officials argue that stronger European defense industries would ultimately benefit NATO as a whole, while allowing the US to focus more resources on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.
Türkiye’s defense industry at center
This is where Türkiye comes in. Washington has recently pointed to Türkiye as a positive example of defense-industrial development.
Whitaker said during an interview with Fox News that allies should be “more like Türkiye,” citing Ankara’s ability to build 50 ships at the same time in its shipyards.
He also warned against European defense initiatives that could sideline non-EU partners, saying Washington opposes “protectionist language” that would “cut out … non-EU allies, including Türkiye and others” – an issue he said “may come up during the summit.”
Analysts who track the alliance closely say Washington’s framing reflects a broader shift underway.
Rich Outzen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told a panel at the SETA Foundation in Washington, DC in May that US interest in Turkish-made defense equipment is growing, and American firms are increasingly buying Turkish products in areas such as shipbuilding and drones.
Trump, meanwhile, has described his attendance in the summit in personal terms, saying he is traveling to Ankara “out of respect to President (Recep Tayyip) Erdogan.”
Asked about Türkiye’s bid to rejoin the F-35 program and jet-engines for the Turkish-made KAAN fifth-generation fighter jet, Trump said he expects to “do something that’s going to make him (Erdogan) very happy.”
Iran, Ukraine and wider picture
The summit also comes as Trump remains frustrated with European allies for not joining the US-Israel war on Iran, and initiatives to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Meeting NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House on June 24, Trump repeated his complaint that NATO members did not take part in the campaign.
“We didn’t need help on this at all. We demolished them in literally the first week,” he said. “But it would have been nice if they would have said, ‘We’d like to help.'”
Rutte defended the alliance, noting that 4,000-5,000 US planes flew out of bases in Europe during the conflict, and describing European reluctance as “isolated cases” rather than a collective failure.
On Ukraine, Whitaker said Washington will continue to support Kyiv through allied purchases of US weapons, citing more than $6 billion in purchases of US-made systems so far.
“You should expect long-term sustained commitments to the support of Ukraine that will help them continue to stay in the fight,” he said.
Analysts expect the discussions in Ankara to reflect Washington’s desire for a more balanced transatlantic relationship, with greater European defense spending and industrial capacity.
