Summits are usually about communiques. This one is about a bill. President Trump left the White House on Monday evening and flew to Ankara, Turkey, where leaders of all 32 NATO countries are meeting July 7 and 8, and he arrived with one message for the room: the 5 percent defense spending pledge you all signed last year is due, and the payment plan starts now.
Last year at The Hague, NATO members promised to raise defense spending to 5 percent of annual GDP by 2035. This year’s summit, chaired by Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the Bestepe Presidential Compound, is where Trump intends to collect.
Here is what is on the table, and why the next two days matter well beyond Ankara.
The pledge, and the fine print
The Hague commitment breaks the 5 percent into two pieces: 3.5 percent of GDP on core defense, plus 1.5 percent on security-related needs like infrastructure, PBS NewsHour reported. The deadline is 2035, but the White House is not interested in a leisurely glide path.
US Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker put it bluntly: President Trump fully expects that all allies will step up immediately and get on the path to 5 percent, and do it with urgency, according to NPR.
Who is paying, and who is not
The scoreboard is uneven. Poland, the Nordic countries and the Baltic states lead on spending, while many others lag, per Whitaker. Germany is on track to reach 5 percent by 2029, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pushed back on years of American criticism, saying this is the greatest effort we have ever made to strengthen our defence capabilities, Al Jazeera reported.
Then there is Spain, which has said flatly that it cannot meet the 5 percent target. And there is an awkward number hanging over the whole argument: the United States itself currently spends roughly 3 percent of GDP on defense, ABC News noted. Trump is demanding a standard Washington does not yet meet.
The Zelenskyy meeting
The most consequential sideline meeting comes Wednesday, when Trump sits down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the war with Russia grinds into its fifth year. Zelenskyy is expected to press for additional Patriot air-defense systems, the weapon Kyiv values most against Russian missile barrages, a request made even more urgent by this week’s deadly strike on the capital.
The backdrop is a shifting American posture in Europe. Trump has ordered a six-month review of US force posture on the continent and announced plans to send 5,000 US troops to Poland. Every ally in the room will be reading those two moves for what they say about where American protection is headed.
Erdogan, al-Sharaa and the F-35 card
Trump also plans sideline meetings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the summit host, and Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa. The Turkey meeting has a concrete deliverable in play: Trump has indicated the US could sell F-35 fighter jets to Ankara, contingent on Turkey eliminating its Russian-made air-defense systems.
That would unwind one of the longest-running fights inside the alliance, which began when Turkey bought Russian S-400s and was thrown out of the F-35 program. Sealing it in Ankara, at Erdogan’s own summit, would be exactly the kind of deal Trump likes to announce in person.
A summit with a bigger guest list
This is not just a NATO family dinner. Non-member participants include South Korean President Lee Jae-myung plus defense and foreign ministers from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The alliance is deliberately widening its circle at the exact moment its members are being pushed to spend like a wartime bloc.
Trump’s own view of the alliance has never been warm. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, he said of NATO in April. The Ankara summit is his chance to declare that the tiger, under pressure from him, has grown teeth.
The reason the spending fight is really about credibility is that deterrence lives or dies on whether adversaries believe the promises behind it. A pledge to defend every member means little if the militaries backing it are hollow, and Moscow watches allied budgets closely for exactly that reason. When Trump demands allies get to the target now rather than in a decade, the subtext is that a threat a decade away does nothing to deter a war that could come far sooner.
Why This Matters
Defense budgets are the clearest measure of whether NATO’s promises mean anything, and this summit turns a 2035 pledge into a present-tense test. If allies visibly commit to the path, deterrence against Russia gets more credible. If Spain’s refusal spreads, the alliance’s biggest-ever spending promise starts to look like paper.
It also matters for the war that will not end. Zelenskyy’s Patriot request, the US troop review, and the 5,000 soldiers headed to Poland are all pieces of the same question: how much of Europe’s defense will America carry, and how fast must Europe pick up the rest.
The NewsSparq Takeaway
Three things to hold onto.
One, this summit is an enforcement action. The 5 percent pledge was signed at The Hague last year. Ankara is where Trump demands allies get on the path immediately, with Whitaker saying the president expects urgency, not timelines.
Two, watch Spain and watch Germany. Spain says it cannot reach 5 percent, Germany says it will get there by 2029. Which of those two paths the middle of the alliance follows will define NATO’s next decade.
Three, the sidelines may outweigh the summit. A Zelenskyy meeting about Patriots, an Erdogan meeting about F-35s, and a first summit appearance by Syria’s al-Sharaa could each produce bigger news than the communique.
Trump flew to Ankara to collect on a promise. By Wednesday night we will know which allies opened their wallets, which ones flinched, and whether the paper tiger line gets retired or repeated.
Sources: NPR, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, Al Jazeera.
By Md Danish, Founder and Editor in Chief, NewsSparq
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