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This week’s NATO summit in Ankara was the most anticipated for some time. After five years of war on the continent, and two years of rancour from a confrontational White House, it was the moment for Europe to prove it’s serious about its own defence.
At Tuesday’s Industry Defence Forum, European allies heralded $50 billion (€43 billion) of deals for defence production and procurement, covering submarines, Patriot missile defence systems, interceptors, ammunition, all presented as proof that the alliance is on a credible path to spending 5 percent of its GDP on defence by 2035.
Among the headline announcements was a decision by NATO to choose Swedish company Saab to manufacture surveillance planes to replace the Airborne Warning and Control System currently operated with US Boeing planes.
In addition, NATO’s Drone Hedge commits $40 billion (€35 billion) in counter-drone capabilities over the next five years to cover the whole of the alliance. It also focuses on hiring and training pilots, and will be fully interoperable across all allied states.
“Drones have fundamentally altered, as we all know, the character of modern warfare, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the Defence Industry Forum on Tuesday. “They have become a decisive factor on the battlefield. This is clear from what we see in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and across the alliance.”
Drone incursions into NATO territory, particularly in the Baltic countries, are becoming increasingly frequent, and the alliance has been under pressure to respond in an agile, cost-effective manner.
“The really interesting thing is how much work the European allies have done behind the scenes when it comes to defence and arms deals,” said Daniel Fiott, EU Institute for Security Studies.
“Working together on difference aspects of security, and frankly that’s what we need,” he told Euronews’ special report show. “We need more of it, and we need it on steroids at this precise moment in time.”
Made in Ukraine
In a significant and welcome move, Trump appeared to approve the licensing of the US Patriot defence systems to Ukraine. Patriots have proven the best interception systems for responding to Russian ballistic missile attacks; Kyiv has been lobbying for the right to produce its own for some time, but there was no guarantee Trump would agree.
“A little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” said Trump sitting next to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy ahead of their meeting in Ankara. “We’ll show them how to do it, it’s very complex actually. But it’s – you’ll figure out the complexity quickly.”
Max Bergmann of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said Trump’s openness on this front is testament to Ukraine’s strength.
“President Zelenskyy and Ukraine have a lot of cards now, and Trump has realised he can’t bully the Ukrainians now because Ukraine has moved on and is interacting with Brussels,” Bergmann told Euronews’ NATO special report.
Still, US dominance within NATO is far from over. As Nico Lange, analyst with Rasmussen Global, put it, the Europeanisation of the alliance will not becoming a reality unless its members “replace NATO’s strategic enablers with European ones”.
This includes fundamental military infrastructure needed to connect soldiers and assets across the alliance, including “satellite based time code, navigation, airborne electronic warfare and precision deep strike,” he said.
Lange explained that while the consensus among leaders is that summit passed off relatively incident-free, Europe needs to take Trump’s renewed threats toward Greenland seriously and never forget his mercurial nature where at any moment he could choose a vastly different path, damaging the alliance.
But Fiott says that while Europe will be rely on the US for defence for some time, the direction of travel – a move away from US dependency – is clear.
We’ll still need the US, “at least for the short term as some weapons are only available from there,” said Fiott.
“But the direction of travel is very clear for the longer term,” he says.
“We’re not going to be spending tax payers money in Europe without a return. And the return is jobs an European made capabilities and I think that is the longer term trajectory for Europe here,” Fiott told Euronews.
“But it’s a really good sign that the Europeans at least on defence production side of things really do get the message that they need to be spending more, and spending it wisely on capabilities.”
That was the message Rutte delivered at a press conference on Tuesday, as he tried to frame the summit as a story of Europe stepping up.
“New capabilities are being delivered, industry is expanding production, and European Allies and Canada are assuming greater responsibility for our shared security,” said Rutte at a press conference on Tuesday.
“The Europeans have stepped up. The EU has stepped up and is now the major military financial backer for Ukraine,” he said.
However, at the start of the summit, it looked as if Trump was about to ignore his partners’ best efforts to impress him.
Power projection
A bristling US President arrived at the NATO summit in Ankara Tuesday evening, clearly unhappy to be there and telling allies he was only present out of respect for the host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Almost immediately upon his arrival he began castigating European countries for not supporting Washington as part of its war in Iran. But Trump’s claims in this regard are exaggerated, and during a press briefing on Wednesday, Rutte softly intervened to correct the record, saying that certain states’ refusals to let the US use European airbases as waystations for its air campaign were “isolated” incidents.
Rutte pointed out that 5,000 US aircraft had taken off from European bases at the peak of the conflict, illustrating that “Europe again is one big platform of power projection for the United States”.
“What I sense generally in the US is disappointment when it comes to what I would say are isolated cases where Europeans did not always fulfil what was bilaterally agreed,” Rutte said to Trump.
In another move that threatened to upend the summit, Trump unexpectedly revived his claim that the US should “control” Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark – and Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen took the threat seriously.
“The US position is, unfortunately, very clear on this topic,” she said. “Our position is as clear as it has been throughout: Greenland is not for sale. I hope all allies will respect the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination.”
Trump also attacked Spain, whose Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has openly criticised the war in Iran but also resisted moving at pace towards reaching NATO’s elevated defence spending target.
Trump said he would order his administration to cut all trade with Madrid. “Spain is a wasted cause,” he declared. “We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.”
But by the end of the summit, there was no sign of any such policy being enacted – and instead, Trump sounded an upbeat tone.
“There’s one word that comes out of the day: unification,” he said on Wednesday after attending a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal decision-making body – even going so far as to call it a “great meeting”.
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