Implementation, not production. That is how NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed the 2026 summit. It convenes in Ankara in early July, hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The last two summits produced landmark commitments, including the 5% spending pledge agreed in The Hague. Now leaders arrive in Turkey under pressure to deliver. They must show that pledges are turning into real capability. The headlines will be about money, industry, and the future of the US role in Europe. The deeper question is harder. Can an alliance built for consensus move at the speed necessary to face the challenges ahead?
CEPA experts lay out what to expect.
The Money Question
The Hague set the target: 5% of GDP by 2035. That splits into 3.5% for core defense and 1.5% for related investment such as infrastructure. Ankara is where allies must show their plans to reach it.
Some are well on their way. Others are not. “Many countries are increasing their defense spending with significant amounts of money,” says Kurt Volker. He is a former US ambassador to NATO and a CEPA distinguished fellow. That group includes Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, and the Nordics. But a few allies, he says, have “made it clear they’re really not going to reach for that target.” He names Spain, the United Kingdom, and Canada among the laggards.
The aggregate numbers are moving. Gordon B. “Skip” Davis, Jr., a CEPA senior fellow and former Assistant Secretary General of NATO’s Defense Investment Division, points to one early indicator. Allies added “$90 billion” in defense spending in a single year, he notes, calling it “a significant step forward.”
The harder question is enforcement. Burden shifting is now alliance doctrine. So the spending laggards face an uncomfortable summit. Any nation below target “is going to have a very tough time of it,” says David Cattler. He led NATO’s intelligence and security from 2019 to 2023. The pressure will be sharpest “in private when they get together to talk about this.” His warning is blunt. “Now is not the time to not have a clear plan,” he says, pressing for “real military spending and capability delivery on a real timeline.”
A Day for Industry
For the first time, the defense industry takes center stage. The full day of July 7 is given over to a defense industry forum. That is more hours than the leaders’ meeting itself. “Yes to interoperability, to looking together to how NATO can procure together,” says Jason Israel. A CEPA senior fellow and former defense-policy director at the National Security Council, Israel flags one concrete deliverable: the NATO front door for industry. He calls it “an AI-enabled tool” to help companies join “the NATO procurement cycle.”
The ambition runs into a procurement system not built for speed. Davis sees this as the summit’s quietest but most consequential gap. Western buyers need “more flexibility and delegation of authority in the use of defense budgets,” he says. That would “enhance or encourage experimentation.” CEPA has explored the theme in its report on unleashing defense innovation. The battlefield lesson is stark. “Volume has its own quality,” he says. The West must “mass produce both offensive and defensive systems at a lower cost than we currently do.”
The Lessons of Ukraine
Ukraine’s defense against Russia runs through every agenda item. The experts worry the alliance is studying it rather than absorbing it. Europe and the US are “both lagging” in incorporating those lessons, Davis says. “They’re observing, monitoring, but not sure they’re yet integrating.”
Volker frames the core lesson in cost. He says “large numbers of cheap high-tech systems are outperforming smaller numbers of very expensive” ones. “Let’s not use Patriot missiles on $30,000 drones.” The deeper shift is mindset and tempo. A Western anti-drone tender “would be billions of dollars procurement” taking “a couple of years,” he says. “Ukrainians do this every six weeks,” he adds. By then “the earlier generation is now failing because of Russian countermeasures.”
Laura Galante, former Director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sees a broader template. Ukraine, she says, is “the blueprint for a more effective way to operate in an AI-fueled warfare.” That means sensing across air, sea, and cyber. It means adapting commercial tools and running faster cycles. The payoff is “muscle memory” for “a more adaptive advantage in modern warfare.”
The Shadow War
Below the threshold of open conflict, Russia is already testing the alliance. The question is whether NATO will say so. Volker argues the alliance still lacks a strategy for hybrid attacks. These range from disinformation and bribery to “deliberate probing of NATO airspace and sea space.” His concern is the political signal. “We say rhetorically we’ll defend every inch of NATO territory, and then we don’t,” he says. He cites a Russian drone that struck an apartment building in Romania.
His sharpest warning is about a limited incursion. Russia might “go into Lithuania or Estonia, grab a small piece of territory, and then stop.” Voices across the West would then counsel against escalation. That is “exactly what Russia would want.” The goal would be to show “that Article Five is negotiable or hollow.”
Jan Lipavský warns against complacency about Moscow’s intentions. He is a member of CEPA’s International Leadership Council. He served as foreign minister of the Czech Republic from 2021 to 2024. “We are living in times when things which are possible are also happening,” he says. He warns that Putin may still “decide to test NATO.”
Galante’s reframing may be the most important. The targets are increasingly private, from data centers and undersea cables to airports and railways that carry both civilian and military traffic. This is not the occasional Russian incident, she says. “This is really about the stability of the alliance.” And “that’s not a cyber problem, that’s an alliance problem.”
US Presence in Europe
Hanging over Ankara is the future of the US commitment to Europe. Lipavský calls “the diminishing role of the USA in European defense” the summit’s organizing reality. It is no longer a novelty, he says, but now “under a certain timeframe.”
The experts urge separating signal from noise. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to cut US contributions, but Volker calls that “a little bit of bluster.” A force posture review is underway, and “when you strip away the rhetoric, it’s a fairly straightforward and normal process,” he says. Cattler offers a similar clarification. The US “is not pulling out of crisis planning,” he says, but adjusting which forces it commits up front. What matters is the timeline, because Europe needs time to grow the high-end capabilities the US has long provided, from special operations forces to ballistic missile defense. CEPA’s military experts warn that a large-scale drawdown of US bases would weaken deterrence, a point former US national security advisor H.R. McMaster presses hard.
Israel returns to a question of perspective: compared to what? The US, he says, “is able to bring countries together” in a way rivals cannot. Neither China nor Russia can match it “when it comes to bringing other nations around them.”
The Bigger Picture
The most likely outcome is not a single headline, Cattler predicts. He expects steady movement across investment, industry, and innovation. The real significance lies deeper. “NATO’s adaptation is becoming structural rather than episodic,” he says. The alliance is “organizing itself around long-term competition rather than short-term crisis response.”
That is where the central test sits. Interoperability is “becoming a software problem just as much as it has historically been a hardware problem,” he argues. It now turns on shared data, cloud architecture, and AI-enabled systems. The question for Ankara is whether allies can keep pace. Can they translate consensus, investment, and innovation “into operational capability at the pace required by strategic competition?”
The summit will not settle that question. But what leaders commit to in Turkey will matter. So will what they leave undone. Both will signal whether the alliance is keeping pace with the war already being waged against it.
Michael Newton is the Director for Communications and Information Systems at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
