When NATO leaders gather in Ankara on July 7-8, they will be meeting in the capital of the ally Europe can least afford to alienate and which it is least confident about embracing.
Turkey now sits closer to the center of European security than at any point since the Cold War. Missile batteries on its territory have already shot down Iranian projectiles bound for US bases on its soil, its drones and defense industry are reshaping regional balances of power, and its geography still commands the Black Sea and the routes linking Europe to the Middle East and the Caucasus. Thirty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse was supposed to make Turkey’s strategic value fade, Ankara remains one of the alliance’s most important members. That fact, not just burden-sharing, will be one of the real stories of this summit.
For most of the Cold War, Turkey’s importance was mostly a matter of geography, anchoring NATO’s southeastern flank and controlling access to the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits. When the Soviet Union dissolved, many assumed that value would diminish along with the threat that had created it.
Instead, the opposite happened. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought large-scale war back to the continent; instability across the Middle East continues to drive migration and energy disruption; competition and fighting in the Black Sea has intensified; and energy pipelines running through the Anatolian landmass and the Caucasus have taken on new strategic weight; and this is likely to rise as Middle Eastern energy and fertilizer producers look for alternative routes a Strait of Hormuz menaced by Iran. Turkey sits at the intersection of nearly all of it, in a position no other ally can truly replicate.
Ankara’s reach now extends well beyond NATO’s own borders, and this is where its leverage over European partners is also quietly reinforced. In Syria, the fall of the Assad regime at the end of 2024 has left Turkey as the dominant outside power, with Turkish-backed forces controlling territory in the north, Turkish firms leading much of the reconstruction effort, and a Damascus government widely seen as dependent on Turkish backing for its survival.
In the South Caucasus, Turkey’s close alliance with Azerbaijan during the war to conquer Nagorno-Karabakh and its push to open the Zangezur corridor, now renamed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), are reshaping trade and security links from the Caspian to Central Asia, at Russia’s and Iran’s expense. Likewise, it has made efforts to restore relations with Armenia.
None of this makes the country an extension of NATO in these theatres, but it does establish it as a power in its own right, one whose growing footprint in a volatile, fast-changing neighborhood can just as easily work in Europe’s favor.
Handled well, that reach becomes something like an Archimedean lever for the Europeans, a point of purchase that helps shape outcomes across their southeastern periphery without having to commit large numbers of troops, money, or political capital of their own.
Geography is no longer the whole story. Turkey has built a defense-industrial base, exemplified by its now well-known drone programs, that has turned it into a producer of security rather than merely a consumer. Nowhere is that shift more visible than in Italy, where the navy is preparing to fly Baykar’s TB3 drone from the carrier Cavour, built through a joint venture with Leonardo, rather than a simple off-the-shelf purchase. Spain’s work on the Hürjet trainer, Safran’s new partnership with Baykar in France, and similar deals touching Poland, Romania, Portugal, and Ukraine point to the same pattern of Turkish industry becoming ever more deeply embedded in Europe’s defense supply chains.
None of this has resolved the political friction that has long complicated Turkey’s relationship with European partners. Disputes with Greece over the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean persist, the Cyprus question remains unsettled after decades of negotiation, and Ankara’s own maritime claims keep resurfacing through new legislation and diplomatic notes.
This helps explain why the EU’s main defense-industrial financing instrument, the €150bn ($171bn) SAFE program, still leaves Turkey on the outside despite the country’s growing footprint inside European supply chains, leading to an odd asymmetry, where Turkish systems enter Europe through Leonardo or Safran while Turkey as a political actor stays, for the most part and as of now, outside the system.
It also calls for a more deliberate balancing act than European policy has so far managed. European governments, and France in particular, are right to keep refusing any unilateral use or threat of force in the Aegean over energy rights, and to insist that any resolution stay strictly diplomatic. But holding that line does not require freezing every other channel. Wherever interests genuinely overlap, as in unmanned systems, naval cooperation, or energy corridors, Europe has more to gain from structured engagement than from letting Aegean disputes poison cooperation elsewhere. The point is to keep the two questions separate: uncompromising on sovereignty and the renunciation of force, pragmatic everywhere else.
The Ankara summit is therefore more than a discussion of burden-sharing or Ukraine support, and also constitutes a test of whether NATO, and the EU alongside it, can build a predictable framework for an ally that no longer fully fits the Cold War template of dependence.
The task is to manage these tensions without fracturing the cohesion that both sides benefit from, and without letting unmanaged industrial integration outrun political judgment at the same time. The Turkish question may therefore be less an exception within NATO than a preview of the alliance’s future.
Jean-Baptiste Laborde holds a bachelor’s degree in law and political science from the University of Bordeaux and is currently completing a dual master’s degree in global security and international political analysis at Galatasaray University in Istanbul and the University of Bordeaux. His work focuses on Turkish foreign policy, NATO-EU relations, and the public policy dimensions of transatlantic security. He is currently an intern at the Global Relations Forum in Istanbul, where he is writing on French-Turkish economic relations through the lens of political risk premium.
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