One of the few things that are certain about the NATO summit in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on July 7 and 8 is that it’ll be a heck of a production.
It’s what summits usually are, a show to reassure friends and deter foes, no matter how messy the reality. We can expect plenty of feigned camaraderie among the excellencies and public pronouncements liberally sprinkled with references to unity and shared values.
Much of it is artificial, of course. But that’s the point. Everyday politics, in our time, is meant to project authenticity, like politicians who banter on TikTok and attend sporting events. Summits, by contrast, are stuffy affairs and are meant to be stuffy. There may be some tieless photo ops, but the gatherings are, for the most part, encrusted with symbolism — of purpose, cooperation, friendship. The performance is meant to imply that the world is an orderly place or at least the part of the world represented there is one in which reasonable people are determined to impose some order.
In Turkey the messy reality will be hard to hide. President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for NATO or for international organizations in general; he went to war in Iran without any attempt to justify it in international law or to work with any ally other than Israel, and his vacillating and unpredictability on Ukraine, Greenland, Venezuela and tariffs have left allies irritated, confused and worried. Whether or how much he will choose to participate in the rituals of Ankara is an open question.
At the recent Group of 7 meeting in France, just the fact that Mr. Trump stayed to the end and didn’t insult anyone too badly was deemed a successful outcome. (He cut short his stay at at least two of the six previous Group of 7 summits he attended.) The outcome was attributed in part to the ways in which Europeans managed to keep him happy — a soccer jersey numbered 47 from Germany’s chancellor, a fancy dinner at the Versailles Palace from the French host. The good feelings didn’t last, of course. Soon after the summit, Mr. Trump got into a nasty spat with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, claiming she had “begged” to be photographed with him. Among her better lines in response: “My popularity is none of your concern. I suggest you focus on yours.”
NATO faces a far greater challenge. No amount of placating Mr. Trump is likely to change his antipathy to the alliance, especially when European allies rebuffed his efforts to involve them in the war against Iran. “Not our war” is not something he will forgive, no matter how hard Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, seen in a photo immediately below, tries to cajole him.
Mr. Trump has already made clear that he views the stationing of American troops in Europe as a favor or a punishment, as he showed when he threatened to pull troops from Germany then said he’d send more to Poland.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, European allies could reassure themselves that relations with the United States might revive under another president. That is not a luxury they have anymore. He may not have the power to unilaterally take the United States out of NATO — that would take Senate approval or an act of Congress — but by simply raising questions about American commitment, he has delivered Europe the message that it must take its security far more into its own hands. The trans-Atlantic partnership will never be the same.
That does not mean any European leader is about to deliberately provoke Mr. Trump. There’s nothing to be gained that way, and there’s plenty of immediate business before NATO — supporting Ukraine first of all — in which his support is important.
There’s another reason just getting Mr. Trump to stay engaged and not insult anyone gravely would be meaningful. In the end, a defensive alliance is really a bluff, a facade of unity and strength meant to convince an adversary that it doesn’t want to mess with you. In the Cold War, the confrontation reached an apogee with the aptly named doctrine of MAD — mutually assured destruction — which held that any nuclear strike would lead to mutual annihilation.
Nobody knows whether it really would have happened that way. That’s exactly the point.
A good show in Ankara will not answer the messy questions about the purpose or future of NATO or undo the damage of Greenland or Iran. But if done well, it could at least make Vladimir Putin of Russia think twice.
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Jan Staiger is a photographer based in Brussels.
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