Trump Heads to Ankara for a NATO Summit Heavy With Ukraine and Alliance Tensions
The leaders of the Western alliance have converged on Ankara for a NATO summit that promises to be anything but routine, with President Donald Trump's arrival in the Turkish capital setting the stage for another potentially tense gathering of an alliance he has repeatedly unsettled.
Heads of state from more than 30 countries are attending, but the meeting drawing the most attention is bilateral: Trump is scheduled to sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at a moment when Washington's diplomacy on the war has intensified. Trump held separate calls with Zelensky and Russia's Vladimir Putin in recent days, and the Ankara meeting offers the first face-to-face test of whether that flurry of contacts can be converted into anything resembling a peace process.
The choice of venue carries its own significance. Turkey has long occupied a singular position within NATO — a member state that maintains working relations with Moscow, has mediated between the warring parties before, and under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has never been shy about leveraging its geography and diplomacy. Hosting the summit places Ankara at the centre of the alliance's most consequential debates.
Those debates are piling up: the war in Ukraine grinding through another summer, the aftermath of the conflict with Iran still reshaping the Middle East, burden-sharing disputes that Trump has made a signature grievance, and the alliance's posture toward a China-Russia partnership that continues to deepen.
For Zelensky, the summit is another opportunity to keep Western support intact at a moment when Ukraine's drone campaign is hurting Russia but the front lines remain unforgiving. For the alliance as a whole, Ankara will test a familiar proposition: whether NATO's unity, so often proclaimed, can withstand the personalities and pressures pulling at it.
