Allies are unveiling tens of billions in new defense contracts and a shift toward drones and AI, but the meeting lands while Trump publicly questions whether the US still backs NATO's Article 5 pledge.
When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte convenes the alliance's defense industry forum in Ankara on Tuesday, the centerpiece will be a contract that says a great deal about European rearmament. Reuters has reported that NATO is preparing to announce Saab's GlobalEye surveillance aircraft as the replacement for the aging American-built AWACS fleet, the largest airborne command-and-control decision in the alliance in a generation. The choice is Swedish, not American. It is being announced in Turkey, not Washington. And it lands hours before President Donald Trump sits down with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for a formal summit dinner the same evening to revisit whether the United States is still bound by NATO's mutual-defense pledge.
The forum is being staged as a counteroffensive. European NATO members and Canada raised their real-terms defense spending by roughly $90 billion in 2025, an annual jump of about 20%, pushing total allied military expenditure above $570 billion, according to alliance figures cited in advance reporting. Rutte has called the increases "staggering." Dutch Defense Minister Dilan Yesilgoz has already confirmed that the Netherlands will unveil more than €3 billion ($3.43 billion) in defense initiatives in Ankara, including air-defense cooperation with Belgium and naval partnerships with the United Kingdom. Those announcements will be joined by an expected pivot away from heavy armor: Bloomberg has framed the July summit as a turn toward drones and artificial intelligence systems, and Ankara is actively marketing Turkish drones and air-defense systems to allies looking to diversify away from U.S. suppliers.
The deal announcements will say one thing. The political backdrop says something else.
Trump has publicly questioned whether the United States would honor NATO's Article 5 mutual-defense commitment after the U.S. conflict with Iran, accusing European allies of providing insufficient support and pointing to the United States' ongoing troop drawdowns in Europe and a review of its continental posture. European governments counter that they backed the Iran operations with access to airspace and bases, even without being consulted in advance. The summit agenda includes Iran, Greenland, and a diplomatic row with Italy, all of which European officials hope Erdoğan and Rutte can keep from overshadowing the procurement announcements.
Allies are spending at wartime speed to rebuild militaries they underfunded for a generation, while the political foundation of the alliance is being questioned at the same moment by its principal guarantor. More money is not buying more certainty. It is buying more hardware while the credibility of the Article 5 guarantee is openly contested.
The AI dimension sharpens that tension. Reports ahead of the summit have flagged that OpenAI and Anthropic are being absorbed into NATO procurement pipelines, and the alliance has stood up an AI-enabled "front door" tool to help companies join the NATO procurement cycle, according to analysis from the Center for European Policy Analysis. NATO's own emerging-technology program, anchored in the 2025 Hague Summit's Rapid Adoption Action Plan, sets a target of integrating new technologies into allied forces within 24 months. That timetable assumes the alliance can still operate as a single buyer. It also assumes the United States, the dominant supplier of advanced systems, will continue to underwrite the political risk of doing so.
What to watch: the dollar value of the full deal basket, which NATO is expected to disclose at the dinner; whether Trump's public posture on Article 5 changes in Ankara or only in private; and whether the AI vendor role is confirmed as procurement-grade or recasts itself as advisory after the summit. DW is carrying live coverage of the forum and dinner.