President Donald Trump leaves Monday night for a NATO summit in Ankara at the Beştepe Presidential Compound, a two-day meeting Tuesday and Wednesday where he will press allies to implement pledges to spend 5% of GDP on defense and is expected to return to the U.S. Wednesday evening.
The summit will be chaired by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, with a formal opening Tuesday and an expected conclusion Wednesday when Trump will hold a news conference; while in Turkey the president is expected to take part in bilateral meetings and working sessions.
Trump plans meetings on the summit sidelines that include a separate meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, for which the White House has not provided goals.
Matt Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said, "President Trump fully expects that all allies will step up immediately and get on the path to 5% and do it with urgency."
Last year's summit at The Hague produced a commitment for allies to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, including 3.5% on core defense requirements and 1.5% on broader security needs, with some countries saying they could not meet those levels.
The administration has promoted a concept called "NATO 3.0," which envisions Europe taking on more of its security needs; Elbridge Colby, a U.S. undersecretary of defense, outlined the strategy, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a six-month review of U.S. forces in Europe that surprised alliance partners.
Ulrike Franke, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, "This is really the NATO summit where NATO goes from burden sharing to burden shifting."
The summit will press allies to turn higher budgets into military power, with debate expected on procurement, industrial capacity and long-term support for Ukraine; Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at CSIS, said, "The data indicates [that] the Russians are performing terribly in 2026."
"This is the reality for most Europeans," said Liana Fix, senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, adding that many are far from being able to defend themselves without the United States, "even if they're starting to develop all that."
Trump has resurrected feuds with other leaders in recent days, including statements about British leader Keir Starmer and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that prompted a denial and the cancellation of a planned U.S. visit by Italy's foreign minister, while a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., is traveling to Ankara to represent congressional support for the alliance.
Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at CSIS, said Turkey will likely use the summit to press for access to defense procurement and to demonstrate its centrality, noting concerns that Turkey could be excluded as European spending shifts toward EU producers.
Whitaker said the summit will measure the progress of NATO allies' commitment to spend 5% of their GDP on defense and that the U.S. would also "take stock of our allies' expanding NATO's capabilities in support of the burden-shifting going on here on the European continent." He added, "Some allies are doing more than others. Poland, the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries lead the way, and Germany is on track for the 5%, reaching it in 2029. But many others are lagging behind."
A senior U.S. official said the Strait of Hormuz and the protection of maritime traffic there is likely to be on the agenda, but that many NATO allies "don't have the necessary ships or assets to contribute to a meaningful maritime effort."
Two senior U.S. officials said a force posture review of U.S. forces in Europe is under way and "very well may lead" to changes; one official confirmed that Hegseth attended a meeting of NATO defense ministers to announce a "six-month or less" review and said any shift would be driven by global demands and be "based on nonpolitical reasons."
Rutte, who visited the White House on June 24, has framed the summit as the moment when member countries begin implementing last year's spending and capability commitments and has promised announcements of "tens of billions" of dollars in defense-related contracts as part of a transatlantic "defense industrial revolution."
Trump said he would not have attended the summit were it not for his relationship with Erdogan and suggested he planned to bring a "big gift bag" for his host, potentially including the sale of dozens of F-35 fighter jets; Turkey is seeking to join the U.S. F-35 program but is prohibited from doing so as long as it possesses Russian-made air defenses, and Trump said, "I'm probably going to do something that's going to make him very happy."
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Sunday that Trump will meet separately with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday afternoon. A senior U.S. official said Trump planned to speak with Zelenskyy about "how we can end the war," and the official added, "We're hopeful that we can make progress towards doing that when, when the president gets together with President Zelenskyy." A Kremlin readout said Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday for nearly an hour and a half and "reiterated his readiness" to find a solution; the White House did not respond to a request for comment.