July 8. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck it is the NATO Ankara Summit…especially when the attending French, German and even US leaders present are themselves lame ducks. Trump is a Big Beast lame duck and one, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, is simply dead duck quacking. It has been fascinating reading the pious views of the Kommentariat these past few days trying to inject life into this ‘Implementation Summit’. ‘Implementation’ is a metaphor political leaders use meaning “we do not agree on much, so there is nothing new to agree”. Politics dressed up as strategy.
The Big Beasts? For Turkish President Erdogan this is his Big Beast moment when he can play the Statesman at the critical nexus between Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East. For Erdogan the summit is all about his domestic position, a ‘you need me more than I need you’ moment he will play for all its worth. For Trump the Summit is about the US midterm elections in November when his power is likely to be markedly curtailed. He will contrast his ‘leadership’ over Iran with supine European counterparts.
Much of what I have read has been of the ‘what to look out for’ variety, which reveals how little there is to look out for. Secretary General Mark Rutte, who sounds ever more like a cross between a ‘nothing to see here’ PR manager and a junior commander of some latter-day Maginot Line, dutifully bangs on about the increased level of defence investment taking place as the Alliance moves towards the 5% GDP on defence of which 3.5% should be spent on hard military investment agreed at The Hague Summit. The problem is the Alliance is not as a whole moving towards the ‘agreed’ target, as Starmer’s lamentable British Defence Investment Plan has just demonstrated.
Germany is rearming but still has a long way to go before military rearmament is transformed into strategic leadership. As one German commentator said of Merz “the cart is stuck in the mud”. That is one way of putting it. Like Britain, France is trapped between its regional-strategic defence ambitions and its dire financial economic and financial reality. Whilst President Macron is not a dead duck, he is on life support, at least until (Heaven forfend!) either Marie Le Pen or Jean-luc Mellenchon turn it off in April 2027. Poland is talking big, but Tusk also has his problems, whilst the rest in defence terms simply do not matter.
Talking of Big Beasts there are also three elephants in the summit room. First, most Europeans have still to grip the extent of their defence crisis and spend and plan accordingly. Second, the United States wants something it will never get – NATO as a mechanism for controlling far more capable Allied forces. Third, and in plain Turkish sight, an Alliance that is no longer built on shared values but rather interests that for now roughly align but with no guarantee they will do so in the future.
NATO’s say-do’ gap will not be closed until it has the political courage to properly face its future. First, the enormity of the growing multi-domain space non-US NATO allies need to defend. Second, the enormous cost of starting defence modernization after years of neglect. Third, the transformative and massive defence architecture NATO must build to credibly deter and defend by the mid-2030s. Fashionable drones (‘everyone must have some’) are just one tiny aspect of a much greater transformation that emerging disruptive and destructive technologies will impose.
I am a deep believer in MY Alliance, for that is what it is meant to be. I am not at all sure I am a believer in THIS Alliance. And I will not again believe in it until I can see an Alliance willing to properly confront difficult issues. For me, it is frankly embarrassing watching the lengths NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will go to KowTow to Emperor Trump simply to paper over deep political cracks and the fissure between appearance and strategic reality. A fissure reinforced by an ever-pricklier Public Diplomacy Division (PDD) which only wants to hear from people who tell it what it wants to hear!