NATO leaders gathered in Ankara on Monday for the alliance's first summit in Turkey in 22 years, as Secretary-General Mark Rutte faces the sharpest test yet of his strategy to keep the United States committed to the world's most powerful military alliance. The meeting comes at a moment of deep internal tension: President Donald Trump has made clear that money is no longer enough — what he wants now is loyalty.

For much of the past two years, Rutte — a former Dutch prime minister who took charge of NATO in late 2024 — has pursued a calculated campaign of flattery to prevent Trump from acting on repeated threats to abandon the alliance. That approach appeared to pay off at last year's summit in The Hague, where allies agreed to historic defence spending increases and Trump left calling his partners a "nice group of people." But at a White House meeting last month, Rutte's carefully staged presentation — complete with a gold-lettered chart titled "The Trump Trillion" showing $1.2 trillion in spending by European allies and Canada since 2017 — left Trump unmoved. The president complained that NATO allies had refused to support the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which he had launched without consulting them. "We don't need their money — we don't need anything," Trump said. "I just want loyalty."

The stakes are compounded by a series of unsettling moves from Washington. The Pentagon recently informed NATO allies — in a document that leaked — that the US would provide significantly fewer military assets in the event of a conflict: roughly one in three combat aircraft, half of naval resources, and all long-range surveillance drones have been removed from American commitments. Trump has also sent contradictory signals about whether US troop numbers in Europe will rise or fall. Meanwhile, Russia has been testing European air defences with drone incursions near military bases across multiple countries, according to a study released this week. European members have sharply increased their own defence budgets — by some 20 percent last year alone — and Germany has pledged to reach a new NATO target of 3.5 percent of GDP on defence by 2029, six years ahead of schedule. But building real military capabilities takes years, and unpredictable American behaviour makes coordinated planning nearly impossible.

Turkey's role as host is itself significant. Ankara, the Turkish capital, last held a NATO summit in 2004. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has cultivated a close personal rapport with Trump, is seen as one of the few leaders capable of keeping the American president engaged. Trump himself acknowledged he might have skipped the summit entirely had it not been hosted by Erdoğan. Yet personal chemistry is unlikely to resolve structural rifts. As one Swiss commentary put it bluntly, the transatlantic relationship is in its deepest crisis since World War Two, with a fundamental divergence not just over burden-sharing but over values and strategic priorities — from Ukraine to Iran to Greenland, where Trump's continued territorial claims on Danish territory have permanently damaged European trust.

What the Ankara summit can realistically deliver remains uncertain. Rutte's argument — that Europe is spending enough for the US to safely redirect its focus toward China — has so far failed to satisfy a president who frames alliances in transactional terms. Former Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, writing in his memoir about the 2018 NATO summit that Trump nearly derailed, captured the underlying risk: if an American president declares he will not defend his allies, the alliance's security guarantee loses its meaning. That warning feels more relevant now than ever.