Ali Mammadov, mwi.westpoint.edu
When NATO leaders gather in Ankara in July, they will be meeting in the capital of one of the alliance’s most strategically important and politically contested members. The 2026 NATO summit will take place in Turkey at a moment when the United States is sending increasingly uncertain signals about its long-term role in European security, including a planned drawdown of US forces from Germany that has intensified European debates about burden sharing. At the same time, Turkey brings capabilities that few allies can dismiss. It fields the alliance’s second-largest army, and its geography places it at the intersection of the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Caucasus.
This setting captures NATO’s enduring Turkey paradox. Turkey is militarily valuable, geographically essential, and regionally influential, especially when the alliance faces crises along its southern and eastern flanks. At the same time, its domestic politics, independent foreign policy, disputes with Greece and Cyprus, strong disagreement with US support for the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria, purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system, and frequent clashes with European governments have made it one of NATO’s most difficult allies to manage.
This paradox has existed since Turkey entered the alliance in 1952, but it is becoming more relevant as NATO faces a more uncertain strategic environment. If Washington becomes less predictable and Europe is forced to carry more of its own defense burden, Turkey’s role inside NATO will become more visible. Greater visibility, however, will not automatically produce greater trust. Turkey’s future role in NATO will likely follow a pattern that has shaped the alliance for decades: When threat perceptions rise, allies rediscover Turkey’s strategic value; when threat perceptions decline, concerns about Turkey’s identity, reliability, and political direction regain force.
Turkey’s accession to NATO was born from strategic necessity. After World War II, Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Turkish Straits and territorial claims pushed Ankara away from its earlier tradition of neutrality and toward the United States. The Truman Doctrine gave Turkey an initial American security umbrella, along with Greece, but Ankara wanted the firmer collective defense guarantee contained in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. NATO membership also carried symbolic weight. For Turkish leaders, joining the alliance meant protection against Moscow and formal inclusion in the Western security order.
Turkey’s entry was neither automatic nor uncontested. Several European members worried that admitting Turkey and Greece would stretch NATO geographically, redirect American resources, and complicate the alliance’s political identity. Turkey’s location made some allies question whether it truly belonged in a North Atlantic alliance, while its political system raised concerns about compatibility with the democratic character NATO claimed for itself. Washington also hesitated at first, partly because American planners were reluctant to expand security commitments beyond the core European theater. Over time, Turkey’s proximity to the Soviet Union, the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East, along with its participation in the Korean War, changed the calculation. NATO’s 1951 accession protocol for Greece and Turkey stated that their admission would enhance the security of the North Atlantic area. That formula captured the logic of the moment: Strategic necessity overcame political hesitation.
Turkey’s early NATO years strengthened the southern flank of the alliance. Its membership forced the Soviet Union to account for another front, provided the West with access near the Middle East, and gave NATO a major military partner close to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Even so, the same period planted the seeds of Turkish mistrust. After the Cuban Missile Crisis and the removal of US Jupiter missiles from Turkey, the United States sought to explain the move in terms of modernization and military obsolescence. Many in Turkey interpreted the episode differently. From Ankara’s perspective, the removal suggested that Turkish security could be negotiated within a larger US-Soviet bargain.
The Cyprus crisis deepened that suspicion. In 1964, as Turkey considered military action over Cyprus, President Lyndon Johnson sent Prime Minister İsmet İnönü a letter warning that NATO protection might not apply if Turkish intervention led to Soviet retaliation. The letter had a lasting psychological effect in Turkey because it raised doubts about whether alliance guarantees would operate in a crisis caused by Turkey’s own regional security concerns. A decade later, Turkey’s 1974 intervention in Cyprus produced allied condemnation and a US arms embargo, reinforcing the perception that NATO expected Turkish contributions to Western security while remaining reluctant to support Turkey’s interpretation of its own vital interests.
These crises did not push Turkey out of NATO, although they changed how Turkish elites viewed the alliance. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Turkish debates over NATO membership included claims that the alliance increased Turkey’s exposure to nuclear attack, constrained its freedom of action over Cyprus, complicated relations with Arab states, and deepened dependence on the West. Supporters of continued membership emphasized the opposite side of the ledger: Western military assistance, access to equipment and spare parts, intelligence cooperation, influence in alliance decision-making, and protection against Soviet pressure. Turkey remained in NATO because withdrawal carried higher costs than continued frustration. Its relationship with the alliance became one of necessity, bargaining, and periodic resentment.
The end of the Cold War reopened the question of Turkey’s value. If NATO had been built to contain the Soviet Union, Turkey’s role became less obvious once that threat disappeared. Ankara worried that it would lose the strategic importance that had anchored its Western alignment. The Gulf War quickly answered part of that question. Turkey’s location near the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and key energy corridors made it central to the post–Cold War security agenda. Its value shifted from being a front-line state against the Soviet Union to being a regional pivot near Europe’s unstable periphery.
The Gulf War also revealed that older doubts had survived the Cold War. When Turkey requested NATO protection against a possible Iraqi attack, some allies questioned how directly Turkish exposure was connected to NATO’s collective defense mission. NATO eventually provided reassurance, including air defense support, but the debate reinforced Ankara’s fear that some European allies treated Turkish security as separate from European security. A similar dynamic appeared during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. NATO deployed AWACS aircraft and air defense batteries to enhance Turkey’s defense through Operation Display Deterrence, but the political controversy surrounding the war strained alliance relations. Turkey’s parliament refused to allow US forces to use Turkish territory for a northern front for the invasion, a decision that Washington viewed as a major setback. Many in Turkey viewed the refusal as a legitimate effort to avoid being pulled into a war that could destabilize their neighborhood and intensify security concerns related to the Kurdish separatist PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party).
The post–Cold War period also produced a structural problem that continues to shape Turkey’s position: Turkey remained inside NATO while staying outside the European Union. As the EU developed its Common Foreign and Security Policy and later its defense ambitions, Ankara feared that European security decisions could affect Turkey without giving it meaningful influence. The Cyprus issue made the problem sharper after the Republic of Cyprus entered the EU in 2004 while Turkey’s accession process stalled. From the European side, Turkish resistance to some NATO-EU cooperation appeared obstructionist. From Ankara’s perspective, the issue involved exclusion from a European security architecture that expected Turkish cooperation without offering Turkish participation on equal terms.
After 2010, the Turkey-NATO relationship entered a more difficult phase. Earlier disputes often centered on specific crises, including missiles, Cyprus, Iraq, or alliance guarantees. The newer tensions became broader, touching on values, identity, regional strategy, and the basic reliability of Turkey as an ally. Turkey’s relations with the United States deteriorated sharply over Syria, particularly because of US support for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led force in which the YPG (People’s Defense Units) played the dominant role. Washington viewed the Syrian Democratic Forces as a partner against the Islamic State, while Ankara saw the YPG as an extension of the PKK, which Turkey, the United States, and the European Union have long designated as a terrorist organization.
This dispute became one of the most important sources of distrust between Turkey and its Western allies.
The failed coup attempt of July 2016 further damaged the relationship. Turkish officials accused Western governments of reacting slowly and insufficiently to the attempted overthrow of an elected government, while many Western governments became increasingly critical of democratic backsliding. For Turkey, allied criticism appeared indifferent to Turkey’s trauma and security concerns. For many Western members, Turkey’s domestic trajectory increasingly appeared to diverge from the political identity NATO claimed for itself.
The S-400 crisis became the clearest symbol of this breakdown. Turkey argued that it needed air defense systems and had failed to receive satisfactory terms from Western suppliers. The United States and other NATO allies saw Ankara’s acquisition of a Russian system as incompatible with alliance security, especially because Turkey was also part of the F-35 program. Washington eventually suspended Turkey from the F-35 program and imposed CAATSA sanctions on Turkey’s defense procurement agency. The dispute became larger than a weapons purchase. It exposed how far trust had eroded between Turkey and its allies, and how difficult it had become to distinguish legitimate Turkish security needs from strategic behavior that undermined alliance cohesion.
Turkey’s use of veto power added to the perception that it had become a more transactional ally. In order to force greater attention to its security concerns, Ankara blocked or threatened to block NATO initiatives including cooperation with Austria, defense planning for Poland and the Baltic states, and Nordic enlargement. Turkey eventually approved Finland’s and Sweden’s accession, with the two becoming NATO’s thirty-first and thirty-second members in 2023 and 2024, but only after a prolonged diplomatic process involving Turkish demands on counterterrorism, arms restrictions, and political commitments. While critics saw this as exploitation of NATO’s consensus procedures, Ankara viewed it as an effort to use available institutional leverage so that allies would take Turkish security concerns seriously.
This is the historical background against which the Ankara summit will take place. NATO will gather in Turkey at a moment when Russia’s war against Ukraine has restored territorial defense to the center of alliance strategy. NATO now describes Russia as the most significant and direct threat to allied security in the Euro-Atlantic area. The Black Sea has become a central theater of European security, the Middle East remains unstable, and the South Caucasus is undergoing a strategic realignment. At the same time, the possibility of reduced US involvement in Europe is forcing allies to think more seriously about European defense capacity inside NATO.
In that environment, Turkey’s assets become harder to sideline. Turkey regulates access between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention, which places restrictions on the passage of warships and gives Ankara a unique role in Black Sea security. Turkey has supplied Ukraine with drones while maintaining working channels with Russia. It has a large military, an expanding defense industry, and influence in regions where many European states have limited reach. It is one of the few NATO members that thinks simultaneously in terms of Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and Central Asia. If NATO operates in a more fragmented and contested security environment, Turkey’s ability to act across regions will become more valuable.
This does not remove the paradox, however. Turkey’s strategic value does not eliminate allied concerns about predictability and coordination. Its geography does not settle disputes over Cyprus, Russia, or NATO-EU cooperation. Its military capacity does not automatically make it a trusted leader in European defense. Many European governments view Turkey as a necessary partner whose political direction and regional behavior remain difficult to reconcile with their expectations for alliance solidarity. Turkey, in turn, sees NATO as essential but often insufficiently attentive to Turkish threat perceptions. The relationship continues because both sides have strong reasons to preserve it, even while mistrust remains embedded in the partnership.
The decisive variable is threat perception. If Russia’s pressure extends beyond Ukraine and begins to threaten continental Europe more directly, the Black Sea remains militarized, instability continues across the Middle East, China’s global role grows in closer coordination with Russia, and the United States becomes less predictable, European allies will have stronger incentives to work with Turkey despite political disagreements. Strategic necessity will likely push them toward Ankara. If the threat environment softens, older objections will regain force. Concerns about Turkey’s domestic politics, relations with Russia, tensions with Greece and Cyprus, and willingness to use NATO procedures for national bargaining will become more prominent. Turkey’s influence inside NATO expands when necessity outweighs discomfort, and it contracts when allies believe the costs of exclusion are manageable.
The Ankara summit is likely to place NATO’s Turkey paradox at the center of alliance politics. Turkey has survived decades of disputes with NATO because the alliance has repeatedly found Turkey too useful to lose, while Turkey has repeatedly found NATO too valuable to leave. That pattern is likely to continue. The central question is whether NATO can adapt to a future in which Turkey becomes more strategically necessary while remaining politically uncomfortable for many allies.
For NATO, the difficulty is not the existence of disagreements with Turkey, since disagreements have defined the relationship for decades. The more important issue is whether the alliance can afford to treat one of its most militarily capable and geographically essential members as peripheral at a time when Europe is being forced to think more seriously about its own defense. Ankara will host the summit, but the larger test will be whether NATO can turn an uncomfortable partnership into a more disciplined and strategically useful one.
Ali Mammadov is a PhD researcher at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and managing editor of the Center for Security Policy Studies. His work focuses on military alliances, NATO, and international security. His analysis has appeared in publications including the Atlantic Council, The National Interest, War on the Rocks, and the World Economic Forum, and has been cited or featured in outlets including the Financial Times, Adelphi, Newsweek, and the Congressional Research Service.