President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan walks with his aides to a meeting during the NATO Summit 2023 in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11, 2023. Turkey’s hosting of the 2026 NATO summit could create problems for the alliance. (Shutterstock/Gints Ivuskans)
Don’t Let Turkey Hijack the NATO Summit
NATO leaders must make it clear to Turkey that it cannot be a NATO member and pursue a foreign policy that undermines the alliance.
For the first time since 2004, Turkey will host the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will likely use the event to present Turkey as a model ally. The messaging will be simple: Turkey is the indispensable nation, an image that Erdogan has long cultivated.
If left unchallenged, NATO leaders will miss the vital question of whether Erdogan’s government uses Turkey’s NATO membership to strengthen the alliance or to shield policies that undermine it.
Nowhere is the dilemma more apparent than in Ankara’s attempt to lead a new Sunni security framework with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and others, a potential sign that Turkey is interested in entering into alliance networks outside of NATO. We have already observed this in Turkey’s repeated bids to join BRICS and the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO)—entities that model themselves in opposition to the rules-based international order.
While Turkey frames the potential Sunni pact as an effort to promote regional stability amid Iran’s weakening, it risks forming a parallel security bloc that undermines NATO cohesion, complicates US strategy, and enables Ankara to pursue strategic independence rather than transatlantic priorities.
Despite worries, however, the formation of a formal “Sunni NATO” is unlikely. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not likely to coordinate their security policies with Erdogan. Pakistan’s involvement is limited by its domestic economic problems, ties to China, and nuclear sensitivities. Qatar may support Turkish initiatives, but lacks the strategic leverage Ankara seeks. The most likely outcome is an ad hoc consultative mechanism that may serve diplomatic purposes but would not replace US-led regional security.
The eastern Mediterranean is a more immediate challenge. Turkey’s recent proposal for maritime legislation seeks to codify Ankara’s expansionist claims in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Under its “Blue Homeland” maritime doctrine, Ankara has long claimed a maximalist interpretation of its maritime borders and exclusive economic zone, but turning unilateral interpretations into domestic law to challenge Greece and Cyprus is a new and worrying manner hitherto unwitnessed. At the highest level, such an action makes a mockery of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The way forward is clear. NATO leaders should state that intra-alliance coercion is incompatible with alliance solidarity. Leaders, especially President Donald Trump, must declare that threats against allies undermine alliance solidarity. The United States should warn that Turkish military enforcement of unilateral maritime claims will impact defense cooperation. The EU should tie Turkey’s access to military initiatives, customs modernization, and diplomatic privileges to tangible de-escalation policy goals that Turkey is keen to broker with the EU. Moreover, Ankara cannot claim NATO solidarity against Russia while threatening NATO and EU partners in the eastern Mediterranean.
Adding to regional worries is Turkey’s increasingly hostile relationship with Israel. While Ankara likes to claim its condemnations of Israel are born out of Israel’s war on Hamas or Hezbollah, it is worth remembering that Erdogan has invested heavily in undermining Turkey’s relationship with the Jewish state since 2008. On May 31, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan commented that Turkey was willing to normalize ties with Jerusalem on the condition that Israel respected and ended its war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and respected the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, based on the 1967 borders. This is hypocritical.
Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, Ankara’s invocation of sovereignty and borders is selective and insincere. Turkey occupies northern Cyprus and has done so continuously since 1974, and refuses to recognize the Republic of Cyprus while demanding that Israel accept maximal Turkish conditions for regional legitimacy. Ankara’s refusal to allow Cyprus to attend the upcoming COP-31 climate summit is only the most recent example.
In addition to regional concerns, the July NATO summit is also likely to be an occasion for Ankara to seek readmission to the F-35 program. This would be a big mistake, as Turkey was justifiably removed from the F-35 program by the Trump administration and sanctioned in 2019 for acquiring Russia’s S-400 system, which is incompatible with the F-35’s security and NATO’s interoperability standards. Ankara has not met the conditions for return, nor does it seem interested in doing so. The Trump administration must continue to deny Turkey access to the F-35, for as long as Ankara refuses to live up to the spirit and letter of being a NATO member.
The F-35 is not a diplomatic trophy but a sensitive fifth-generation weapons platform, and providing it to a government that retains close and evolving ties with Russia, NATO’s foremost adversary, supports terrorist entities, including Hamas, one that threatens allies Greece and Cyprus, would reward precisely the behavior NATO should be deterring. The summit is an opportunity to focus on maintaining alliance discipline rather than reinstating Turkey’s privileges.
Finally, the NATO summit is a momentous opportunity to warn Turkey’s Erdogan that his disdain for democratic governance has crossed too many boundaries of acceptability. States that are desirous of joining NATO today must demonstrate the existence of a functioning democracy. Turkey has trouble convincing observers that the basic rule of law exists.
On May 21, a Turkish court replaced the elected CHP leadership with figures more acceptable to the regime. This was not an isolated legal matter but part of Erdogan’s wider effort to weaken Turkey’s democratic opposition following CHP’s 2024 municipal wins and the popularity of leaders like Ekrem Imamoglu and Ozgur Ozel. A NATO ally that uses courts to suppress opposition is not just experiencing democratic backsliding; it is becoming a security liability.
The message in Ankara should be clear: Turkey is a NATO ally, but membership carries obligations. It cannot be used to justify strategic freelancing, Islamist patronage, maritime coercion, or democratic repression.
If Erdogan wants Turkey to be recognized as a keystone of the transatlantic alliance, he must demonstrate that commitment. Until then, the NATO summit should not serve as a platform for Turkish strategic autonomy, but as a test of the alliance’s resolve to defend its principles, members, and security interests.
About the Author: Sinan Ciddi
Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow on Turkey at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC. Sinan has over two decades of research experience focused on Turkish domestic politics and foreign policy, with bylines in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Politico, Newsweek, The National Interest, and 19FortyFive. He frequently provides commentary on various media outlets, including BBC, CNN International, DW News, France 24, the Greek Current Podcast, and CBS’s John Batchelor Show. Sinan is also an associate professor of national security studies at Marine Corps University and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
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