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Or sign-in if you have an account. U.S. President Donald Trump (R) meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (L) for bilateral talks at Bestepe Presidential Compound during the NATO Summit on July 08, 2026 in Ankara, Turkey. Photo by Win McNamee /Getty ImagesIt could have been a lot worse.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorThat’s about the best that can be said of the NATO summit that wrapped up Wednesday in Ankara. After having jailed dozens of journalists and civil society activists in the lead-up to the gathering, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a favourite of U.S. President Donald Trump, concluded the proceedings by handing out engraved pistols to the presidents and prime ministers in attendance.Erdogan emerged from the conference with a big win. Over Israel’s objections, Trump agreed to lift sanctions that prevented Turkey from acquiring American F-15 fighter aircraft. But Erdogan wasn’t the only smiling statesman in Ankara, and a tremendous amount of effort is being expended in presenting the two-day top tier assembly of the Transatlantic Alliance as a smashing success.This newsletter from NP Comment tackles the topics you care about. (Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againTrump said there was a “lot of love” at the conference. “A lot of unity. “We’ve had a tremendous time and I think a great success . . . They said, ‘Sir, we love you.’ These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice?”NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the flamboyant former Netherlands prime minister who made headlines last year by referring to President Trump as “daddy” and prides himself on his skills as Europe’s leading “Trump whisperer,” was especially upbeat.“I think we should praise Donald Trump for the fact that NATO is so much stronger,” Rutte told a journalist from the U.K.’s Independent newspaper at Wednesday’s closing news conference. The question Rutte was responding to alluded to Trump’s chronic habit of attacking the sovereignty of NATO states, right up to the moment before the assembly when he doubled down on his threat to take over Denmark’s territory of Greenland. The reporter asked Rutte: “Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit like that and say nothing?”If a NATO summit “success” is mollifying an unstable American president whose signature policies involve waging trade wars against American allies and trash-talking Europe and Canada while sweet-talking Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it’s hard to imagine a lower bar. But a lower bar was established in Ankara. The summit heralded as a highlight its reiteration of NATO Article 5, the “all for one” clause, which was NATO’s entire raison-d’etre when the alliance was established in 1949.It would not have gone unnoticed in Kyiv that Article 5 is the primary reason Trump cites, like President Joe Biden before him, for opposing Ukraine’s entry into NATO — even though NATO’s official standpoint is that Ukraine belongs in the alliance. Ukraine’s NATO membership would force NATO states to jettison the diplomatic fiction that Europe and Russia are not at war, and the recapitulation of Article 5 in Ankara further provides Moscow with another perverse incentive to prolong the war: So long as Ukraine is under attack, NATO membership is beyond Kyiv’s reach.If the NATO alliance is stronger — and on paper, in military-budget spreadsheets, you could say it is — it’s because almost every key NATO state is scrambling to build up its defence and security infrastructure owing to the Trump administration’s abdication of the American rule-setting role the U.S. had imposed on the alliance for the 75 years before Trump‘s return to the White House in January last year.And on paper, most of NATO’s 32 member states really have invested heavily in armaments and defence infrastructure since Trump’s re-election. The greater portion of those investments have gone to readiness measures and countering threats from Vladimir Putin, who continues to wage a bloody war on Ukraine and engage in reckless incursions into Eastern Europe, if not with President Trump’s blessing then at least with his toleration.On paper, for instance, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in Ankara that Canada will spend $475 million in ammunition for Ukraine, purchased from Canadian and Czech suppliers, and another $400 million on Canadian armoured-combat support vehicles. All well and good, but those expenditures will come from a $2 billion package Ottawa announced last February.Similarly, Canada’s new satellite communications in the Arctic, the $800 million for long-range Norwegian joint strike missiles, the acquisition of at least 1,600 military vehicles and utility trailers, the $6.4 billion on two new polar icebreakers and the tentative deal for German-Norwegian submarines all just fill in some of the blanks from the $40 billion the Carney government set aside last March.As for the $80 billion in military assistance the NATO states pledged to Ukraine in the joint declaration issued at the close of the Ankara summit, only a fraction of that amount is “new” money, and none of it comes from the United States, which cut off contributions to Ukraine after Trump’s inauguration. The $80 billion is a complex repackaging of earlier European and Canadian commitments. Roughly half of the money is from a European loan agreed upon last December.To be fair, financial innovation is one thing today’s NATO leaders are good at.Prime Minister Mark Carney is a former head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, and until he assumed the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau in March last year he was the chair of the board of Brookfield Asset Management. French prime minister Emmanuel Macron came into politics as a Rothschild & Co. investment banker. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is the former head of the German subsidiary of Blackrock Asset Management, the world’s largest financial asset manager, and Finnish president Alex Stubb is a former vice-president of the European Investment Bank.For these reasons it doesn’t require too close a reconnaissance of the sea surface to notice that the flotsam of the Transatlantic Alliance contains quite a few banker-statesmen, and they’re treading water while the American flagship of the NATO flotilla is steaming off towards the far horizon.While the United States did sign on to the symbolic reiteration of NATO’s Article 5 in Ankara, so long as Donald Trump is president, and so long as the NATO states fail to bring forward a suitable degree of coherent, convincing resolve, it’s not at all clear how much Vladimir Putin will be allowed to get away with.Russia’s clandestine operations targeting European NATO states have quadrupled over the past two years, involving everything from reckless incursions into European airspace to arson attacks and the sabotage of critical infrastructure — all below the threshold that would trigger Article 5. After Ankara, it’s anybody’s guess whether NATO could summon the backbone to respond forcefully and finally in the event of a crisis.Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s engraved pistols aren’t going to be enough.National Post Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.