By Bosphorus News Research Desk
Study: From Burden-Sharing to Strategic Delivery: NATO and Türkiye's Priorities Ahead of the Ankara Summit
Institution: Atlantic Council
Date: July 2026
Region / File: NATO, Türkiye, European defence, defence industry, southern flank
Research note
A new Atlantic Council issue brief frames the NATO Ankara Summit as a test of whether the alliance can convert three years of pledges into reportable delivery.
The paper argues that NATO's credibility now depends less on another round of burden-sharing language and more on whether allies can turn spending, readiness and industrial-capacity commitments into measurable output. In this reading, Ankara is not only the host city of a summit. It is the point where NATO's political promises meet the harder questions of procurement, production, deployable capability and industrial scale.
Türkiye sits near the center of that test. The brief underlines a structural contradiction inside the alliance: Türkiye remains the only major European NATO ally with an advanced defence industry that is still excluded from key European Union funding and procurement mechanisms. That makes the Ankara Summit not only a spending debate, but also an access debate.
The study also gives weight to NATO's southern flank. It argues that instability across the alliance's southern neighbourhood, sharpened by the Iran war, should no longer be treated as a secondary theatre. That framing increases Türkiye's relevance beyond the Black Sea and Ukraine files, placing the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, migration routes, energy corridors and southern-flank security inside the same strategic picture.
Strategic relevance
The study's relevance lies in the shift from burden-sharing to delivery architecture.
NATO's current debate is no longer only about whether allies meet a headline percentage of gross domestic product. The harder question is whether new defence investment can be transformed into munitions, air defence, drones, naval platforms, command systems, strategic lift and deployable forces.
That is where Türkiye becomes unavoidable. Its defence industry has developed production depth in unmanned systems, armoured vehicles, naval platforms, missiles, electronic warfare and other critical areas. But political disputes and the institutional divide between NATO and the European Union continue to limit its place in Europe's procurement ecosystem.
This creates a strategic mismatch. NATO wants faster production and deeper stockpiles, while Europe is building new financing and procurement mechanisms that may still keep Türkiye only partially connected. A delivery agenda that underuses Türkiye risks narrowing the industrial base at the very moment NATO says it wants to expand it.
The Ankara Summit Defence Industry Forum gives this issue a practical frame. NATO describes the forum as a high-level event on transatlantic defence production, investment and innovation. That makes Türkiye's role more than symbolic. The summit is taking place in a country whose defence industry is increasingly relevant to alliance capacity, but whose access to European defence-financing channels remains politically constrained.
Bosphorus News reading
The Ankara Summit should be read less as a burden-sharing summit and more as a delivery-and-access test. Türkiye's place inside NATO's operational burden is already established. Its place inside the alliance's defence-industrial delivery architecture remains contested.
That gap is now sharpened by Europe's new defence-financing instruments, including Security Action for Europe, or SAFE. If the European Union builds large-scale procurement and production mechanisms while keeping Türkiye only partially connected to them, NATO's delivery agenda will carry a structural weakness from the start. Türkiye may be asked to help solve the alliance's capacity problem while remaining outside parts of the market where that capacity is funded, ordered and scaled.
Bosphorus News has previously argued that Europe's defence bargain with Türkiye runs through NATO's Ankara Summit: Ankara's military geography, southern-flank weight and defence-industrial capacity are becoming harder for Europe to ignore, even as Türkiye's access to the financing and procurement channels shaping the next defence cycle remains politically constrained.
The Atlantic Council brief gives that argument a sharper research frame. If NATO wants faster production, deeper stockpiles and a stronger European pillar, Türkiye cannot remain useful in crisis but peripheral in procurement. The alliance's delivery problem will not be solved only by higher budgets; it will be solved by deciding which industrial actors are allowed to turn those budgets into capacity.
The contradiction is now structural. NATO needs Türkiye's geography, forces and defence industry, but Europe has not yet built a defence-market framework that fully absorbs Türkiye's role. SAFE makes that question more urgent, not less. The summit's credibility will depend on whether this contradiction is managed with another formula, or finally treated as a problem inside NATO's delivery architecture.
Read the study: Atlantic Council, "From Burden-Sharing to Strategic Delivery: NATO and Türkiye's Priorities Ahead of the Ankara Summit"
Sources: Atlantic Council, NATO, Bosphorus News review and reporting.