The NATO Summit opens in Ankara on July 7 and 8, and Turkey is not just the host, it is the central power broker. With t...

The NATO Summit opens in Ankara on July 7 and 8, and Turkey is not just the host, it is the central power broker. With the US pulling back from Europe's defense umbrella, Erdogan is positioning Turkey as indispensable to whatever NATO becomes next. Turkey joined the alliance in 1952 and has always treated membership as the cornerstone of its Western alignment. Now, with its EU accession talks frozen indefinitely, NATO carries even more strategic weight for Ankara. The country fields the second-largest military in the alliance and sits at its eastern edge, bordering Russia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. At a preparatory NATO Parliamentary Assembly held in Istanbul days before the summit, Erdogan closed the session with a direct demand: Turkey must not be excluded from the emerging European defense architecture, and he made clear this was not a request. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas visited Erdogan in Ankara shortly before the summit and focused solely on deepening EU-Turkey partnership, with no public mention of Turkey's democratic backsliding. The Greek MP Dimitris Kairidis was the lone dissenting voice at the Istanbul assembly. He publicly called on Turkey's parliament speaker Numan Kurtulmus and former foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to lift the casus belli threat against Greece, calling it unacceptable for one NATO ally to threaten another with war. Trump confirmed he will attend, saying he is coming "out of respect for President Erdogan." That statement alone hands Erdogan a significant political win heading into the summit. Opposition leader Ozgur Ozel, recently removed from his post by Turkish courts, warned in the Financial Times that Turkey's democratic decline under Erdogan is a direct threat to NATO's southern flank stability. The core agenda item is defense spending. NATO Parliamentary Assembly President Marcos Perestrello called on member states to present concrete plans at Ankara for reaching 5% of GDP on defense by 2035. Almost every delegation praised Turkey's strategic value. Almost no one raised its human rights record. #NATO #Turkey #Greece