Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where your co-authors have somehow made it through not only another hectic multilateral gathering but also the first day without a World Cup match in weeks. They both plan to stay up late in Turkey to watch France play Morocco, though.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: NATO takes stock after Trump’s amicable departure, the U.S.-Iran cease-fire takes further hits, and Turkey has a potential fighter jet breakthrough.
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where your co-authors have somehow made it through not only another hectic multilateral gathering but also the first day without a World Cup match in weeks. They both plan to stay up late in Turkey to watch France play Morocco, though.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: NATO takes stock after Trump’s amicable departure, the U.S.-Iran cease-fire takes further hits, and Turkey has a potential fighter jet breakthrough.
The Future of NATO 3.0
The pageantry has ended, the world leaders have left, and Ankara traffic is back to normal. And, notably, U.S. President Donald Trump—despite some halftime hiccups—left the NATO summit in Turkey’s capital on a positive note.
“[T]here was tremendous love in that room,” Trump said in his final press conference, where he largely avoided criticizing the alliance’s other members like he has in the past. “There was tremendous unity in that room,” he added, using a word that NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European leaders had tried to repeatedly emphasize over the two-day gathering.
And while those leaders will undoubtedly be breathing a sigh of relief at that sentiment(ality), keeping Trump happy wasn’t necessarily their core focus this year.
“The way it all ended with the communiqué and the press conference, you could almost say it was business as usual with the Trump show on the side,” Torrey Taussig, who served as a Europe director on former U.S. President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, told SitRep in Ankara. “Unlike last year in The Hague, where it really felt like everyone was holding their breaths to see what the president was going to say, my conversations with NATO officials but also allied officials were kind of shoulder shrugs.”
We heard a similar refrain from officials and summit attendees both in public and private—that Europe and Canada are stepping up to do more to shoulder their burden within the alliance and secure their own defense without depending on Washington.
They showed progress toward that goal in Ankara, but there are other looming questions that the alliance must face—chief among them when and how a less-American NATO will actually materialize.
“Less on display at the summit but very much behind closed doors was: What does NATO 3.0 mean for the alliance going forward?” said Taussig, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “There wasn’t as much conversation about the [U.S. Defense Department’s] force posture review and how U.S. engagement and presence in Europe might look,” she added.
A broken relationship. At last year’s summit, there was a “genuine hope” among NATO allies that “maybe if we flatter him [Trump] enough, it’s all going to be fine,” Nathalie Tocci, who is the director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs think tank and was in Ankara, told SitRep. But now, “no one has any illusions about Trump anymore,” Tocci said, and allies realize that the relationship between the U.S. president and NATO is “broken.”
At the same time, they’re in “the business of not revealing the fact that it’s broken,” she added, because they can’t make that “explicit” in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war. They expect Trump to lob insults, and they let it happen—because it could always be worse (such as Trump making good on his threat to withdraw the United States from NATO).
NATO is now “playing a waiting game,” Tocci said: working to minimize the chances for further blowups with Trump while hoping that “something will happen internally in the United States” and that eventually there will be “an administration with whom one can work.”
So despite Trump’s amicable parting words, NATO faces an uncertain future—and it remains unclear if there will even be a summit next year. On Wednesday, Rutte confirmed that the next gathering will be in Albania, but he said a date has not been set yet. Tocci suspects this is because there’s concern that Trump would not show.
“You can’t have a summit without the U.S., unless that’s the summit to declare NATO dead,” Tocci said.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
U.S.-Iran cease-fire crumbles. The weekslong truce between the United States and Iran that began with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in mid-June appears to be on its last legs. The two countries exchanged fire for a second day in a row on Thursday. Iran’s push for control over tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is at the heart of tensions, and the renewed fighting has rattled energy markets, as FP’s Keith Johnson writes.
At the NATO summit on Wednesday, Trump said he thought the cease-fire was “over,” but he also offered conflicting messages on what could happen next. He suggested that the United States wasn’t necessarily returning to all-out war, but that strikes would continue. Sure enough, the United States announced fresh strikes on Iran mere hours after Trump departed Ankara. A report from Axios, based on comments from a U.S. official, suggested that the bombing campaign could continue for days or potentially even weeks.
Turkey’s F-35 waiting game. One of the other big questions hanging over this year’s NATO summit was how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might leverage his country’s hosting of the summit and his close relationship with Trump.
Trump said ahead of the summit that he would remove U.S. sanctions imposed on Turkey during his first term in 2020 over its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system. He also opened the door to reversing a ban on Turkey buying F-35 fighter jets from the United States. Doing so would require congressional approval, as U.S. lawmakers passed that ban into law back when the sanctions were imposed. It would also face heavy opposition from another key U.S. ally, Israel.
Trump was a little more noncommittal during his final summit press conference on Wednesday. “We have to make a decision [on] who we give it to,” he said, referring to the F-35. “Whether or not we do that, I haven’t totally made up my mind,” he added, but he called Erdogan “a great ally.”
Snapshot
Crowds of mourners surround the convoy carrying the coffins of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and members of his family during a funeral procession ahead of his burial in Mashhad, Iran, on July 9.Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images
Put on Your Radar
Monday, July 13: The European “Coalition of the Willing” for Ukraine begins a two-day meeting in Paris.
Wednesday, July 15: The 10-year anniversary of the attempted coup in Turkey takes place.
The Senate confirmation hearing for Todd Blanche to become U.S. attorney general is scheduled to be held.
Thursday, July 16: The British Labour Party’s leadership election is due to be completed.
By the Numbers
59—the percentage of U.S. Jews who hold an unfavorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll of more than 1,000 Jewish adults by The Associated Press and Chicago University’s NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Quote of the Week
“It’s difficult—there are a lot of Ukrainian drones in the air.”
— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, answering a question from Trump on whether he would visit Moscow.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
You may recall from yesterday’s SitRep intro that Trump abruptly decided to fly back from Ankara on the old Air Force One plane instead of his shiny new Qatari-gifted jet. The move was reportedly made due to unspecified security concerns, but Trump said during his press conference that it was so the new plane could fly to a few U.S. military bases in Europe so troops stationed there could admire it. “We’ll be going home by normal methods,” he said.
But the U.S. president appears to have pulled a reverse switcheroo: switching back to the Qatari aircraft at the United Kingdom’s RAF Mildenhall base (after aforementioned troop admiration) for his flight back to Washington. “As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal — including distraction and misdirection — to address those threats,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the New York Times.
