Tag: nato

Eight Contradictions Behind NATO’s Summit of ‘Love’

“I just want to say there was tremendous love in that room,” President Trump declared as he wrapped up the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara.

But anyone looking beyond the carefully choreographed photo-ops saw an alliance beset by public feuds, competing visions of security, and widening political divisions.

Here are eight contradictions that defined the Ankara summit—and raise fundamental questions about NATO’s future.

1. Military Spending vs. Real Security

NATO leaders had already agreed at the previous summit to move toward spending 5 percent of GDP on military-related expenditures, but Ankara exposed how divisive that commitment remains. Trump used the meeting to chastise allies for failing to meet even the old 2 percent benchmark, arguing that most allies were not paying what they should. Spain became the main target because it refused to commit to the full 5 percent goal, prompting Trump to call it “a terrible partner in NATO” and threaten trade retaliation.

The timing made the debate especially striking. As leaders met to discuss pouring hundreds of billions more into weapons and armies, Europe was enduring one of the most severe heatwaves in its recorded history, with deadly temperatures, wildfires, strained electricity grids, and mounting pressure on public health systems. The contrast raised an unavoidable question: at a time when climate change is already killing people and overwhelming governments, why is the overriding political priority dramatically expanding military budgets instead of investing in the threats people are facing today?

2. NATO Countries Reluctant to Support Trump on Iran

The recent U.S.-Israeli war on Iran cast a long shadow over the summit. While most European leaders continued calling for diplomacy and de-escalation, the summit itself began with renewed U.S. bombing of Iranian targets after attacks in the Strait of Hormuz. During the meeting, Trump declared the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding “over,” dismissed further negotiations as “a waste of time,” and referred to Iran’s leaders as “scum.”

Trump also complained that European allies had failed to support Washington’s military campaign, saying, “We are there for them, but they are not there for us.” Spain was among the strongest critics of the war, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused U.S. requests to allow American bases in Spain to be used for offensive operations against Iran. Before the summit, Trump publicly feuded with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni after she likewise refused to allow Italian bases to be used for attacks on Iran. Germany and France also declined to participate militarily.

The contradiction was unmistakable: NATO presents itself as a defensive alliance, yet its most powerful member expected allies to support an offensive war against a country thousands of miles from the North Atlantic that had not attacked a single NATO member.

3. Europe Pushes Support for Ukraine as the United States Pulls Back

Missing from NATO’s final declaration was its previous pledge that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance—a notable concession to Trump’s opposition. Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership, first strongly backed by President George W. Bush at the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest summit, has long been one of Russia’s central stated objections and was repeatedly cited by Putin as a justification for the 2022 invasion. Its omission from the declaration reflects a significant shift in NATO’s position.

The declaration pledged roughly $82 billion in military assistance for Ukraine in both 2026 and 2027, but unlike in previous years, the overwhelming share will come from European allies and Canada rather than the United States. After Washington poured well over $100 billion into Ukraine’s war effort, the United States is now stepping back. That reflects a growing sentiment among Trump supporters that the U.S. should stop financing what they see as another endless foreign war. Many European governments, however, continue to see Russia as a direct threat and remain committed to arming Ukraine rather than pushing for a diplomatic solution.

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NATO Member Claims Ukraine Won the War

The politicians are now trying to redefine what victory means because they cannot admit the obvious. CNBC reported that Finnish President Alexander Stubb declared that Ukraine has already “won the war” against Russia because it preserved its independence and sovereignty. He said, “I say Ukraine has won,” while arguing that Russia advanced only 60 kilometers in four years. Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson joined the same fantasy, saying, “Russia is certainly not winning,” and claiming Ukraine is having “spectacular successes.” These people are playing word games while young men are still dying every day in trenches, cities are still being bombed, and Ukraine survives only because the West continues financing the war.

This is the propaganda that has kept this war going. Ukraine did not win. Ukraine was used. There is a very big difference. A country does not “win” when millions have fled, its economy has been destroyed, its population has been shattered, and its government must beg NATO for air defense, ammunition, budget support, and money to keep the state functioning. CNBC itself noted that Stubb still warned Kyiv urgently needs more NATO air defense. That alone exposes the contradiction. If Ukraine has won, why must it still plead for Patriot missiles, NATO membership, and endless Western financing?

Russia has not won either. NO ONE WINS DURING WARFARE! CSIS estimated Russia suffered roughly 1.4 million battlefield casualties through June 2026, including 400,000 to 450,000 deaths. That is a meat grinder. But the fact that Russia has suffered enormous losses does not magically mean Ukraine has won. War is not a football match where one side loses badly and the other is declared victorious by default. Ukraine has suffered staggering losses as well, with CSIS estimating 525,000 to 625,000 Ukrainian military casualties, including 125,000 to 150,000 dead. That is a generation destroyed.

The UN reported that since the 2022 full-scale invasion, at least 15,172 civilians were killed and 41,378 injured by February 2026, and the real figures are likely higher. Civilian casualties continued rising in 2026, with April marking the highest monthly toll since July 2025 and May becoming the deadliest month for civilians since April 2022. This is not victory. This is the complete failure of diplomacy, the failure of NATO expansion policy, the failure of European leadership, and the failure of anyone who believed war could be managed like a public relations campaign.

Ukraine has only held off Russia because the West turned it into a proxy war. The Council on Foreign Relations reported that the United States made available $195 billion in Ukraine-war-related spending by March 31, 2026. The EU Council states total EU support has reached €215.2 billion, including €77 billion in military support. Ukraine is now seeking another €6.6 billion from the EU’s peace fund while its own officials say total defense needs for the year are about €136 billion, with the domestic budget covering only about €53 billion. That is a state kept alive by foreign taxpayers.

Stubb is wrong because he is measuring survival as victory. Kristersson is wrong because “spectacular successes” do not change the strategic reality. Ukraine has launched impressive drone strikes and disrupted Russian energy infrastructure, but Russia is still fighting, still advancing in places, still bombing Ukrainian cities, and still forcing Kyiv to rely on NATO for survival. Ukraine may have prevented Russia from taking the whole country, but preventing total defeat is not the same as winning a war.

The neocons never cared how many Ukrainians died. If Ukraine were winning, there would be peace. If Russia were defeated, the war would be over. Instead, we have a devastated country, a shattered generation, an endless funding pipeline, and NATO leaders pretending that attrition is victory.

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Trump’s Ankara Reversal — Ukraine Gets Patriot Manufacturing License As NATO Wraps Summit With €70B Pledge

The Ankara NATO summit closed Wednesday with Trump performing one of his signature pivots: arriving hostile, leaving warm. The substantive headline is real regardless of the theater around it — Trump told Zelenskyy the US will grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense interceptors domestically, something Kyiv has requested for years and Washington had consistently refused. “We’re gonna give you a license to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said at a joint press conference. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly.”

Whether they can is a separate question. Patriots are expensive, technically complex, and take time to produce at scale — the manufacturing license addresses the supply-chain bottleneck in principle but is not a short-term battlefield fix. Ukraine’s air defense remains critically thin right now, not in 18 months when domestically built interceptors might plausibly come online. The real-money test is what bridge supply the US is providing in the interim. That was not spelled out publicly.

On the collective declaration: NATO allies pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to sustain equivalent levels in 2027. The Guardian noted — correctly — that this “largely reflects commitments already made.” It is a re-packaging of existing pledges rather than new money, a pattern NATO communiqués repeat with reliable consistency.

Trump also used the summit to publicly savage Spain as “a terrible partner in NATO,” repeating threats to cut off trade after Madrid declined to join the US Iran campaign. He arrived demanding European allies’ support in Iran and left praising “unity” — neither characterization was quite accurate. NATO Secretary-General Rutte, for his part, called the US strikes on Iran “absolutely necessary” and told Trump: “I’m with you on this.” Whatever you think of the Iran strikes, having the NATO chief functioning as a presidential cheerleader on a non-Article 5 unilateral US military campaign is worth watching.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s PM Frederiksen felt compelled to state publicly that her country is “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” after Trump reopened the Greenland question at the summit itself. That a NATO summit requires an ally to publicly reaffirm sovereignty over its own autonomous territory speaks to how strained the foundational norms have become.

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President Zelensky Opens NATO Summit With Plea For Missiles and Alliance Membership

NATO would be wise to welcome Ukraine as a member of the alliance and should hurry to send more missiles to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ankara Summit on Tuesday.

World leaders have arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit, including U.S. President Donald Trump who flew from Washington with both Air Force One aircraft, disembarking from the new red-white-and-blue refurbished Boeing 747-8 on Tuesday afternoon. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was one of the first world leaders to address the summit and spoke at the NATO Defence Industry Forum after his personal jet touched down, using his time at the podium to call for more missiles for Ukraine, and for NATO membership.

While membership of the alliance has been frequently discussed for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the difficulties of admitting a new member that is already at war and one-fifth occupied by Russia has so necessarily precluded any progress on the matter. Nevertheless, it is something Ukraine has persistently raised — often as leverage against other wants — and that continued on Tuesday afternoon, with a pitch to the floor from the national President that attempted to portray admitting Kyiv as a slam-dunk.

President Zelensky said:

…we have raised our interception rate against Russian Shahed drones to over 90-per-cent… and with all due respect no other country has the capability to defend against attack drones at this scale… I have a question for you. Do you really believe it would be right to leave outside NATO a country and a people with this level of defensive capability?

If we already have these capabilities, if Ukrainians already know how to fight like this, then it does make sense for these capabilities to become part of the alliance’s collective defence. That would make all of us stronger. And we already see each other as reliable partners, and it would only be natural to become part of one common security community.

While Ukraine is doing well in intercepting Russian drone strikes and cruise missiles, catching ballistic missiles — which are propelled into space before they return to earth, plummeting at enormous speed towards their targets — is an altogether different proposition. One of the most difficult jobs in defence, successfully intercepting modern ballistic missiles is a job for only a handful of sophisticated and extremely expensive specialist interceptors, and these are in short supply.

For Ukraine and most of the Western world this presently means the U.S.-made Patriot missile, a creation of the Cold War designed to protect cities from long range nuclear strikes. Given the relatively small number of Patriot missiles in the world, the slow rate at which new ones are being produced in the U.S., and the anxiety of those nations which possess Patriot batteries to not leave their own cities totally undefended, Ukraine has never been able to field as many defence systems as Russia is able to launch attacking ballistics.

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Leak from Israel to Embarass Trump for NATO

A ton of emails have come in about the Israeli leaked video and the timing. Footage has surfaced from Israel, which has been long rumored to have existed. Channel 12 has aired the leaked video in time for the NATO conference confirming Israel ordered the Hannibal Directive in the early hours of October 7th, 2023. This takes place at the Israel police command center.  The video shows what they said:

“(Strike) Gaza. Break it all apart. Along with the soldiers who got abducted.”

In the first hours of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, while conversing with Israel’s Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, another senior officer calls to implement the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE, and destroy Gaza along with the Israeli captives. Minister Itamar Ben Gvir later arrives and orders to stop filming the meeting. This video has been leaked to discredit Trump at the NATO meeting.

The HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE is a highly controversial Israeli military policy. The most widely accepted explanation for its name is that it is named after the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, who chose to take his own life by poison around 181BC rather than be captured by his Roman enemies. The name is seen as a chillingly apt reference to a policy that emphasizes preventing capture at almost any cost.

Its primary intent was to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces, even if it meant TERMINATING the soldier’s life, by authorizing the use of massive force to stop a kidnapping in progress. The Israeli perspective was to ensure that enemy forces could NOT take an Israeli soldier hostage. The underlying concern was that captured soldiers could be used as bargaining chips to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

In essence, while it was supposed to be officially a “last resort,” the directive allowed for the use of overwhelming firepower, potentially including artillery or airstrikes, on a vehicle carrying a captured soldier, even if that meant the soldier might be killed in the process. The instruction was to prevent the escape of the captors “at any cost,” which critics argue effectively prioritized preventing the kidnapping over the soldier’s personal safety.

In 2016, the Israeli claimed to have military revised the directive to emphasize the soldier’s life as paramount. However, a 2022 report indicated that the Israeli military had officially rescinded the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE, replacing it with updated, more refined protocols for hostage and missing persons situations.

In the context of the October 7 Hamas Attacks, the policy has drawn significant attention since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. While the directive was officially rescinded before the attacks, its legacy and application have been debated. Multiple investigations and news reports had alleged that the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE was activated during the chaos of the October 7 attacks. For instance, some reports indicate that the IDF ordered that “no vehicle can leave” the attack area, which allegedly led to a policy of “shoot to kill and leave no one behind.”

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Sheer Madness: UK Tests Long-Range Missile For Ukraine To Bomb Moscow – The US Needs To Pull Out Of NATO Immediately

Ukraine is making it clear they are seeking to “bring the war to Russia” – and this is what’s behind the recent series of massive Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow, which has wreaked havoc particularly on energy refineries, and air travel for the region. That Ukraine desperately wants to gain back what leverage they are able to is fully understandable, however, that NATO is backing such actions against a nuclear-armed superpower constitutes madness. 

Aside from covert targeting assistance, the UK is taking things in a more overt direction, having reportedly just tested missiles with a range of 300 miles which is intended to be sent to Ukraine’s military. 

The British missile platform has the capability of delivering 500-pound warhead to Moscow.

The Telegraph offers some further details regarding context to the major Ukraine support program in the following:

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) challenged firms to build long-range strike weapons that can fly at more than 370mph, cost about £400,000 each and can be built at a pace of 20 a month.

Some 27 bids from industry were made with Dragon’s Den-style pitches held last February, before six UK companies were awarded contracts worth around £5m each to design prototypes for testing in just seven months.

By last December, only three suppliers remained: MBDA UK, which makes the Storm Shadow stealth missile, MGI Engineering, a UK small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) with a background in Formula 1 technology, and Rotron Aerospace, another UK SME with a history of working with the MoD.

And the publication confirms that “New systems that can attack targets more than 300 miles away have been tested at a range in the Hebrides, with further trials taking place in the UK over the coming months.”

For missiles of this range and power, this is a relatively cheap price tag, and can apparently be rapid-produced at that.

UK Armed Forces Minister Louise Sandher-Jones has said the new missiles are intended to “complement” the Storm Shadow cruise missiles London sends to Ukraine.

“The UK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine, and we will continue to provide the support it needs to defend itself against Russian aggression,” she stated. “Project Brakestop shows what happens when we combine that commitment with the talent and ingenuity of British industry.”

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NATO Propagandists Again Proclaim That Ukraine Is on the Verge of Winning the War

NATO partisans in both Europe and the United States are perpetual optimists about Ukraine’s prospective fortunes in its war against Russia.  Lately, there has been yet another inundation of such accounts in Western news media outlets.  Many of them emphasize that Moscow’s latest military offensive against Ukrainian ground forces has come to a halt with inconclusive results.  The lack of a decisive breakthrough, members of Ukraine’s fan club contend, means that Russian president Vladimir Putin has again failed in his quest to conquer Eastern Europe’s resilient “democratic” frontline state.  That version of recent developments contains just enough truth to gain credibility among gullible opinion shapers and political leaders in the United States and in most other NATO countries.

In fact, even if Kyiv continues to receive extensive financial and military support from Alliance members, Ukraine is no closer to defeating Russia than it was before.  Over the long run, Moscow is still likely to prevail against its weaker, less populous neighbor and Ukraine’s NATO supporters.  Moreover, Russia’s geostrategic position remains formidable.  It is especially significant that Putin’s diplomatic and military ties with China’s president, Xi Jinping, continue to be robust.

The West’s stubborn optimism about Ukraine’s victory prospects is reminiscent of the attitude of Chicago Cubs fans who spent more than a century of futility insisting that “this will be THE YEAR” their team would finally win the world series.  Their optimism did finally pay off in 2016, some 108 years after the team’s previous championship.  Unfortunately, neither Ukraine nor NATO has the luxury of waiting 108 years for their strategy to pay off.

Yet, excessive optimism has been the norm in Western capitals since the earliest weeks of Russia’s February 2022 enlarged military incursion into Ukraine.  The unexpected failure of the Kremlin’s invading forces to capture Kyiv led to widespread predictions in U.S. and European media circles and some NATO foreign ministries that Ukraine was poised to score a stunning upset victory.  Indeed, some Western analysts speculated that Kyiv would prevail in a matter of months or even weeks.

Similar flares of optimism and predictions of Ukraine’s imminent triumph have occurred on several occasions since then.  Examples include Kyiv’s initial successes in launching attacks using cheap drones against Russian targets, and the spectacular June 2025 assault deep inside Russia on the country’s strategic bomber fleet.  There were also spikes of optimism throughout NATO whenever a Ukrainian military ground offensive scored even the most limited gains or a Russian offensive bogged down.  Lost in all the hoopla on the multiple occasions, though, was mounting evidence that Russia was slowly making gains in this meat grinder of a war.  That fundamental reality has not changed despite recent developments.

Indeed, the latest events signal more of the same in terms of the conflict’s trajectory and ultimate outcome.  Russia has made new territorial advances into Ukrainian territory, but the gains are minimal.  Both sides have made larger and more lethal attacks than before with drone and missile strikes.  Despite being more destructive than previous assaults and inflicting more suffering on already traumatized civilians, however, the latest blows have not been large enough to produce a decisive military outcome.

New predictions throughout the NATO countries that Kyiv is finally poised to prevail in the war are based on little more than wishful thinking.  The expectation seems to be that because Ukraine has been able to hold out this long against a larger opponent, Moscow cannot continue to sacrifice money, armaments, and manpower at this pace much longer.  Either Putin will seek a face-saving exit that includes making major concessions to Ukraine, the optimistic scenario concludes, or Russia’s oligarchs will finally replace their country’s aging, flailing leader.

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Why NATO’s defense spending imbalance lasted for decades

For more than three decades, the U.S. carried the largest share of NATO’s military burden while many European allies spent far less on defense than Washington wanted.

The imbalance survived the Cold War, multiple U.S. administrations and repeated debates over burden sharing. Only in recent years — following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and renewed pressure from President Donald Trump — have many NATO members begun significantly increasing defense spending.

So why did the gap persist for so long?

Defense analysts say the answer lies in a combination of post-Cold War optimism, domestic political priorities and an American defense umbrella that convinced much of Europe it could safely spend less on defense without sacrificing its security.

“For much of the post–Cold War period, it is fair to say that Europeans underinvested in defense, partly because threats were low, and partly because a series of U.S. presidents did everything they could to convince Europeans that we would stay there forever,” Barry Posen, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Fox News Digital.

The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced that mindset. 

With the primary threat NATO had been created to deter suddenly gone, governments across Europe moved to collect a so-called “peace dividend,” redirecting resources toward domestic priorities and away from their militaries.

Between 1992 and 1999, defense spending among European NATO members fell 22%, helping establish a pattern of underinvestment that would persist for decades even as the United States maintained troops in Europe and continued serving as NATO’s ultimate security backstop.

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EU & NATO Member State Bulgaria Tells American Military to Leave After Trump Says No To Visa-Free Travel Deal

Bulgaria’s new government has moved to terminate an arrangement that allows American military aircraft to use Sofia Airport for refueling and logistical operations, linking the decision to the Trump administration’s continued refusal to grant visa-free travel to Bulgarian citizens.

Prime Minister Rumen Radev, elected weeks ago in a landslide election, announced Friday that permission for American aircraft and personnel to remain at Sofia’s Vasil Levski Airport would expire at the end of June, bringing an abrupt end to an agreement approved by the previous government earlier this year.

The decision marks one of the first major foreign-policy disputes between the newly elected Bulgarian government and the Trump administration.

Radev said he personally raised the issue of visa-free travel during a recent conversation with President Donald Trump but failed to secure a positive response.
“I called for the suspension of visas for Bulgarian citizens during my conversation with the American President, but I have not received a positive answer,” Radev said.

While acknowledging the complexity of immigration and regulatory procedures in the United States, the Bulgarian leader suggested that Sofia could not indefinitely continue accommodating American requests without progress on issues important to Bulgaria.

“We also have our priorities and we cannot respond positively to the request for long stays of aircraft and tankers at Sofia airport,” he added.

Under the extension approved by the Bulgarian government, the arrangement will remain in force only until June 30.

The temporary extension is intended to provide time for allied militaries to relocate aircraft and personnel to alternative facilities elsewhere in Europe.

“We’re extending the permission until the end of June so we can give time to our allies to reschedule and find another location,” Radev explained.

The agreement currently covers up to 15 American military aircraft, associated equipment, and as many as 500 personnel.

Aircraft operating from Sofia have included Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft, Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport planes, and Boeing C-17 Globemaster III heavy-lift cargo aircraft.

Bulgarian officials, for their part, have emphasized repeatedly that the aircraft were not intended for any kind of combat missions.

Former caretaker Defense Minister Atanas Zapryanov previously stated that the deployments were primarily logistical in nature and designed to support allied activities.

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Is A New Iron Curtain Inevitable?

Russia’s consequent focus on the western front might embolden US-backed NATO member Turkiye to accelerate its power play in the south at the risk of sparking another regional crisis after Ukraine.

Russian Ambassador-at-Large Artyom Bulatov warned in a recent interview that “Westerners, with energy worthy of a better cause, are erecting a new ‘Iron Curtain’, seeking to make irreversible the rupture – provoked by themselves – of socio-economic, trade, transport, interpersonal, cultural, and historical ties that have been built in the region not over years, but over centuries.” He also condemned the weaponization of regional interaction mechanisms like the Council of the Baltic States against Russia.

Truth be told, a new Iron Curtain is inevitable and has been since summer 2024 when the Baltic States and Poland combined their respective border fortification plans along NATO’s Eastern Flank to unveil what they now officially refer to as the “EU Defense Line”, which readers can learn more about here. This initiative will likely be expanded to include Finland too, thus stretching from the Arctic to Central Europe. Even in the event of a Russian-US rapprochement, which is now unlikely, these barriers will still remain.

Russian experts, who operated for so long under the influence of the wishful thinking fantasy that the EU is challenging Russia at its senior US patron’s behest and not due to its own ideologically driven hatred of Russia (contrary to its objective interests), are finally waking up to reality. New President of the Russian International Affairs Council Dmitriy Trenin, who issued an unprecedented clarion call in April for correcting foreign policy misperceptions, published a relevant piece in parallel with Bulatov’s interview.

Titled “The EU, Like ‘NATO 3.0,’ Will Remain Our Adversaries”, it dramatically begins by informing readers that “For the first time since 1945, the most pressing military threat to Russia is coming from Europe—European states themselves. This represents the most significant military-political shift for Russia since the victory in the Great Patriotic War.” The goal, Trenin believes, is “to split the Russian Federation into externally controlled components and turn them into semi-colonies of the European Union.”

This will be pursued through indefinitely perpetuating the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine together with ramping up sanctions and military pressure for undermining domestic political stability.

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