Two decades ago, I was covering Turkey’s tortured efforts to join the European Union. I was based in Paris then, and when one of my pieces about the talks published, I’d often get an irritated call from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president. He was one of many Europeans who thought Turkey was just too big, too undemocratic and too “different,” as he put it, to ever become a member of the club.
Turkey still isn’t in the E.U., but its position in the world has clearly changed. It now has things fellow NATO members in Europe want — a big military, a vibrant defense industry and a leader with a unique ability to charm Donald Trump. As NATO leaders meet in Ankara, my colleague Ben Hubbard writes about Turkey’s newfound clout.
How Turkey became vital to NATO
By Ben Hubbard
Just a few years ago, Turkey was seen as the bad boy of NATO.
It rankled allies by slow-walking bids from countries seeking to join the military alliance. It refused to apply Western sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as a “dear friend.” European and American officials worried about Erdogan’s strongman tendencies.
But global developments over the past few years, including the wars in Ukraine and Iran and the return of President Trump to the White House, have dealt Erdogan a new hand — and suddenly Turkey is looking increasingly vital to the alliance.
When Erdogan welcomes NATO leaders in the Turkish capital, Ankara, today for a summit meeting, it will be as a leader whose assets are seen as critical for NATO’s future — and whose increasingly autocratic governance is a concern for another day.
Turkey in a new light
The past few years have led to a new appreciation of what Turkey brings to NATO.
Its broad diplomatic relations include not just major countries in the East and West, but also across the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. Turkey has used these relationships to mediate in various crises.
It helped keep Syria from collapsing into chaos after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in 2024. It leveraged its relationship with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in peace talks aimed at ending the Gaza war. It has maintained contacts in Iran throughout the war there, despite being targeted with Iranian missiles.
But nothing has driven the reassessment of Turkey’s value to NATO more than the war in Ukraine, and Trump’s disregard for the alliance.
These have heightened concerns about how to produce the arms needed to support Ukraine, deter Russia and remain strong if the United States scales back. And they’ve cast Turkey in a new light.
Turkey has the alliance’s second-largest army after that of the U.S. It controls maritime access to the Black Sea and makes up much of NATO’s southern flank.
It also boasts a growing defense industry that chalked up more than $10 billion in exports last year, of everything from artillery shells to drones. Turkish companies are known for manufacturing arms more quickly and less expensively than Western producers.
It’s not clear what concrete gains Turkey could reap during this week’s summit, the first to be held in Turkey since 2004, when George W. Bush was president of the United States and Erdogan was a first-term prime minister. Trump administration officials have said they would like to sell Turkey advanced F-35 fighter jets, which Turkey was barred from buying after it acquired a Russian S-400 air defense system in 2019.
But Erdogan can claim one victory before the event even begins. Without him, Trump might not have agreed to attend.
“If not for the fact that it was being held in Turkey by President Erdogan, I don’t think I would have gone for it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office recently.
A convenient time for a crackdown
Trust remains low between Turkey and some other NATO members because of political disputes and concerns about Erdogan’s commitment to democracy. Ankara has bristled at being excluded from efforts to shore up European defenses through the European Union, of which Turkey is not a member.
But for now, NATO’s desire to work with Turkey has won Erdogan a key benefit: silence as he expands his domestic power.
Turkey’s most prominent opposition presidential hopeful, Ekrem Imamoglu, the former mayor of Istanbul, remains in jail while defending himself in what is widely viewed as a political trial. A Turkish court recently ousted the leadership of Turkey’s main opposition party, replacing its head with the same man Erdogan defeated in the 2023 presidential election.
In private, officials from NATO countries worry about Turkey’s commitment to the values in the alliance’s founding treaty: individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
But in public, amid deep concern about the security of their own countries, few speak up.
As one former U.S. ambassador to Turkey told me recently, for Europeans these days, “the wolf at the door is not the state of Turkish democracy.”
Read Ben’s full story here.
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Ben Hubbard was our guest writer today.
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