Swords into Sofra: What NATO Ankara Said About Turkey’s Place in the World — and What Comes Next

The 36th NATO Summit was not only a diplomatic event. It was a performance — carefully staged, deliberately symbolic — in which Turkey presented a version of itself to the world. The question is whether the version on display in Ankara corresponds to where Turkey actually is, and where it is going.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  Summer 2026

Every major diplomatic gathering is, at some level, a piece of theatre. The question is always whether the performance corresponds to the underlying reality, or whether the gap between them is the most important thing to understand.

The Ankara NATO summit was, on the surface, a triumph for Turkish diplomacy. F-35 delivery commitment secured. CAATSA sanctions lifted. Trump praising Erdoğan in terms that no American president had used about a Turkish leader in recent memory. Janissaries in the courtyard. Fatih Tutak in the kitchen. Mehter in the air. The world’s media, briefly, turning its attention to a city that is rarely the subject of positive international coverage.

Beneath the surface, the picture is more complicated. Not because the gains were not real — they were. But because the exercise of hosting the summit, and the particular form that success took, reveals something specific about both Turkey’s strengths and the structural conditions that constrain it.

The Personal Diplomacy Model: Asset and Liability

Turkey’s most important gains at Ankara were secured not through institutional channels — not through NATO consensus mechanisms or transatlantic frameworks — but through a personal relationship between Erdoğan and Trump. Trump’s own statement was explicit: he came because of his friendship with Erdoğan. The F-35s and the CAATSA sanctions were delivered in that context.

Personal diplomacy of this kind is, simultaneously, effective and fragile. It is effective because it can move quickly, bypass institutional resistance, and deliver outcomes that formal negotiating processes might take years to achieve. It is fragile because it depends on the continuation of a personal relationship, and on both principals remaining in power. Trump’s second term runs until 2029. Erdoğan’s mandate continues to 2028. Within that window, the personal channel is valuable. Beyond it, the question of what institutional foundations Turkey has built — foundations that would survive a change of leadership in Washington — is more open.

The Defence Industrial Dimension

One of the most substantive points in Erdoğan’s summit speech was the call to remove restrictions on defence industrial cooperation among NATO allies. This is a direct reference to the technology-sharing constraints that Turkey has faced since the S-400 purchase — constraints that have limited its access not only to the F-35 but to a range of technology transfers that would accelerate its own defence industrial development.

Turkey’s defence industry has, in the absence of Western technology transfers, developed domestic alternatives with considerable success. The Bayraktar TB2 drone has been sold to dozens of countries and has changed the character of several conflicts. The Akinci drone, more capable, is entering service. The KAAN fighter jet programme — for which Turkey is seeking an American engine, the GE F110, that remains subject to export controls — represents the next frontier of domestic aerospace capability. Erdoğan’s call at Ankara was, in effect, a request to treat Turkey as a full industrial partner rather than a technology recipient with conditions attached. Whether that framing is accepted by Washington will determine the trajectory of Turkey’s defence industry for the next decade.

Turkey, NATO 3.0, and the World Without a Script

The concept of “NATO 3.0” — invoked in the summit commentary — reflects a genuine transition. NATO 1.0 was the Cold War alliance, built around deterrence of the Soviet Union. NATO 2.0 was the post-1991 expansion, which extended the alliance eastward and shifted its focus toward crisis management and out-of-area operations. NATO 3.0 is something more ambiguous: an alliance trying to remain relevant in a world defined by great-power competition, hybrid warfare, trade conflicts, and the rise of autonomous weapons.

Turkey’s role in NATO 3.0 is, in some ways, more important than its role in previous phases. Its geographical position — controlling the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, bridging Europe and Asia, bordering Russia, Iran, Syria and Iraq simultaneously — gives it a relevance that many larger economies do not possess. Its military, the second-largest in NATO by personnel, is battle-experienced in a way that few European armies are. Its defence industry produces systems that are competitively priced and widely deployed.

What Turkey offers NATO 3.0 is, in the assessment of the analysts and officials who spoke with this magazine at the margins of the summit, something specific and valuable: the ability to maintain relationships with actors that most NATO members cannot — Russia, Iran, and the Gulf states — while remaining formally within the alliance. This is sometimes described as unreliability; it might more accurately be described as strategic ambiguity that creates options.

The Cultural Dimension: Gastronomy as Soft Power

The deployment of Fatih Tutak’s kitchen and the Mehter at the NATO summit was not accidental or peripheral to the event’s strategic logic. It was a deliberate use of cultural assets as an instrument of diplomatic impression management — soft power in its most literal sense.

Turkey has, for most of the past decade, suffered from an image problem in Western capitals that its diplomatic messaging has struggled to address. The S-400 purchase, the treatment of journalists and opposition figures, the democratic backsliding documented by international watchdog organisations, the Kurdish question: these have created a narrative about Turkey in European and American media that the Ankara summit was, in part, designed to complicate.

The Janissaries and the Mehter complicated it. The Tokat sarma complicated it. The dana kaburga that Trump wanted recreated at the White House complicated it. None of this resolves the underlying issues, and serious interlocutors — in Brussels, in London, in Washington — are aware of that. But image management is not about resolution; it is about creating space for engagement that substantive issues would otherwise foreclose. The Ankara summit created that space.

The UK Dimension: London and Ankara After Burnham

For British readers of this magazine, the question is where the Ankara summit leaves the UK-Turkey relationship. The answer is: in a more interesting position than it has occupied for several years.

The incoming Burnham government, with its stated emphasis on rebuilding bilateral relationships with non-EU partners and its climate ambitions that intersect with Turkey’s COP31 hosting, has a set of reasons to engage with Ankara that the outgoing Starmer government, preoccupied with Washington and Brussels, did not fully develop. The F-35 delivery creates a new dynamic in UK-Turkey defence industrial relations: the UK is the second-largest industrial partner in the F-35 programme, and Turkish participation in the programme, once formalised, will create supply chain connections that have commercial as well as strategic implications.

The Ankara summit was not about Britain. But it created conditions in which a British government that wishes to rebuild its relationship with Turkey has more material to work with than it did before. Whether the Burnham government chooses to use that material will depend, ultimately, on how it prioritises the bilateral relationship relative to the many other competing demands on its diplomatic bandwidth.