Newsletters
NATO is considering ending its practice of holding annual leader summits, a shift that could spare the alliance a potentially fraught encounter with U.S. President Donald Trump in his final year in office, according to six sources familiar with the deliberations speaking to Reuters.
A senior European official and five diplomats from NATO member countries told Reuters that some members are pressing to slow the pace of high-level gatherings, though no formal decision has been made. Secretary General Mark Rutte would have the final say.
The 32-nation alliance has held summits every summer since 2021. Leaders are scheduled to meet next in Ankara, Türkiye, on July 7 and 8. Beyond that, the picture is less certain. One diplomat said the 2027 summit, planned for Albania, would likely shift to autumn, and NATO is weighing whether to hold any summit at all in 2028, the final full calendar year of Trump's current term and a U.S. presidential election year. Another diplomat said some countries are pushing for a biennial schedule.
All sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal alliance deliberations. In response to a Reuters query, a NATO official said the alliance "will continue to hold regular meetings of Heads of State and Government," adding that allies would "continue to consult, plan and take decisions about our shared security" between summits.
The push reflects both political calculation and a longer-standing critique of summit culture within the alliance. Some diplomats and analysts have argued for years that annual gatherings create pressure to manufacture headline results, crowding out substantive long-term planning.
"Better to have fewer summits than bad summits," one diplomat told Reuters. "We have our work cut out for us anyway, we know what we have to do." Another said the quality of discussions and decisions was the true measure of alliance strength.
Phyllis Berry, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued in a recent piece for the think tank that "reducing high-profile summitry would allow NATO to get on with its business and dial down the drama that has marked many recent transatlantic encounters." She noted that NATO held only eight summits across the entire Cold War period.
Two of the sources cited Trump directly as a factor in the discussions, though several said broader institutional considerations were also driving the conversation. The president's relationship with NATO has been persistently turbulent across both his terms.
Berry described Trump's first three NATO summits during his initial presidency as "contentious events, dominated by his complaints about low allied defense spending." At the 2018 summit, he threatened to walk out in protest over the issue. In a memoir published last year, former Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote that had Trump "made good on his threat to leave in protest, we would have been left to pick up the pieces of a shattered NATO."
Last year's summit in The Hague was similarly dominated by Trump's demand that member states raise defence spending to 5% of gross domestic product, a target allies partially accepted by agreeing to spend 3.5% on core defence and 1.5% on broader security investment. That the gathering ended without open rupture was widely seen as a relative success.
The July meeting in Türkiye's capital arrives under considerable strain. Trump launched military operations against Iran without consulting or informing NATO allies, and after they declined to back the campaign, he publicly questioned whether the United States should remain bound by the alliance's mutual defence commitments under Article 5, and suggested he was considering withdrawing from NATO altogether. Earlier, he had staked a territorial claim to Greenland, an autonomous territory of fellow NATO member Denmark.
Trump's administration has also repeatedly criticised alliance members for failing to contribute more to U.S. military operations. The accumulated tensions make the Ankara summit, in the words of one diplomat, a high-stakes moment for an alliance still navigating the consequences of American unpredictability, whatever its meeting schedule looks like in the years ahead.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
2 min read
1 min read
