Ankara is about to host a NATO summit dominated by a transactional reality that traditional Western diplomats loathe to admit. European defense policy is broke, the White House is actively looking to downsize its commitments across the continent, and the only ally with the immediate manufacturing capacity to plug the gap is a highly volatile autocracy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent decades building a self-reliant domestic defense industry, a move initially triggered by Western arms embargoes in the 1970s. Today, that patience is yielding massive geopolitical dividends. As US President Donald Trump demands that European allies drastically scale up their defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, European capitals are finding themselves trapped between American isolationism and an empty industrial base. They need weapons immediately, and Turkey is one of the few players capable of churning out low-cost, high-volume hardware.
This shift is not a triumph of shared values, but rather a alignment of hard-nosed interests. Washington is using Turkey's industrial rise to accelerate its own military drawdown in Europe, while Ankara is leveraging its factories to force its way back into the West's good graces.
The High Cost of the Trump Trillion
The upcoming Ankara summit will showcase a radically altered alliance. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte recently presented the White House with a breakdown nicknamed the Trump Trillion, a visual display designed to flatter the American president by showing how his pressure has forced allies to increase military spending since 2017.
But spending money is not the same as building weapons.
European nations can pledge billions toward defense targets, but they lack the factories, supply chains, and political will to turn currency into combat capability overnight. The war in Ukraine exposed a hollowed-out European defense sector unable to sustain high-intensity munitions production. Compounding the crisis, the recent US war against Iran strained transatlantic relations, with Trump castigating allies like Italy and Spain for restricting American access to domestic military bases. With Washington threatening a sweeping review of its troop deployments in Europe and openly floating a drawdown, Europe is panicking.
Enter the Turkish defense industrial base. Well over half of Turkey's 10 billion dollars in defense exports went directly to NATO countries last year. While the European Union attempts to erect protectionist barriers around its own 150 billion euro arms procurement loans, the immediate needs of front-line states are overriding Brussels bureaucracy.
The Bilateral Backdoor
Ankara is completely bypassing the European Union's institutional roadblocks by forging direct, bilateral manufacturing agreements with individual European states.
- Italy: Turkish drone pioneer Baykar, led by Erdogan’s son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar, formed a strategic joint venture with Italian defense giant Leonardo. By anchoring operations inside Europe, the partnership circumvents EU funding restrictions targeting non-member states.
- Spain: Turkey secured a 2.6 billion euro deal to sell 30 training jets to Madrid, a project that will be co-produced alongside Airbus, creating an intricate web of industrial interdependency.
- Germany: Turkish ammunition manufacturer Repkon is setting up production facilities directly on German soil, embedding Turkish defense technology into the core of the Baltic and Central European supply chains.
These are not standard procurement contracts. They are deep industrial partnerships that make European defense reliance on Turkey almost impossible to unwind. For nations on NATO's eastern flank, Turkey offers an immediate fix for critical shortages in heavy armor, naval systems, and low-cost precision munitions.
The F-35 Quid Pro Quo
The ultimate prize for Erdogan is not merely selling artillery shells to Europe, but reclaiming Turkey’s position in the upper echelon of Western military technology. In 2019, Washington expelled Turkey from the fifth-generation F-35 fighter jet program after Ankara defied Western warnings and purchased the S-400 air defense system from Russia. For years, Turkey was treated as a security liability.
That isolation is crumbling. On the eve of the Ankara summit, Trump hinted at a massive policy reversal, suggesting to reporters that he would "probably do something" to make Erdogan "very happy" regarding the F-35 program. Furthermore, the White House is reviewing plans to supply American F-110 jet engines to power Turkey’s internally developed KAAN fighter jet.
This potential deal has alarmed Washington's defense establishment. Analysts point out that Turkey remains an erratic partner that maintains cordial relations with Moscow, defends Hamas, and deepens economic ties with Beijing. Yet, the White House views the transaction through a purely pragmatic lens. If Turkey secures the F-35 and successfully scales up its KAAN fighter program with American engines, it assumes the financial and military burden of policing NATO's volatile southeastern flank, freeing up American resources for other theaters.
Capital Risk and the Limits of Autocracy
Despite the current boom, Turkey's rise as a primary arms supplier to the West rests on a highly fragile foundation. Ankara frequently highlights its military exports to project domestic strength and absolute strategic autonomy. The reality inside Turkey's borders reveals significant structural vulnerabilities.
The country's domestic economy is currently struggling with 33% inflation and an overvalued exchange rate that has severely damaged the competitiveness of ordinary commercial exporters. More critically, Turkey's legal climate presents a major barrier to sustained industrial growth. The World Justice Project ranked Turkey 118th out of 143 countries in its recent Rule of Law Index, placing it just a single spot above Russia.
This lack of legal institutional security means that foreign venture capital avoids Turkey. Consequently, the defense sector remains heavily reliant on state-backed conglomerates and a handful of family empires closely connected to the presidency. It is a capital-light model that struggles to finance the long-term, multi-billion-dollar research and development cycles required for true generational technological breakthroughs.
Furthermore, Turkey’s touted independence is partially an illusion. The flagship KAAN fighter jet remains dead in the water without imported American F-110 engines. If relations between Washington and Ankara sour again, the entire domestic aerospace apparatus risks grinding to a halt.
The Transactional Alliance
The shift occurring at the Ankara summit marks the end of an era where NATO alignment was packaged as a defense of democratic values. European leaders are staying quiet about the domestic political situation in Turkey, including the imprisonment of major opposition figures like Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. The immediate demand for weapons has eclipsed any public concern over democratic erosion.
Turkey is utilizing its factories to build an unassailable position within the Western security architecture, not by changing its behavior, but by exploiting Western desperation. Europe requires weapons that its own factories cannot produce, and the United States wants a less expensive method to maintain a presence in the region. In this new, highly transactional era of international security, a well-stocked arms factory matters far more than diplomatic conformity.
For a deeper dive into how changing American strategies and booming defense exports are shifting the balance of power within the alliance, see this analysis on Turkey's rising military influence within NATO, which details Erdogan's efforts to leverage these structural shifts ahead of the Ankara summit.
