A military alliance of 32 members rests on a useful fiction, that each of them counts and that no single voice is meant to drown out the rest. The two days in Ankara, hosted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and billed as a showcase for a reshaped, more European alliance, quietly dispensed with that idea, unfolding less as a meeting of equals than as a running commentary from the one man every other leader had travelled a long way to keep onside.
First came the war, pronounced over from the summit floor: Trump declared his ceasefire with Iran finished and further negotiation a waste of time, only hours after the two sides had traded missiles and drones across the Gulf. He then rebuked London, Berlin and Paris for staying out of a campaign on which they had never once been consulted, and oil climbed some 5 per cent even as he spoke.
Then came the trade, in an order for a complete halt to business with Spain over its solitary refusal to sign up to the alliance's 5 per cent spending target, delivered in the register of a creditor rather than an ally. It fell to NATO's own chief to talk the President down, reminding him that Madrid had at least been coaxed towards the 2 per cent it once resisted, even as Spanish bond yields rose and the Madrid market slipped.
Territory came last, in a revived claim on Greenland that the island should answer to Washington rather than Copenhagen, a quarrel he had himself admitted damaged the alliance only months earlier and now underwrote with a threat to pull American troops from the very continent the summit had been convened to reassure.Denmark and the Greenlanders returned the answer they had offered before, that their future was theirs alone to decide and the island was not for sale.
Europe's leaders came to Ankara bearing some €50 billion in fresh defence pledges and a much-trailed plan for a stronger continental pillar within the alliance. They left with the plainer lesson, that a cheque-book may buy a place at the table without buying any say over what is written there, and that an alliance one cannot steer grows hard to tell apart from a dependency.
Antonio O’Mullony
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