“Short but intense.” That is how Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the NATO summit held in Ankara on July 7 and 8, in an interview given shortly after the meeting closed. The phrase carries more than it seems to. Italy had arrived in Turkey fearing a trap. It went home with some pressing homework, above all raising military spending fast without letting it swell the public debt, but also with some good news.
The alliance, for its part, emerged from the summit transformed. Ankara confirmed that growing responsibility for the conventional defense of the continent will shift onto the Europeans. For Europe’s middle powers, the summit’s main lesson is that this transformation could become an opportunity, in economic terms as much as in status, for those who take the lead, while presenting a steep bill to those who simply endure it. Given its military and, above all, economic capabilities, as well as its geographic position, Rome will be one of the main actors called to make that choice.
Italy, however, arrived at the 2026 summit as one of the allies most exposed to American pressure. In the weeks before the meeting, dark clouds had gathered on Ankara’s horizon for all the European allies and for Canada. In the speech outlining what he called “NATO 3.0,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had not only restated, in even blunter terms than in the past, that Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense. He had also announced a review, to be completed within six months, of the posture of U.S. forces and of the base system in Europe, which would also assess the reliability of allied guarantees on access, basing, and overflight.
The pressure for this shift had been sustained in parallel by President Donald Trump, who seemed to pursue burden shifting by brandishing the far more radical specter of burden shedding, the wholesale offloading of the continent’s security onto the European allies. It was what Washington once called the risk of decoupling, the uncoupling of the two shores of the Atlantic on security. Back then, however, the United States treated it as a drift to be averted, driven by Europe’s quest for greater autonomy. Today it is Washington itself that evokes it.
Italy’s position looked even more fragile than that of other allies. Trump had repeatedly attacked Meloni, igniting a feud that dragged on for days and culminated in the “Restraining order needed” meme posted on Truth Social. To this was added NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s remark about the use of Italian bases for American operations against Iran, and it is still unclear whether that was a deliberate move or a gaffe. All of this had fed fears in Rome that the summit could turn into a trap. The worst-case scenario involved Washington leaning on Rutte to punish Italy for not having sufficiently supported the U.S. war effort in the Third Gulf War, which could have led to a public challenge of the figures Rome had declared on the share of GDP invested in defense.
Spending was, as in the past, the thorniest issue on Rome’s summit agenda. The Italian government arrived in Ankara with a budget up from 2025, at 2.8 percent of GDP. Of this, 2.09 percent is classified as core defense spending, though it now includes items that previously went uncounted, while 0.71 percent falls under defense and security-related spending, a category whose boundaries remain vague. Italy’s strategy for raising the share of GDP devoted to defense in 2025 and 2026 was to fold into the defense budget several expenditure items previously associated with domestic security.
Rome, however, is not alone in this tactic. Other allies, aware that they could not credibly raise their budgets so quickly, reached 2 percent of GDP by revising their accounting criteria. Spain, for example, counted in several items related to domestic security and to the pensions of its armed forces, while Canada included, among other things, the costs of its Coast Guard. Italy could therefore hardly be singled out by the United States for not having “really” increased military spending, because the same criticism would have had to extend to other countries. It would also have carried a reputational cost for Trump, whose narrative as the president who, more than any other, got the allies to spend significantly more on their own defense would have lost credibility.
Add to this that Italy, far more than most European allies, has always been and remains one of the leading contributors to NATO operations. Rome has sent tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo, to mention only the main theaters, and has suffered significant losses. It was a hard and far from foregone effort, not only because Italian public opinion was never particularly supportive, but because the Italian armed forces managed to conduct these operations effectively while relying on a chronically thin defense budget and insufficient personnel, which imposed punishing rotations and additional risks on the troops.
Considering all these factors, it is no surprise that Italy escaped serious criticism. Apart from a few quips by Trump about Italy’s insufficient contribution to the operations against Iran, Rome was not accused of free riding. What emerged instead was the familiar gap between the American president’s outbursts and the more limited goals his administration actually pursues. The summit’s final declaration was fairly lean, like the 2025 one. But while the latter had focused exclusively on the new pledge to spend 5 percent of GDP, the Ankara text touches on many issues crucial to the life of the alliance, and several of them could turn into opportunities when seen from Rome.
The first is the revival of the 360-degree approach to deterrence and defense. The language endorses Italy’s position, starting with the request that the concept be applied not only geographically but also thematically. In Rome’s view, NATO’s efforts must not stop at the classic understanding of security but should extend to its economic dimension. In the same post-summit interview, Meloni insisted that “today, talking about security does not only mean weapons. It also means protecting critical infrastructure, energy security, and cybersecurity, and therefore the security of the data of families, businesses, and public administrations. […] It means strengthening the state’s capacity to defend its citizens, but also to defend its sovereignty and its freedom.”
Likewise, the confirmation of the 360-degree approach speaks to the need not to concentrate NATO’s efforts exclusively on the eastern flank but to extend the alliance’s strategic attention to the Arctic and the southern neighborhood. In both theaters the Russian threat is real, even if it takes different forms from those visible in Eastern Europe, and it intertwines with the activity of terrorist and criminal organizations as well as with China’s growing influence. This also strengthens the Italian conviction that the threat posed by non-state actors should not be addressed only by improving situational awareness and building up the capacity of fragile states, but can itself become the object of a policy of deterrence.
The second turning point, a potential one for now, is the allies’ reaffirmation that Iran must never possess a nuclear weapon, coupled with the call on Tehran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, an issue that directly touches Italy’s maritime and energy security. The passage was strongly pushed by Washington, but over the medium term Rome can use it as a precedent to press its long-standing and so far little-heeded case for a concrete NATO commitment in the southern neighborhood and for relaunching the alliance’s partnerships, including on a bilateral basis, with the countries of the region.
The third turning point is that the declaration places, for the first time, genuinely equal emphasis on higher defense spending, on allied coordination over industrial priorities, procurement, and production capacity, and on the need for the European allies to take on greater responsibility, above all on the eastern flank and in the southern neighborhood. Combined, these three elements would give NATO operational superiority over its adversaries. It is, after all, the position Italy has held at every summit over the past decade, when the first of the “three Cs” coined at the Wales and Warsaw summits of 2014 and 2016 (cash, capabilities, and contributions) seemed to sit a step above the other two. A balance among the three, Rome argued, was the way to persuade the United States to sustain its commitment even under administrations at least apparently more skeptical about NATO’s usefulness.
That confirmation has in fact come in recent months, though it has gone largely unnoticed. Many observers highlighted the U.S. request to transfer to European leadership the three Joint Force Commands that run the alliance’s operations (Norfolk to the United Kingdom, Naples to Italy, and Brunssum to Germany and Poland on a rotational basis). Far less attention has gone to the confirmation of the American commitment to retain the supreme allied command, the three theater component commands (maritime, land, and air), and the critical enablers, from extended nuclear deterrence to command and control, from intelligence to space and strategic logistics.
If The Hague in 2025 was NATO’s survival summit, Ankara will probably go down in history as the summit of its transformation. For Italy, the challenge is greater than in the past. It will have to invest more in security, integrate fully into the transatlantic defense ecosystem that emerged in Ankara, and convert its claim about the centrality of the southern neighborhood into concrete policy proposals. Above all, it will have to be politically capable of building consensus around a new distinction among allies, one that moves beyond the merely quantitative line between those who meet the 5 percent pledge and those who fall short, and separates the allies that act as security providers from those that, for various reasons, remain security absorbers.
