{"id":40749,"date":"2026-07-09T03:18:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T01:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/?p=40749"},"modified":"2026-07-09T06:30:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T04:30:16","slug":"nato-gipfel-ankara-wo-die-beleidigten-dem-beleidiger-dankten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/en\/nato-gipfel-ankara-wo-die-beleidigten-dem-beleidiger-dankten\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO Summit: Ankara, Where the Offended Thanked the Offender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump's appearance at the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday began with him insulting large parts of Europe and ended only hours later with his declaring that the entire gathering had been one great celebration of unity. There had been tremendous love in that room, he told reporters. Only moments earlier, he had repeatedly said he was unhappy with NATO. Boasting about the private conversations, he claimed people had told him, \"Sir, we love you.\" Grown adults had said that, wasn't it wonderful? Perhaps they had only been trying to flatter him, he added, and in a way they had succeeded, because the unity in that room had been tremendous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notice the sequence, because it explains the entire affair. Mockery in the morning, embraces by evening, with nothing in between that could explain the transformation. On that day, what is supposed to be an alliance was reduced to a mood, and moods recognize no law. In Perpetual Peace, Kant insisted that a peace federation derives its strength not from the affection of princes, but from the treaty itself, which remains binding even when tempers change. A relationship between states that depends on the favor of one individual is not an alliance at all, but a privilege that can be revoked at any moment. That is precisely where NATO stood in Ankara: the recipient of affection that had been withdrawn in the morning and restored by evening, without anyone being able to explain why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There was, nevertheless, something tangible to show. NATO pledged eighty billion dollars in military assistance for Ukraine for this year and next, combining previous commitments in new packaging with fresh ones. And Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States would allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptor missiles itself in order to defend against Russian attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking about Turkey, whose president Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan he had promised a gift last month that would make him very happy, Trump said no decision had yet been made on the sale of F-35 fighter jets. He was inclined to approve it, he explained, because Turkey had not assisted Iran during the war against the United States and Israel, and because of the deep friendship he shared with its president. Fighter aircraft as a gift to a friend. That is how a man speaks who mistakes treaties for acts of personal courtesy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hundreds of journalists pushed past one another inside a vast hall for the chance to ask questions of a president speaking entirely off the cuff, a man who might say absolutely anything. \"That's a lot of press. Wow,\" he remarked with amusement from the podium. Behind him stood his secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury with expressionless faces while he jumped from one subject to another for forty minutes. The war with Iran flared up again while Trump was in Ankara, about one thousand miles from Tehran, and dominated the press conference. The ceasefire was probably over, the president said, after the United States had carried out airstrikes against several Iranian targets on Tuesday. The Pentagon stated that the attacks were a response to Iranian strikes against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. On Wednesday, Iran's armed forces announced that they had fired on American military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Early in the day, Trump unleashed his anger at Iran. He called the country scum and its leadership sick people. What particularly enraged him, he said, was what he described as their deceitful and underhanded way of negotiating. \"There's something wrong with them,\" he fumed. \"We told them to take care of their funeral business, and instead they started firing missiles at ships.\" By \"funeral business\" he was referring to the nationwide funeral procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attended by millions, the Supreme Leader who had been killed in the war Trump had launched alongside Israel in February. \"They're crazy,\" he said, tapping his temple with his index finger. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sat beside him with his legs crossed and his hands folded, completely unmoved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in that stillness that the summit's real story lies. Anyone who sits beside a man dismissing the mourning of millions as \"funeral business\" without changing expression has made a decision, even without saying a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One recurring question throughout this summit was whether it still made political sense for Europe's leaders to maintain the courtesies, or whether it was finally time to push back, as Spain and Italy had begun to do. The days when every European head of government tried to stay on good terms with the unpredictable American are clearly coming to an end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That morning, Trump once again made threatening remarks about taking over Greenland and repeatedly accused Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France of failing to stand by the United States during its war against Iran. Spain received the harshest attack. \"I don't want anything to do with Spain,\" he said. The dispute had begun when Spain refused to meet his demands for higher military spending and intensified after Spain denied the United States the use of its military bases for attacks against Iran. He called for all trade with Spain to stop, along with visits. He never explained what he meant by visits, nor did he mention that the European Union, with its twenty-seven member states including Spain, negotiates trade agreements collectively. He called the Spanish hopeless, bad people and repeatedly declared that his country would no longer conduct trade with a nation of fifty million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By evening, the very same man sounded entirely different. It had been an enormously successful summit, he said, thanking Rutte for his outstanding work. Spain had been very bad, he added, but Italy had been good, and almost every country had been good. They had merely had one bad moment. Rutte himself declared that the summit had strengthened a stronger, fairer, and more capable NATO, while downplaying the attacks on America's allies. In the end, he said, this would not only make the alliance stronger but also bring it closer together. Today's meeting proved it, and he had always known that the president and the United States remained fully committed to NATO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That leaves the matter of the Patriot missiles, because it is there that one sees what a promise made between two sentences is actually worth. \"We're going to give them the right to build Patriots,\" Trump said on the sidelines of the summit. \"We'll show them how to do it.\" Ukraine had the capability, he said. Most countries did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n