The Disappearing Summit — NATO's Institutional Retreat Under the Trump Shock

NATO is facing the most profound internal crisis in over seventy years of existence — and the source of pressure is not the Soviet Union, not Russia, but its own leading ally, the United States. Under Trump 2.0, the NATO summit has degraded from a "symbol of unity" into "a stage for Trump to vent his grievances," and the allies' response is not to step up, but to cancel the summit to dodge the friction. This institutional retreat "in the face of trouble" exposes NATO's structural dilemma under American unilateralism.

I. The Disappearing Summit: An Unusual Decision

In April 2026, an unusual piece of news circulated from the transatlantic diplomatic circuit: NATO was considering postponing — or even canceling — this year's and next year's summits. Chang'anjie Zhishi (a commentary account affiliated with Beijing Daily), citing Reuters, reported that some NATO member states were asking to slow down preparations for this year's summit; there were also plans to push the 2027 summit to the autumn and to consider canceling the 2028 summit altogether.

The abnormality of this decision lies in the numbers: NATO held only eight summits during the forty most intense years of the Cold War, but the rhythm of "almost one summit a year" since 2021 has suddenly been broken. The reason is not that external threats have weakened — it is that the alliance's leading member itself has become the largest source of risk.

Chang'anjie Zhishi citing Reuters: some NATO member states are asking to slow preparations for this year's summit. NATO also plans to push the 2027 summit to autumn and is considering canceling the 2028 summit. — Weibo Collection / 2026-04-28

II. The Root Cause: Trump — From "Tuition" to "Withdrawal," a Sustained Escalation of Pressure

Since returning to the White House in early 2025, Trump has applied sustained, systematic pressure on NATO and the European allies: tariff stick, defense-spending debt collection, territorial threats (Greenland), and "withdrawal" threats — a combination punch of escalating layers. The key break, however, came after the Iran war: several NATO allies restricted U.S. forces from using their airspace or military bases, and Trump took this as "betrayal."

III. Deeper Reading: From "A Bad Summit" to "No Summit"

In response to this situation, two interpretive directions emerged within NATO. Officially, officials said it was better to hold fewer summits than to hold "bad summits," claiming that the real measure of NATO's strength lies in "the quality of consultation and decision-making." Phyllis Berry, an expert at the Atlantic Council (a U.S. think tank), cut straight to the point: Trump attended four NATO summits during his first term and after returning to the White House, and each was overshadowed by "controversial incidents." Fewer summits means fewer stages for friction.

Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg wrote in his memoir: if Trump actually carried out his threat and let the United States leave NATO, "we will have to pick up the pieces of NATO falling apart."

IV. Parallel Signals: Russia's "West Losing Its Position" Narrative

Mirroring NATO's retreat, Russia intensively released signals of "the West losing its leadership position" during the same period. Vladimir Putin said "the old modes of operation, established norms and rules of engagement in international relations are gradually losing their effectiveness… the West is losing its leadership position." Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, speaking at the SCO defense ministers' meeting, went further, emphasizing that U.S. activity in the Asia-Pacific "continues to exert a steady, destructive influence."

These three statements form a complete narrative chain: the West's dominant position is in decline → U.S. military expansion in Central Asia is unacceptable → EU involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is escalating dangerously.

V. Analytical Framework: Institutional Retreat as a New Pattern

NATO's "disappearing summit" is not an isolated event — it should be read in a larger framework:

Layer	Manifestation	Meaning
Summit Mechanism	Cancelling / postponing the annual summit	Avoiding rather than confronting differences — institutional retreat
Defense Spending	U.S. pressure + passive allied response	NATO has become America's "debt-collection tool," not a collective-security platform
Military Operations	Allies restrict U.S. use of their airspace	Lack of trust in U.S. military operations — from "alliance" to "limited cooperation"
Strategic Narrative	U.S. threatens withdrawal / Russia's "Western decline" thesis	The trust deficit on both sides of the Atlantic has widened systematically

VI. From Retreat to Bribe: The Tactical Pivot at the Ankara Summit

On July 7–8, 2026, the NATO summit took place as scheduled in Ankara, Turkey — not a resurrection of the "disappearing summit," but a tactical pivot: from "dodging Trump" to "buying off Trump."

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte carried out a precision "interests diplomacy" before the summit: he announced that European countries and Canada would place orders for military equipment from the United States totaling US$300 billion over the next several years, supporting 195,000 American defense-industry jobs. Rutte chose economic data over strategic reasoning to convince Trump — a precise use of "Trump-language."

At the White House, Rutte acknowledged that Trump "had every right to be angry" and clarified the flight records of some 5,000 U.S. military sorties from European bases during the Iran war, redefining Europe as "one of the major platforms through which the U.S. projects power." Read in the context of a year ago, such statements were almost unimaginable — the NATO Secretary-General needing to "report on his work" to the U.S. President.

Rutte also acknowledged, however, that American defense-industrial capacity had reached its limits — "some critical capabilities can only basically be obtained from the United States" — but that "given current U.S. defense-industrial bottlenecks, some European countries can only procure from non-NATO countries." This exposes the paradox of the US$300 billion order: American defense-industrial capacity is already fully loaded, and the order-fulfillment cycle far outstrips the political-commitment window.

VII. From Security Alliance to Commercial Platform

The Ankara summit's "bribe" strategy was not improvised. A Politico deep-read published just before the summit revealed the full picture of this transformation: Trump has "reshaped the transatlantic alliance — built on shared democratic values and lasting generations — into a model he finds more comfortable to deal with: a business model." The yardstick of a NATO summit has shifted from "how many security resolutions were passed" to "how many arms orders were signed."

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said bluntly at the NATO defense ministers' meeting that the alliance is just a "paper tiger" and that the U.S. military maintains an "unhealthy mutual dependence" on it. The normalization of this "rebuke-style diplomacy" has brought NATO's asymmetric dependence out of the shadows and into the open.

Stage	Model	Ally Strategy	Cost
1.0	Common-defense commitment	Meet the 2% of GDP target	Limited strategic autonomy
2.0 (Ankara)	Economic appeasement	US$300 billion arms orders	Deepened dependence on U.S. weapons
3.0 (Projection)	Pay-per-use security service	Trapped in bidding games	Contractualized rather than allied

VIII. The Quantitative Signal of Public Opinion

On July 6, 2026, an internal NATO public-opinion poll leaked by POLITICO provided quantitative evidence of the alliance crisis. The survey covered more than 31,000 respondents across NATO's 32 member states — the first large-scale transatlantic opinion measurement since Trump's return to the White House.

Indicator	United States	NATO Average	Meaning
Believes NATO would defend it if attacked	43%	57%	U.S. ranks lowest, a 14-point gap
Considers the transatlantic alliance important	—	72%	Overall support remains high, but functional trust has decoupled
Would vote to stay in the alliance	—	65%	Withdrawal sentiment not yet mainstream but already cracked
Holds a favorable view of Russia	—	17%	Up 5 points year-on-year

The significance of the U.S. 43% data point lies not in the number itself but in the fact that it occurred one year after Trump's return to the White House. When the American public — NATO's supportive opinion base — begins to question the alliance's commitments, institutional retreat has moved beyond the diplomatic level and sunk into the social-psychological layer. A structural decoupling has emerged between value identification with the alliance and functional trust in it: people agree with the alliance's idea, but do not believe the institution will work at the critical moment.

IX. Achievements and Cracks at the Ankara Summit

CAATSA Sanctions Lifted and F-35 Returns

At the summit, Trump made two concrete concessions directly: he announced the lifting of sanctions imposed under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) on Turkey's defense industry; and he promised to deliver five F-35 fighters to Turkey. The four-year standoff triggered by Turkey's 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 system has begun to ease.

The Triple Acceleration of Transatlantic Rearmament

The summit's ammunition-side outcomes were denser than the diplomatic side. The UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands jointly launched a long-range missile development program with Ukraine (range 1,000–3,000 km), explicitly aimed at "ending NATO's dependence on U.S. weapons." Poland signed an agreement with the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden to build a PAC-3 Patriot missile maintenance center in Europe. The Dutch Defense Minister acknowledged in Ankara that the capacity to assist Ukraine had reached its limits.

The Kremlin's Mirror Observation

In an interview with Swiss media, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered a concise but precise observation: "Europe has suddenly realized that it no longer enjoys the security guarantees provided by the United States, and therefore needs to build up its military capabilities on the foundation of the EU economic bloc." The piercing power of this sentence lies not in its conclusion but in its timing: Peskov used "suddenly realized," implying a cognitive leap.

The Data-Driven Pressure of Defense Spending

The Trump administration released its "first report card" during the summit, demanding that countries show progress toward the goal of 5% of GDP on defense spending by 2035. Slovenia expects to reach only 1.6% of GDP; Belgium, Spain and the Czech Republic are also barely scraping the old 2% target. The Trump administration's attitude was not "understanding the difficulty" — it equated missing numbers directly with political disloyalty.

During the same summit, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a trilateral cooperation memorandum with his Korean and Japanese counterparts, aimed at accelerating the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors in the Indo-Pacific. The signing happened on the sidelines of the NATO summit — the leader of an alliance whose core mission is Euro-Atlantic security was advancing an Indo-Pacific nuclear-energy agreement during the summit itself.

Rutte's Blanket Endorsement

In an interview on Politico Europe's podcast, Rutte made a remark rare for formal diplomatic occasions — he did not use the reconciling language of diplomatic boilerplate, but said straight out: "I just like the man. I think everything he's done for NATO has been great news." He then narrowed the scope of his endorsement: the direction of defense-spending pressure is right; pressuring allies to modernize their militaries is right; and the war against Iran was also right.

Rutte was clearly aware his comment would be cast in the "flattery" narrative. He had previously defended himself on this point: the Trump era has indeed witnessed continued growth in European defense spending; judged by data rather than rhetoric, Trump has indeed achieved what several previous presidents failed to negotiate through.

X. Implications and Strategic Insights for China

NATO's institutional retreat has created greater strategic buffer space: the window of weakening European dependence on the United States means more diplomatic room for maneuver for China in Europe; cracks inside NATO mean reduced strategic unity on Russia; and the influence of the Global South is rising systematically. But there is also reason to be wary: when Europe stops "obeying," the United States may accelerate the eastward shift of its strategic focus, and the Indo-Pacific may become the new stage on which America vents its unilateralist anxieties.

XI. The Self-Confirmation of the Transatlantic Crisis — "The Most Serious Alliance Crisis in 80 Years"

On the evening of July 13, Sputnik, citing Bloomberg, reported that Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, gave the most direct echo of this page's title in an interview: "It is clear that this is the most serious crisis in the transatlantic alliance since World War II." Daalder added that the European members of NATO have effectively concluded that the United States is no longer a reliable ally.

The weight of this judgment lies in its coming from a former senior U.S. diplomat rather than from European critics. Daalder's tenure as NATO representative spanned the Obama administration and Trump's first term — he handled, in office, the 2018 NATO Brussels summit where Trump threatened to withdraw from the alliance. When a man who has worked inside the alliance and lived through the previous shock declares "this round is the most serious," that is not rhetoric — it is that he now has a reference frame built up over years of experience.

The simultaneous emergence of multiple national narratives. Daalder is no isolated voice. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said bluntly that NATO is "steadily disintegrating," while Trump declared that a NATO without the United States is a "paper tiger." When the leader of a U.S. ally, the President of the United States, and a former senior U.S. diplomat point to the same conclusion in three different languages in the same week, "NATO faces a crisis" is no longer an analyst's judgment — it is confirmed jointly by multiple voices inside the alliance.

This round of self-confirming crisis narrative completes the logical chain with the earlier diplomatic signals: the NATO summit at Ankara "counts as a success if no fight breaks out" (sections VI–X) → after the summit Trump cashed in the patience with sanctions threats against Spain (the Spain case) → the European allies' pivot to China accelerated the trend of redistributed bets → and now, a former diplomat publicly acknowledges "this is the most serious crisis." The signal chain has upgraded from the behavioral level to the level of narrative self-confirmation — when participants inside the alliance no longer deny the existence of the crisis, the nature of the crisis has shifted from "hidden institutional friction" to "explicit structural crisis."

XII. The Baltic Nuclear Threshold — Latvia and Lithuania Prepare for NATO Nuclear Deployment

On July 16, Sputnik reported: Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said that, if it served NATO's collective interest, Latvia would be willing to host nuclear weapons on its territory. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda revealed that Lithuania was removing from its constitution the clause banning the deployment of nuclear weapons, in order to draw on NATO's nuclear deterrent.

These two statements were made at the same press conference in Vilnius, releasing a new signal extending from the Ankara summit: when the alliance transformed from "collective defense" to a "business model" (section VIII), the NATO eastern-flank countries' chosen response was to add their own strategic assets to hedge against the unreliability of the leading ally.

Lowering the nuclear threshold is not expansion — it is instinct. The Baltic states' security anxiety toward Russia has not disappeared since the dissolution of the Soviet Union — but until now they at least believed in the value of Article 5 (the collective-defense clause). Now, as America's NATO commitment is repeatedly devalued by Trump and the Ankara summit's achievements are quickly overlaid by "sanctioning Spain after the meeting," the Baltic states choose to host nuclear weapons on their own soil — not as a sign of confidence, but as its opposite: if the ally's commitment is unreliable, at least point nuclear weapons directly at the likely direction, so that any military action against the Baltics automatically escalates into a "conflict with a nuclear-armed state."

The constitutional dismantling of the nuclear taboo. Lithuania's removal of its constitution's ban on hosting nuclear weapons is one of the eastern-flank countries' most sensitive responses to "NATO institutional retreat." Rather than fill the security vacuum by adding conventional military presence, they dismantle the constitutional-level nuclear-weapons prohibition directly. It is a "lowest-cost, highest-deterrence" choice made against the backdrop of intensified security anxiety.

The Baltic states' accelerated signal, taken together with the Ankara summit's "silent endurance" and Spain's "sanction-driven pivot to China," forms three faces of the same coin: the response of Europe's great powers is to reduce friction (canceling summits) or to find alternative partners (pivoting to China); the response of small and medium countries is to raise the level of deterrence (hosting nuclear weapons). Both point to the same driver — when the leading ally is no longer reliable, each country calculates its own survival strategy, and lowering the nuclear threshold is the one with the least room for retreat.

XIII. "They Don't Have Good Armed Forces" — Trump's Public Belittling of European Militaries (increment appended 2026-08-06)

On August 5, Trump delivered an unreserved assessment of European allied militaries in a speech to supporters in Las Vegas: "They don't have good armed forces, because they have relied on us for too long. I have told NATO that, they cannot do that."

The context of this remark is arms trade: he criticized the Biden administration for sending weapons worth US$350 billion (he had previously cited the same number when discussing military aid to Kyiv), and claimed European countries now want to buy American weapons — "I sell everything. They are willing to pay. This is the Europeans and their own money."

Set back into the framework of this page, it is another fulfillment of "from security alliance to commercial platform" (section VIII). Each retreat recorded earlier — canceling summits, sanctioning Spain, pricing security per transaction — happened at the policy level; this belittling happens at the discourse level, and it is done in front of supporters, in campaign language. When the leading ally's public narrative describes allied militaries as having "no good armed forces," the trust foundation of the security alliance has slid from institutional friction into public humiliation.

Trump simultaneously uses the "Europe-dependence thesis" in two directions: domestically, the US$350 billion in military aid becomes evidence of "a mess"; externally, Europe's weapons purchases become orders for American arms exports. Dependence is both the reason they are belittled and the object they are sold to — the closed loop of this discourse is: the more Europe is portrayed as having no army, the more it needs to buy America's army.

Sources synthesized from: Weibo Collection / 2026-04-28, 2026-07-01, 2026-07-06, 2026-07-07, 2026-07-08, 2026-07-13, 2026-07-16, 2026-08-06