NATO Leaders Head to Ankara Summit With Defense Spending Debate Back in Focus

NATO leaders are gathering for a summit in Ankara, Turkey, where the central debate will again focus on strengthening collective defense and the defense spending commitments of alliance members. The meeting comes in a notably different atmosphere within the alliance and on the broader geopolitical stage compared to previous gatherings. The summit follows what has been described as a leap into the dark in The Hague — a reference to the previous NATO summit held in the Dutch city, where allies struggled to reach consensus on new spending targets and burden-sharing arrangements. That meeting exposed tensions between member states over how much each country should contribute to the alliance's collective defense, a debate that has intensified under continued pressure from the United States for European members to spend more on their own security. The Ankara summit takes place against the backdrop of Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine, which has fundamentally reshaped European security calculations since 2022 and pushed many NATO members — including Slovakia — to reconsider long-delayed increases to their defense budgets. How the alliance navigates disagreements over spending benchmarks and military commitments will have direct implications for Slovakia, which has historically spent below NATO's target of two percent of gross domestic product on defense, though the current government has pledged to raise that figure.