Terms of Participation Rather Than Volume of Participation
ABSTRACT
The Ankara Declaration reaffirmed the 5 percent defence investment commitment and set out a large procurement programme. Türkiye is included in NATO’s industrial architecture and excluded from the European Union instruments financing much of the same rearmament. This paper argues from alliance theory that the strategic return on the current cycle lies in what contracts transfer rather than in what they earn.
1. The summit and its content
The 36th NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government was held in Ankara on 7–8 July 2026, the second summit hosted by Türkiye after Istanbul in 2004. The Ankara Declaration reaffirmed the commitment to collective defence under Article 5 and restated the Hague defence investment commitment obliging members to spend at least 5 percent of gross domestic product on defence and security-related expenditure by 2035. The Secretary General reported that Alliance average investment had reached approximately 4 percent.
The declaration set out more than 50 billion dollars in new equipment procurement, 70 billion euros for Ukraine in 2026, expansion of defence industrial capacity, an interoperable transatlantic combat cloud and adoption of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, framed within a multi-domain conception integrating nuclear, conventional, space, cyber and missile defence.
The NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum, held in Ankara on 7 July 2026, brought Alliance officials together with defence company executives. Announcements ranged from counter-drone systems to integrated air and missile defence and precision strike, with deal values in the billions. Türkiye concluded a bilateral Security and Defence Partnership with the United Kingdom and pushed allied language on removing defence trade barriers.
2. The structural asymmetry
Türkiye’s position is defined by an asymmetry that the summit sharpened rather than resolved. It is included in NATO’s industrial and operational architecture: it hosts summits, exhibits at the industry forum, supplies allied militaries, and its firms are visible participants in the rearmament cycle. It is excluded from the European Union instruments financing a substantial portion of that same rearmament, by design rather than by oversight.
The practical consequence is that access runs through two channels that are available and one that is not. Bilateral partnerships are available, and the United Kingdom agreement is the current example. Subcontracting to prime contractors eligible for European funding is available, and it is the principal route by which Turkish suppliers reach European programmes. Direct participation in the European funding perimeter is not available, and no trade instrument resolves it, since it rests on membership status rather than on trade law.
3. What alliance theory predicts
Two established frameworks bear on the resulting choice.
Glenn Snyder’s entrapment–abandonment dilemma holds that alliance members trade between two risks that move in opposite directions. Tighter integration reduces the risk of abandonment — being left unsupported in a crisis — and raises the risk of entrapment — being drawn into conflicts chosen by allies. A state increasing its indispensability to allied industrial production moves along this trade-off in a specific way: industrial indispensability lowers abandonment risk substantially, because supply relationships are costly to replace, while raising entrapment risk only modestly, because supplying equipment does not commit forces.
Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat revision holds that states align against threats rather than against aggregate power, and that threat is a function of proximity, offensive capability and perceived intention rather than of capability alone. This explains why European rearmament is driven by proximate capability change rather than by aggregate distribution, and why a supplier located close to the relevant theatres with demonstrated production capacity occupies a favourable position within it.
Both frameworks converge on the same operational conclusion: the favourable move for Türkiye is deeper industrial integration rather than deeper operational commitment, because industrial integration captures most of the abandonment-risk reduction at a fraction of the entrapment cost.
4. Volume versus terms
The conclusion has a specific implication for how the current cycle should be evaluated, and it is not an export target.
Turkish defence exports reached 10.05 billion dollars in 2025 with 17.8 billion in new contracts, and roughly 56 percent went to EU, NATO and US markets. These figures record commercial success. They do not resolve the dependencies that determine whether production can continue under stress: propulsion systems, advanced semiconductors, sensor components and specialised materials including rare earth permanent magnets, where China holds 85 to 90 percent of global separation and refining capacity.
Four contract features determine whether the cycle transfers capability. Co-production with technology transfer rather than licensed assembly, the distinction being whether Turkish engineers hold design authority or build to another party’s drawings. Qualified second-source status for subsystems in allied supply chains, which creates a position that survives the cycle because qualification is expensive and buyers do not lightly de-qualify a source. Joint development participation at the design stage rather than the production stage. And offset arrangements directed specifically at the four dependency categories rather than at general industrial participation.
None of these appears in export statistics, and all of them determine the answer to the question defence industrial autonomy exists to address, which is whether production continues when suppliers become unwilling.
5. Deterrence follows the same structure
Cross-domain deterrence, as developed by Erik Gartzke and Jon Lindsay, holds that as capabilities span nuclear, conventional, space, cyber and other domains, deterrent threats become harder to make credible because capability in one domain does not straightforwardly substitute for capability in another and because signalling across domains is ambiguous.
The relevant implication here concerns sustainment. A deterrent threat is credible to the extent that the threatened party believes it can be executed and sustained. Sustainment is determined by supply chains rather than by inventories: a force with substantial stocks and no capacity to replenish them has a deterrent that expires on a calculable date. This is precisely where subsystem dependencies bind, and it is why the transfer question is a deterrence question rather than an industrial policy question.
6. Risks in the current position
Three risks attach to the strategy of deeper industrial integration. Cycle reversal: rearmament cycles plateau once stocks are rebuilt and contract as budgets normalise, and a supplier that expands capacity for the peak without securing a steady-state position faces overcapacity. Political conditionality: market access secured through bilateral partnership is revocable in a way that treaty-based access is not, and the legislative resistance connected to the earlier acquisition of Russian air defence systems illustrates how quickly the terms can change. And the entrapment side of the dilemma is not zero: industrial indispensability creates expectations of alignment in crises, and those expectations constrain the multi-alignment posture pursued elsewhere.
7. Conclusion
The Ankara Summit consolidated Türkiye’s position inside NATO’s industrial architecture without altering its exclusion from European funding instruments. Alliance theory indicates that this is a favourable position to deepen, because industrial indispensability reduces abandonment risk at low entrapment cost. It also indicates what should be extracted while the cycle runs. Export tonnage does not remove dependency in propulsion, advanced semiconductors, sensors or specialised materials; co-production, licensed process technology, second-source qualification and design-stage participation do. Contracts signed in a rearmament cycle should be assessed by what they transfer, not by what they earn, and the assessment should be made now, because cycles end.
SOURCES
Ankara Declaration, 36th NATO Summit, 7–8 July 2026; NATO, 2026 Ankara Summit overview and NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum (NSDIF26), 7 July 2026.
Snyder, G. (1997) Alliance Politics, Cornell University Press; Snyder, G. (1984) ‘The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics’, World Politics 36(4).
Walt, S. (1987) The Origins of Alliances, Cornell University Press.
Gartzke, E. & Lindsay, J. (eds.) (2019) Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity, Oxford University Press.
Atlantic Council (2026) ‘Dispatch from Ankara: Turkey is establishing its own role in NATO 3.0’; Friends of Europe (2026) ‘The NATO Summit in Ankara’.
Presidency of Defence Industries and Turkish Exporters Assembly, 2025 defence and aerospace export data.
USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025; IEA, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025.
Furkan Mahmut Tameroglu