That is the singular question NATO leaders gathering in Ankara, the Turkish capital, for a crucial summit on July 7 and 8, will have to confront. President Donald Trump and the alliance leaders are convening in Ankara at a time of profound transatlantic tensions, widening intra-European fractures over how to manage President Trump, active wars on the European continent and along its strategic periphery from Ukraine in the east to Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East in the south.
In the short term, Europe must strengthen the collective weight of European NATO members, not the European Union members or EU as an institution alone, within the alliance. In the medium to long term, however undesirable the prospect may be, Europe needs to prepare for a security order that is not dependent on American power and the old terms of the alliance.
And Europe needs an honest reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: any post-American security framework cannot simply replicate the existing NATO-centric order, which rests on strategic clarity, institutional permanence, and a shared threat perception.
Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, recently emphasized the importance of NATO’s official mantra for this summit, laying the ground for NATO 3.0—a milestone in the alliance’s history. The framework is instructive: NATO 1.0 describes the alliance’s Cold War rationale, designed to address a conventional, state-centric threat embodied by the Soviet Union.
NATO 3.0 signals the alliance’s adaptation to today’s changing global order. This is a call for both cognitive and geopolitical adaptation, and it falls most heavily on NATO’s European members. Any continent-wide framework for European security must begin by building closer, more structured cooperation not only among NATO’s key EU member states but also among its non-EU member states: the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Norway.
This holistic logic must extend beyond geopolitical matters to encompass new defense industry initiatives, energy security, and supply-chain redesign. There have been encouraging developments: almost all European NATO members have increased their defense budgets. But the new moment requires a holistic understanding of both “security” and “Europe.”
New boundaries of European security
Both of these dimensions of Europe’s proximate security environment will be high on the agenda in Ankara, including renewed commitments to Ukraine. President Trump has expressed frustration over what he sees as insufficient European support during the Iran war. Europe, for its part, is alarmed by the prospect of American abandonment of Ukraine. Europe’s strategic periphery is not only integral to European security but is actively deepening transatlantic tensions and sharpening intra-European divisions.
Still, engagement with the Southern perimeter remains integral to European domestic political order and to European security itself. Consider the Syrian civil war: the resulting refugee crisis and the spread of jihadist radicalism across the Mediterranean provided fuel for far-right parties across the continent. What originates along Europe’s Southern strategic perimeter does not stay there. It travels, in the form of people, ideologies, and political shocks, directly into the heart of European politics. The Southern perimeter has the potential to redefine politics at the center, whether Europe chooses to engage with it or not.
It also feeds intra-EU rivalries and intra-NATO rivalries. This has been evident in the competing agendas of France and Italy in Libya, and in the clashing postures of Turkey and France in Libya and the Sahel. These contestations expand the room for Russia and China to operate across the Southern perimeter.
The Eastern neighborhood will not simply be stabilized and absorbed into European structures, and the Southern perimeter will not be reformed in Europe’s image. Both will continue to shape Europe as surely as Europe seeks to shape them.
The rise of minilateral diplomacy
The security architecture emerging from a redefined or reduced American role will have to be more variegated, ad hoc, issue-based, and flexible, resting on different forms of minilateralism: small coalitions of relevant states organized around specific crises, whether in the Eastern neighborhood, along the Southern strategic perimeter, or elsewhere.
The contrast with Europe’s near-total absence from current diplomatic efforts to resolve the renewed crisis with Iran, a country that sits at the intersection of its Southern perimeter and Europe’s most sensitive energy and migration corridors, is jarring. The Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine represents another such platform, operating outside both NATO and EU institutional frameworks, for coordinating European responses to the war in the Eastern neighborhood.
The Ankara Summit should serve as Europe’s graduation ceremony: the moment the continent accepts full responsibility for its own security and asserts itself as the center of gravity not only for its Eastern neighborhood, from Ukraine and Moldova to the Western Balkans and the South Caucasus, but equally for its Southern strategic perimeter, from the Maghreb and the Sahel through the Levant to the Persian Gulf. Europe cannot afford to be a single-flank power in a multi-front world.
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