The last summit of the zombie alliance? Post-Ankara reflections
NATO is an organisation that has lost much of its strategic coherence while remaining fully capable of generating instability, militarisation and confrontation.
By Biljana Vankovska
The debate over whether NATO is ‘brain-dead’ or merely ‘living-dead’ misses the point. Both metaphors assume that the Alliance can be understood simply through the lens of institutional vitality. Ankara suggests something different: NATO is neither healthy nor dead. It increasingly resembles a zombie—an organisation that has lost much of its strategic coherence while remaining fully capable of generating instability, militarisation and confrontation.
As the Ankara summit displayed, the representatives of the NATO member-states managed to get together in full composition and provide a family photo for historical archives. It seems to be the biggest achievement, since nobody can say for sure that there will be another summit next year (at least, while Donald Trump is still in office). Beyond carefully staged displays of unity, however, the summit exposed an alliance struggling to reconcile growing internal fragmentation with ever-expanding geopolitical ambitions.
The Summits have lost any meaning in terms of producing strategic thinking and vision of the collective security. Many commentators were puzzled by the emptiness of the event, which was organized in two parts: the first day of the Summit was entirely focused on the arms fair (the so-called Defense Industry Forum), while the second one was meant to appease the master (the US President) and to avoid any major scandal. NATO is a grouping of Western nations that have accepted vassalage as the only way to stay together. They are not partners and allies, but vassallies (as Ali Borhani usually points out).
The 2025 Hague summit set the goals for the military-industrial investment fund by raising the military allocation to 5% of countries’ GDP. That was the Emperor’s whim, not supported by any serious security and threat analysis – only by greed. The Hague Declaration was essentially a political programme centred on unprecedented military spending. Ankara produced little more than a progress report. Its brevity reflected not efficiency but the absence of any new strategic consensus. Yet, nobody can say for sure how realistic this collective commitment is. The Ankara show was ‘stolen’ by two key actors: CEOs of the biggest arms manufacturer corporations and expectedly, Donald Trump, who (again) had the role of the main clown in the circus. He literally grabbed the opportunity (during his 24-hour stay in Ankara) to belittle allies and provoke the adversaries, or better to launch another wave of attacks on Iran and threaten Greenland (and Denmark). Both CEOs and Trump went home pleased.
Many analyses cautiously remind that the order books for new armament deals may remain just that – books of wishes that can hardly be met in the coming year. After all, the US arms manufacturers would always give priority to Trump’s (i.e, US) demands over their deal commitments with other countries. The Alliance is not only poor in terms of strategic vision for the new world but also in terms of depletion of its military arsenals, and particularly the raw materials and rare minerals necessary to produce the required weaponry. Probably the only novelty in this respect is reliance on Ukraine and its direct involvement in these business deals, with few assurances that the Russians would allow that to happen. NATO’s official language remains that of collective defence. Yet its practical agenda increasingly revolves around industrial mobilisation, long-term confrontation with Russia, and preparations for a wider geopolitical competition extending far beyond the Euro-Atlantic area.
A deeper analysis of the extremely brief Declaration is hardly necessary due to its expected content and very superficial wording, which did not need a spectacle and a summit to be drafted. NATO continues on the path it began in 1949, to sell a narrative of deterrence and collective self-defence while going on its imperial march, commanded by the Americans. The six-paragraph Declaration adds nothing new, except that it reiterates the well-known goals of the organization, which hardly manages to control its global appetites, while struggling to secure its own (European) security. In sum, they stress the validity of the most famous article of the Washington Treaty, Article 5, as if the entire existence of the grouping depends on it. It’s partly true because the greatest nightmare of European leaders is that they may be abandoned as little children by the great ‘Daddy’. There was almost a loud sigh of relief when Trump appeared and signed the document. According to some European analysts, the relief was due to the fact that allegedly Europe bought some extra time to establish its own defence capabilities and ‘emancipate’ from the USA.
The summit opened not with strategic deliberation but with the Defence Industry Forum. The symbolism was difficult to ignore. Defence corporations occupied centre stage before political leaders even began discussing security policy (each of them having only three-minute speech to address the summit). This reversal captures an important transformation: military production is no longer merely an instrument of strategy but increasingly its driving force. Security policy follows industrial capacity as much as the other way around.
The family photograph temporarily concealed profound disagreements among the allies. Yet, they left with two contradictory ideas about the Alliance’s future (American and European ones). Yet it is hard to talk about single European security vision. Eastern and Baltic members perceive existential threats from Russia; Southern members in the Balkans remain preoccupied with instability across their region; Türkiye increasingly pursues autonomous regional ambitions; Germany still struggles to reconcile its economic interests, historical memory and geopolitical role. Meanwhile, Brussels speaks of “strategic autonomy” while simultaneously deepening dependence on American military leadership. Finally, we have a rather complex political, party, and societal dynamic for each of them. Viewed from this perspective, the family photo of the Ankara summit showed not only elderly and physically weakened leaders, but also those with hardly any significant public support in their respective countries (let alone the already former British PM).
The Alliance stresses its ambitions, such as “360-degree approach to security” (wide enough to implicitly embrace China and other parts of the world) and defeating Russia on the battlefield. One should not forget to mention the nuclear security that has been normalized as something “thinkable” – not by choice but most probably by escalation (incited by the Europeans). Furthermore, the Declaration used the rhetoric of threats toward states “out of area” (such as Iran and its state and nuclear sovereignty). Ukraine was portrayed simultaneously as a victim, ally, and prospective business partner in the military-industrial complex. Donald Trump actually pledged the U.S. would give Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, a long-sought goal for Kyiv as a global shortage of the missiles and intensifying Russian strikes leave its cities exposed. For the time being and in the future (as Russia is pointed out as the key adversary) the Article 5 beneficiary is de facto only Ukraine. (Here one should take into account the implicit dismissal of Turkiye’s security concerns (vis-à-vis Israel, for instance). The normalization of NATO relations with Syria’s Jolani was just one signal that NATO is a community of rather flexible values.
The Ankara Declaration ends with expressions of gratitude to Turkiye for organizing efforts, which could be taken as a less important protocol matter. However, in return, President Erdogan sent a symbolic message. Most of the recipients were puzzled, surprised or even as odd with such an unusual gift. They failed to understand the true message of the ‘modern Sultan’. Erdoğan’s personalised vintage revolvers symbolised more than Ottoman nostalgia. They reflected Türkiye’s increasingly autonomous geopolitical identity, simultaneously inside NATO yet increasingly unwilling to define itself solely through Western strategic priorities. Ankara thus illustrated another paradox: an alliance expanding its military ambitions while becoming progressively less cohesive politically.
The Check president Babiš complained to the press that during the summit “everybody talks about war, everybody talks about armaments, but not once did I hear the word peace.” Ankara will not be remembered for any major strategic innovation. It may instead be remembered as another step in NATO’s slow transformation into an alliance whose ambitions continue to expand while its political cohesion steadily erodes. History offers many examples of declining powers becoming more dangerous precisely because they struggle to adapt to changing realities. Zombie alliances, like zombie empires, rarely disappear quietly. Their greatest danger lies not in their strength, but in the instability they generate while refusing to recognise that the world around them has fundamentally changed.
Yet Ankara also reminded us that another political imagination survives. Beyond the official summit, peace movements, trade unions, socialist organisations and anti-war activists gathered to challenge the logic of permanent militarisation. Their voices were largely ignored by mainstream media, but they represented something absent from the summit itself: the conviction that security cannot be built through endless preparation for war. In an age increasingly defined by military competition, that may be the most important political message of all.