Cem Tuna Aksu, PhD Candidate, Başkennt University

International politics is not moving toward a new order. It is moving through one — and nobody knows where it ends.

The NATO summit in Ankara on 7–8 July happens in exactly this kind of moment. Not a clean turning point, but a stress test. The real question is not whether NATO will survive the summit. It will. The harder question is whether allies can still agree on what the Alliance is actually for.

After the Cold War, the world felt more predictable. American power, open trade and international institutions gave most Western states a clear sense of direction. That sense has been fading — not suddenly, but steadily. Power is now spread across more actors. Economic ties no longer prevent geopolitical competition. Technology has become a battlefield of its own. And more and more countries have decided that picking a side carries more risk than staying flexible.

This is the environment the United States is trying to manage. Washington has not abandoned its role. It is trying to recalibrate it — pushing allies to carry more of the burden, repositioning its presence across regions, attempting to hold together a system that was built for a different era. The task is genuinely difficult. The United States is working with less margin than it once had, and it knows it.

Russia’s war in Ukraine changed Europe’s security calculations almost overnight. The conflict between Iran and Israel — with Israel increasingly willing to act alone and act hard — showed how fast a regional crisis can go global. Tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the race for semiconductor supply chains, the rivalry over artificial intelligence — none of this fits the frameworks NATO built during the Cold War.

Security is no longer only about armies. It is also about factories, cables, chips and code.

China adds another layer of difficulty. Its rise is not a future scenario. It is the present condition. For most NATO members, China is both a strategic rival and a major trading partner. That contradiction has not been resolved. Allies handle it quietly, through behavior rather than policy statements. But it shapes everything.

An Alliance under Pressure from Every Direction

Look at the map of NATO’s political landscape and what you see is not unity under strain. It is several different conversations happening at once.

Europe wants strategic autonomy — more control over its own security, less dependence on decisions made in Washington. France has been pushing for this for years and is now finding more listeners. But France’s room to lead is narrowing too. Sidelined in AUKUS, losing ground in Africa, and increasingly caught between Washington’s orbit and its own ambitions, Paris speaks loudly about European sovereignty while its actual leverage quietly erodes. The United Kingdom, post-Brexit, is searching for a role that fits neither its old place in Europe nor a clean transatlantic identity. It has not found one yet.

Germany’s position deserves particular attention. Berlin spent decades building an economic model that ran on Russian energy, Chinese markets and American security guarantees. All three pillars are now under pressure simultaneously. The loss of Nord Stream 2 was not just an energy setback — it was the collapse of a strategy. China, once a partner, is now a competitor across too many sectors to ignore. And American reliability is no longer something German planners take for granted. What is less often noted is how much this resembles, in structure if not in spirit, the pre-war logic Germany once applied across the Balkans and Central Europe: secure industrial inputs through political and economic ties, keep supply chains close, avoid hard dependencies on rivals. That circle is closing again — and Berlin knows it. Whether Germany can rebuild its economic geography fast enough, and with the right partners, is one of the quieter but more consequential questions of this decade.

Meanwhile Russia keeps pressing. Not just militarily in Ukraine, but politically — testing where Western resolve is firm and where it is negotiable, probing for the edges of the Alliance’s commitment.

And then there is Türkiye.

Türkiye has long been treated as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be engaged. It is kept at the margins of certain conversations, excluded from certain frameworks, and expected to align without being fully consulted. That approach has not worked particularly well, and it is becoming harder to sustain.

What Ankara has demonstrated, over the past decade and with growing confidence, is that it does not need to be at the center of a crisis to shape its outcome. Türkiye brokered the grain corridor when no one else could. It mediated between Moscow and Kyiv at a moment when direct contact between them had all but collapsed. It was not always welcomed at the table. It was invited anyway, because the problem did not move without it.

This is not the posture of a country that stumbled into influence. It is the result of deliberate positioning — active in Libya, the South Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean, building a defense industry that has changed what Turkish foreign policy can actually threaten or offer, and maintaining channels with actors that most NATO members have closed off entirely. Türkiye has a side in many of these conflicts. But it has rarely been the root cause of them. That distinction matters more than it is usually given credit for.

What is different now is the self-awareness. Türkiye understands, more clearly than before, that its potential has been an inconvenience for some of its partners — that there are structural interests in keeping it capable enough to be useful but dependent enough to be controllable. The response has not been confrontation. It has been patience, and a more careful accumulation of leverage. The steps are more deliberate than they were a decade ago. The ambition has not shrunk. The method has matured.

Germany’s closing circle, France’s receding reach, Britain’s unresolved identity and the broader fragmentation of Western coherence all create openings. So does the simple geography of where the next crises are likely to unfold — a neighborhood in which Türkiye is not a peripheral observer but a central actor. As Selim Deringil has aptly framed it, the “balance of power game” — the art of staying indispensable without fully committing — remains Türkiye’s most reliable instrument. If that balance can be sustained with the discipline it now requires, the doors that open are not only diplomatic. They are military, economic and geopolitical.

The window is real. So is the risk. A major rupture in the international system is not only an opportunity for a rising middle power. It is also a pressure test that punishes miscalculation quickly and without appeal.

Hosting this summit is part of that posture. Ankara is not simply a venue. It is a signal.

The Problem Is Not Military. It Is Political.

NATO is not weak. Its members spend more on defense than any other group of countries. They lead in artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities and defense technology. On paper, the Alliance has everything it needs.

The gap is political. NATO has the tools. It is struggling to agree on how to use them.

After the 2022 Madrid Summit, there was a brief moment of clarity. Russia was the threat. Sweden and Finland were joining. The war in Ukraine had given allies a shared sense of purpose. That clarity did not last.

Now the debates are harder. How long to support Ukraine. How to handle China. How much Europe should rely on the United States. These are not small questions, and allies do not answer them the same way.

The result is a system that needs American leadership, rarely admits it, and increasingly hedges against its absence. Every major ally is quietly building alternatives — not to replace the transatlantic relationship, but to survive a version of it that might one day look very different.

What Comes Next Is Not Written Yet

The honest answer is that nobody knows how this period ends. A few paths are visible.

One is a managed multipolarity — major powers carving out spheres of influence, competing but containing the competition within recognizable limits. Another is prolonged fragmentation, where every actor expends energy maneuvering against the others, alliances shift, and the costs accumulate without resolution.

But there is a third possibility that rarely appears in the forecasts. While the established powers are consumed by their rivalries, something else may be taking shape. Countries that seem peripheral today — with the right geography, the right resources, and the right distance from the main conflicts— may find themselves holding influence that nobody anticipated. Regional powers that stayed quiet, hedged carefully and invested in their own capacity while others were distracted could emerge with a kind of sovereignty that the old order never quite allowed them.

History has done this before. The actors who defined the next order were not always the ones who dominated the previous one.

The Ankara Summit will not resolve any of this. Summits do not work that way. But it will show something important: whether NATO members still have enough in common to manage their differences without breaking apart.

That alone, right now, would be worth a great deal.