ΞΙΦΟΣ

22 Σεπτεμβρίου 2026

What a war with Turkey would look like, and how to hold Syria’s sky without fighting one.

The Long View · Free for Every Reader

The Empty Runway

By Gregg Roman

One Step Away

At dawn on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft put eight strikes into the runway and storage sheds of Abu al-Duhur, a mothballed Syrian airbase in Idlib about 70 kilometers from the Turkish border. Nobody died. The base has not operated as a working military airfield in over a decade. That is the point: Israel was not bombing an army. It was bombing a possibility.

The possibility had visited the day before. Syrian officials told the Associated Press that a Turkish delegation had toured the base on Monday to review rehabilitation work and left hours before the bombs arrived, the first confirmed Turkish presence at the site. Jerusalem confirmed the strike and said Syria was on the verge of breaching an agreed security status quo by letting Turkish troops deploy there. Ankara denied any delegation was at the base before or during the strike, called the raid a violation of Syrian sovereignty, and accused Israel of expansionist politics timed to an election. Damascus said the Turkish visits were ordinary military contact and that no Turkish base is planned. Carry all of it; the gap between those tellings is exactly where wars are born.

Then the American in the middle started talking. Tom Barrack, Washington’s ambassador to Turkey and its envoy for Syria, called the strike an unnecessary escalation and said Turkey had not been warned: Turkish forces watched Israeli aircraft heading north toward their own border and “could have reasonably prepared” a military response. To the Jerusalem Post he went further: the strike carried a real risk of rapid escalation into a direct military confrontation, because Turkish commanders, unaware of the target or the intent, could have scrambled jets in the belief that Turkey itself was under attack. To i24 he compressed it into one sentence: the two countries were a step away from shooting. Those three sentences are reporting, they have held up, and the file below uses them.

The rest of what the envoy said that week is a different matter. By Friday he was telling an interviewer that Israel “occupies” the Golan Heights “against the UN resolutions, against all of the international order,” which does not needle Jerusalem so much as repeal, from an embassy in Ankara, the proclamation his own president signed in 2019 recognizing Israeli sovereignty there, still the standing policy of the United States. He floated the theory that Israel “simply tried to bait Turkey” into a response that “might play well going into elections,” and he said a Lebanon settlement must run through Iran and Hezbollah. The pushback came from two directions at once. From Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the comments “full of inaccuracies,” with positions that “contradict the position of Trump himself.” And from the president’s own political camp: Laura Loomer, who has Trump’s ear, demanded the envoy’s resignation and wrote of him, “He always sides with the bad guys”; a Republican senator had already told Jewish Insider that he is “running a Turkish line”; and the New York Sun asked in print whether America’s ambassador is too close to Turkey. The president, notably, never echoed his envoy’s condemnation of the strike. The envoy’s brief, keeping two American allies from shooting, is real work, and this file borrows his facts where they check out. But an ambassador improvising his own foreign policy between two air forces a step apart is not a sideshow; he is a risk all his own. When Washington speaks in two voices, Ankara believes the one it likes, Jerusalem discounts both, and the American brake fails exactly when the next misunderstanding needs it.

The rest of the week supplied the soundtrack. On Friday Turkey asked Interpol for a red notice against the Israeli prime minister over the flotilla case; Netanyahu’s office answered that the “pathetic attempt to intimidate the leaders and soldiers of Israel” would go nowhere and called Erdoğan an “antisemitic dictator”; the Likud campaign had already put Erdoğan on billboards. These are two states with no ambassadors since November 2024 and no trade since May 2024, now separated from a shooting war by the reaction time of a Turkish radar crew on a night nobody called ahead.

So take the question seriously, precisely in order to refuse it. Three things need answering in one place: what a Turkey-Israel war would actually look like, why Israel must not fight it, and how Israel contains Turkey’s army in Syria anyway. The Forum was asking the first question before it was fashionable; this is the answer file.

What the War Would Look Like

Start by clearing the movie versions off the table. There is no Turkish armor driving to Tel Aviv, no Israeli occupation of Anatolia, and no amphibious landing at Israel’s narrow waist; that last one is a question a Forum colleague once posed to force Washington to plan, not a scenario for adults to write. There is also no Trafalgar: Turkey has the bigger surface fleet and a habit of maritime assertion, Israel’s navy is built around its gas platforms, and this week Israeli security officials described the friction at sea to ynet as displays of presence and projection, not combat. The war would not look like any war these two publics imagine.

It would look like the last sixteen months in Syria, with one addition: people in the blast radius who answer to Ankara. The real war is already visible in rehearsal. Israel strikes runways, hangars, and radar sites associated with a possible Turkish footprint, as it did at T4, Palmyra, and Hama in 2025 and at Abu al-Duhur on Tuesday, on the theory that concrete can be bombed before soldiers arrive without starting anything. An opinion essay in Israel Hayom said the quiet part in print this week: before Turkish troops arrive, the target is infrastructure, because afterward every strike risks Turkish dead. That is one writer’s argument, not doctrine, but it describes the visible pattern.

Both sides have a theory of the case, and the theories are mirror images. Jerusalem’s: if Turkish radar and air defense take up residence in Syria, Israel loses the corridor its air force used against Iran, and a hostile state’s sensors sit on the flight path of every future mission; the red line, consistently stated, was never Turkish infantry, it is equipment that can see the Israeli air force. Ankara’s: Israel has run 988 air and artillery strikes in Syria in the seven months after Assad fell, against 334 in the previous seven years, and if every airfield Turkey surveys gets cratered, the Syrian army Turkey has contracted to rebuild can never stand up. Both theories are locally rational. Run together without a referee, they produce exactly the Tuesday just survived.

From there the fighting writes itself, and none of it is 1973. Standoff strikes against infrastructure, answered by Turkish air defense and electronic warfare from inside Syria. Drones against drones before any manned aircraft meet, because a manned engagement is the conversion event both general staffs fear; the memory in the room is the Russian Su-24 a Turkish F-16 dropped in 2015, the last time an unannounced military aircraft crossed the wrong line near this border. Naval shadowing around Cyprus and the gas fields as a supporting theater, where the first casualty is the insurance premium on Leviathan. The always-on layer, flotillas, Interpol filings, mosque rhetoric, billboards, doing its work of removing off-ramps. And over it all, the mechanism Barrack described: no hotline call, a radar picture filling with unexplained jets, and a scramble order that turns a clash into a war in ninety seconds.

The conversion rule is worth stating plainly, because it is the entire strategic problem. A clash is Abu al-Duhur: hours long, deniable, survivable, nobody dead. A war is any of the same events plus one body: a Turkish soldier under Israeli munitions, or an Israeli crew fired on by a battery that was never told the package was heading north. Neither government has decided to cross that line. The danger is that nobody has to decide; the misread decides for them.

“Every path into this war runs through a runway in Syria. So does every path around it.”

The War Israel Cannot Afford

Now the second question, and the answer the Forum owes its readers without varnish: this is a war Israel must refuse, and not out of sentiment about a former ally.

Begin with the arsenal. Israel is in month six of a two-front missile war, and this newsletter’s own reporting has tracked the magazine problem since spring: Arrow interceptors are the acknowledged bottleneck, American Patriot and THAAD stocks are the coalition’s constraint, and the Houthis are still shooting. A second state-level air war is not a second front; it is a withdrawal from the first one, priced in interceptors Israel does not have to spare. Israel’s own defense establishment has said the quiet version in doctrine: the INSS annual assessment files Turkey as a threat to monitor, not a reference threat to build force against, and Israeli security officials repeated the point to ynet this week: fighting Turkey is not part of the reference scenario, Turkey is a rival state and not an enemy state, and the spectrum between those words is delicate.

Then the alliance. Turkey is inside NATO; Israel is America’s closest non-NATO ally; a war between them is a machine for breaking American strategy in the region, which is why it would freeze Washington rather than enlist it. The legal essays circulating in Israel this week arguing that Article 5 does not travel with Turkish uniforms into Syria may or may not be right as treaty reading, but they are an opinion page, not a targeting authority, and they miss the operational point: Incirlik and the Kürecik radar sit on sovereign Turkish soil, inside the American war architecture, and any war that puts them in question is an American crisis. Washington’s president has spent this year transacting warmly with both capitals, from the Ankara summit in July onward, whatever his envoy improvises; the F-35 file is stalled by statute, not by Israeli lobbying, and the State Department told Congress in writing in July that Turkey has not yet met the legal conditions. Israel does not need to bomb a runway to win an argument Congress has already frozen.

Then the clock. Turkey’s rearmament is real and unfinished: the Steel Dome air-defense network is talked about for 2030, the Eurofighters have not arrived, the Kaan fighter is a development program and not a fleet, and when Iranian missiles crossed Turkish airspace in March it was NATO assets that intercepted them. Some in Jerusalem will read that as an argument to fight now, while the gap is widest. That is the most dangerous sentence in this file. Fighting a NATO member to preempt a hypothetical is how a manageable rivalry becomes a generational enmity; it would hand Tehran, in its sixth month of losing, the only gift that could rescue its war, a second front wearing an alliance flag. And Ankara keeps saying, on the record, that it is not seeking the fight: the foreign minister told an interviewer this month there is no reason for open conflict, while accusing Israel’s prime minister of needing an election villain. Discount the motive, bank the statement.

Last, the test this newsletter set out this morning. The Ben-Gurion Standard asks one thing of a war: name the end state, then pay for it. A Turkey war has no nameable end state. Airpower cannot disarm an eighty-five-million-person NATO state; nobody in Jerusalem proposes regime change in Ankara; and every sortie flown at Turkey is flown away from the war Israel actually has to finish. A war that cannot say what it converts into fails the standard at the first question. Refusing it is not hesitation. It is the decision.

Containment Without Collision

Refusing the war is not the same as conceding Syria, and this is where the essay earns its keep, because Israel’s necessary policy runs on two tracks that look contradictory and are not: no war with Turkey, and no Turkish army parked where it can blind Israel. The instrument set exists. It needs to be named, staffed, and used.

First, draw the line where the interest actually is, and write it down. Israel’s problem was never Turkish trainers teaching Syrian conscripts to march, and the record shows Jerusalem has lived with Turkish ground presence in the north; the problem is sensors and interceptors that can watch and close Syrian airspace. Call it the Radar Line: Turkish men and trucks north of an agreed geography are livable; Turkish radar and air defense that can see the Israeli air force, anywhere in Syria, are not. A rule that precise can be codified with Damascus and Washington, and a codified rule is the difference between a site visit and a provocation. The Nagel Commission warned in January 2025 that a Syria turned Turkish protectorate risks direct confrontation; the answer to that warning is a line that keeps the protectorate unbuilt without requiring a war. And the warning is current, not archival: a source familiar with the matter confirmed to the Jerusalem Post this weekend that Turkey is seeking to put radar at Syrian bases now and, in time, air defense crewed by Turkish soldiers. The Radar Line is not a hypothetical boundary; it is the next six months.

Second, put the price of crossing the line somewhere other than a runway. Israel’s real leverage against Ankara is not another sortie; it is Turkey’s exposure abroad. The European Union is Turkey’s largest trading partner, the defense industry Erdoğan showcases grows on European and American contracts and components, the accession file in Brussels has been frozen since 2018, and the F-35 waits on legal conditions Congress has seen no reason to soften. Jerusalem should spend its diplomatic and intelligence capital making that exposure conditional, in coalition and in daylight: export-license reviews in European capitals when Turkish systems move toward Syria; customs-union modernization priced openly against conduct; a patient intelligence effort that exposes what Turkish services and their proxies do on European soil, where several governments have already moved against Ankara’s networks; and in Washington, existing law kept exactly as written. Economic pressure, intelligence pressure, political pressure on Turkish interests from Brussels to the Gulf: that is escalation Israel can afford, priced in money, licenses, and standing, and it answers Ankara in currencies that cannot shoot back.

Third, make the channel that already exists impossible to ignore. Israel and Turkey have run a deconfliction hotline since April 2025, born of the Baku rounds Azerbaijan quietly hosted after the T4 strikes, and a hotline that is not used before a strike near the Turkish border is a hotline that does not exist. So upgrade it from a phone number to a standing watch: staffed around the clock, in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Turkish, with two written rules that pay for themselves. An Israeli package flying north of a published line generates a call, every time. A Turkish air-defense lock generates a call, every time. The purpose is to make Tuesday’s sentence, “heading north, and nobody called,” impossible to write again. And Baku’s unique value, family to Ankara, trusted in Jerusalem, must not be spent on a war; it should keep hosting the technical track no matter how loud the podiums get.

Fourth, close the Damascus file before the Israeli election does it for everyone. The Mossad chief and Syria’s foreign minister spoke by phone on August 14; al-Sharaa’s government keeps signaling it prefers de-escalation and wants a security agreement; and Turkey itself has encouraged Damascus toward exactly such a mechanism, because Ankara’s stakes sit in the north, not on the Golan. A signed Israel-Syria security text, with the Radar Line inside it, is the single instrument that keeps Turkish trainers from ever becoming Turkish bases. Take yes for an answer before October 27 turns every file into a campaign prop.

Fifth, keep the Hamas office in Istanbul a mediation file, not a targeting file. The reporting that Hamas has been moving covert planning and cyber work from Doha to Turkey, while Turkish intelligence hosts its leadership for Gaza mediation, is the one thread in this story that could bypass Syria entirely. Washington’s ask of Ankara should be surgical: mediation stays, covert operations leave. And Jerusalem’s discipline must be absolute: no strike on Turkish soil, whatever the file says, because a Doha repeat in a NATO capital is the clash no channel can contain. The lever is the mediation chain itself; use it.

Sixth, leave the Mecca pact where this newsletter already put it: a Gulf document, a Saudi hedge with Turkish photography, not an Israel-Turkey treaty. The tripwires I listed two weeks ago still have not tripped. The fastest way to make the photograph grow teeth is to campaign against it.

And two lists of restraint, one per capital, offered with the same respect. Jerusalem should not crater a base the same week it prints the adversary on a billboard; should not let legal essays about Article 5 read like targeting memos; and should not run against Turkey as the new Iran while the actual Iran war is unfinished. Ankara should not put air defense where it can see the Israeli air force; should not launch its long-threatened move on the Syrian Kurds during an Israeli election, with its own red lines primed; and should not mistake Interpol theater for law while its intelligence service hosts the men Israel holds responsible for October 7. Neither list requires either government to like the other. Containment never does.

The Discipline

Here is the paradox that makes refusal easy to sell in Jerusalem, or should: Israel is winning the Syria file without a war. Three Turkish base plans were shelved after Israeli strikes on empty concrete. The strike rate that Ankara protests, 988 in seven months, is itself the proof of escalation dominance; Turkey has answered none of it with force. The corridor to Iran stays open, the radar stays unbuilt, and the price so far has been paid in runway asphalt rather than in anyone’s sons. That is what winning a containment looks like, and it is why converting it into a shooting war would be the first genuinely losing move available to Israel on this front.

The discipline this file asks of Israel is the same one it asked of the candidates this morning, applied to a different door. The Ben-Gurion Standard says choose war or peace and pay the price. Turkey is the rare file where statesmanship’s answer is the third thing: contain, in daylight, with instruments, so that the choice never has to be made at all, least of all by a radar crew at three in the morning. Keep the line codified, the price non-kinetic, the watch staffed, the phone answered before the aircraft launch, and the Hamas file in the mediation channel.

The empty runway at Abu al-Duhur is the whole doctrine in one image. Empty is the win condition. An empty runway means the radar never arrived, the call was made, the deterrent held, and no one on either side flew into a misread. Israel’s job between now and October 27 is to keep it exactly that: cratered if necessary, empty always, and never, ever occupied by the war that would fill it.

Gregg Roman

Executive Director, Middle East Forum

19 Σεπτεμβρίου 2026

US / Greenland Forever

~~/~~

No, the US does not now own the island

Anne Applebaum, Sep 19, 2026 (Posted on: Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum)

The Trump administration has just announced a new “deal” with Greenland. It seems to be more or less the same deal that the U.S. has had with Greenland since 1951. In that year, Denmark, a founding member of NATO, agreed to give the US the right to build military bases on Greenland, in the context of the NATO treaty.

Here is a good summary:

As I wrote back at the beginning of 2025, Danish tolerance of the American presence even extended, in the 1950s, to nuclear weapons. At the time, the sitting prime minister kept this arrangement secret:

In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?

Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.

The US-Danish Greenland treaty itself was public, and it enjoyed widespread approval. Indeed, it was a source of pride in Denmark, which has been a loyal American ally ever since.

During the Cold War, the Danes were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked.

Readers surely know what happened next. Starting even before the inauguration, Trump (and Stephen Miller) spent months threatening Greenland, posting memes and making aggressive statements. Finally, in January 2026, after the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, he backed off, giving a long, rambling speech in which he confused Greenland and Iceland several times (creating a crisis in Reykjavik too) but seemed to say he would not invade.

A series of negotiations followed. These were accompanied by a semi-covert influence campaign, conducted mostly by private companies, that I described in Empire of Grift, the Atlantic cover story published this week:

In May, the governor of Louisiana landed in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, declaring that he had come to “make a bunch of friends.” Jeff Landry is Trump’s “special envoy” to Greenland, a title that comes with no salary and no recognition from Denmark, of which Greenland is a semiautonomous territory. Landry had nevertheless told Trump, on X, that “it’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”

Upon his arrival, Landry changed into camouflage pants, as if he were preparing for combat. He attended a business conference to which he had not been invited. He tried to hand out MAGA hats, without much success. Although Louisiana is near the bottom of all U.S. health-care rankings, and although Greenland has full access to a state-funded national health service, Landry brought a doctor who seemed to be there to discuss Greenlandic health care. On the day after Landry’s departure, Greenlanders staged a large protest outside the new U.S. consulate, which they had dubbed “Trump Tower.” After returning home, Landry nevertheless told Fox News that the people he had met “want more U.S. involvement in Greenland.”

The visit was farcical, but no one in Denmark was laughing. Ever since the surreal, shocking days in January 2026 when the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, the government in Copenhagen has been watching the Americans who visit Nuuk, some for business, some for politics, some for a strange mix of both. In August, for example, an American oil company called Greenland Energy began bringing equipment to drill for oil in a remote part of the island, although it had not received formal permission to do so. Greenland Energy’s investors include Ken Griffin, a major donor to the Republican Party. Dr. Phil, the former talk-show host and prominent Trump supporter, has been commissioned to make a documentary series about the project, designed to “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters.” The company offered locals huge salaries—$185,000 annually, well above the national average—and talked up the potential size of the oil deposit. (Greenland Energy has said that it hasn’t officially started recruiting employees, and that high salaries are standard for specialized security guards.) A local leader told me that this talk of big money seemed ominous to Greenlanders, and in several towns, people staged protests against the drilling project. In mid-August, officials in Greenland formally postponed the drilling.

Larry Swets, the company’s executive chair, told Fortune that the project is not related to American annexation. But two days after the Greenlandic government warned that it had not given the company permission to deliver equipment, Trump posted an AI-generated photograph of himself glowering over a Greenlandic village beneath the headline “Hello, Greenland!” So is Greenland Energy there for politics, for business, or both?

Equally hard to assess are the motives of Dryden Brown, a co-founder of Praxis, which Brown has described as a “crypto-native country” that has financial backing from, among others, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, along with entities associated with Peter Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Brown visited Greenland just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election to “try to buy it,” as he wrote on X. Praxis seeks to build a “digital nation”—anyone can apply to join—and he wants, at some point, to build a city in Greenland to house it. Maybe this was Brown’s own initiative. Maybe it was Thiel’s. Or maybe the idea came from Ken Howery, now the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, who co-founded PayPal with Thiel. Officially, Howery represents the U.S. government, but he equally represents the tech oligarchy, whose influence in this new world far exceeds that of mere government officials.

Lately, a more frequent visitor is Drew Horn, who describes himself as an entrepreneur “focusing on critical minerals and resource development.” With a Greenlandic business partner, a former politician who once starred in a Danish TV series, Horn is planning to build a data center in western Greenland, a daunting project that would require new port facilities, the construction of an undersea cable, housing for imported workers, and some bespoke engineering to prevent the center from sinking into the permafrost. But Horn is also a former Trump national-security official, according to The New Yorker, with links to at least one covert operation: In 2020, a participant in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela named Horn as one of his contacts, though Horn has denied all wrongdoing. He also denies playing any such role in Greenland, writing an article for Britain’s The Spectator magazine in May titled “No, I’m Not a CIA Spy in Greenland.” Still, he told Reuters in April that he maintains a “dialogue” with White House officials. Does he still represent Trump? American oligarchs? Both?

Horn has also met several times with the leader of Naleraq, Greenland’s populist pro-independence political party. At the time of Landry’s visit in May, Julie Rademacher, a Danish Greenlandic politician whom I’d met in Copenhagen, called me from Nuuk to describe the situation. Rademacher said that ever since American business and political operators from the Trump orbit had gotten involved in Greenland, Naleraq had become more aggressive, initiating votes of no confidence in a Parliament that is historically more decorous. Greenland does have long-standing grievances against Denmark. As recently as 2022, the Danish and Greenlandic governments launched an investigation into the Danish promotion of birth control in Greenland in the 1960s and ’70s, which included inserting IUDs into women without consent, a practice that former Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede has said constituted “genocide.” Are Americans seeking to exploit that legacy?

Regardless of their opinion about Denmark, Greenlanders are becoming aware of, and are unnerved by, this semi-covert, sometimes glaringly obvious American pressure. The night after Landry’s visit, Rademacher said, she had gone to a bar in Nuuk where people were openly carrying guns, something she’d never seen before. The atmosphere on the island was becoming unsettled, strange: Greenlanders knew that envoys from a predatory foreign power were circulating among them, seeking minerals, money, attention, regime change. “They are destroying the trust and the respect in society, in institutions, but also in people,” she said. “They fuck with people’s brains. It will be a fight for Greenlanders to keep their sanity.”

After all that, new “deal” is a damp squib. As of this writing, no text of the agreement has been released, but background briefings have been provided to media. The BBC reports that the agreement states that hostile powers, meaning Russia and China, cannot build bases on Greenland, which the Danes would never have allowed anyway. It rules out major investments from those countries too, which weren’t a serious prospect either. The government of Greenland is explicitly included, which is also new. But, at least in the reporting so far, nothing else really changes. The Danish prime minister and foreign minister released a statement declaring that the agreement respects "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination."

These are all additions to the existing treaty that could have been added without the drama, anger and stupid memes, without Trump blustering about "deals” and without terrifying the inhabitants of Greenland. And I fear that the covert and overt influence campaigns will continue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NOTE:

On Friday 18 Sep 2026, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. has reached an agreement for “permanent control over security” for Greenland that would enable a broad expansion of the American military presence on the territory of Denmark that he has long coveted.

The White House did not release a draft of the agreement, which is expected to be signed by all three parties at the U.N. General Assembly next week. It would apparently replace the 1951 treaty that granted the U.S. authority to station troops in Greenland.

09 Ιουλίου 2026

ΔΙΑΚΗΡΥΞΗ ΣΥΝΟΔΟΥ ΚΟΡΥΦΗΣ ΤΟΥ ΝΑΤΟ (ΑΓΚΥΡΑ, 2026)

The Ankara Summit Declaration
08 July 2026

We, the Heads of State and Government of the North Atlantic Alliance, have gathered in Ankara to reaffirm our ironclad commitment to our collective defence under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty and to the transatlantic bond. An attack on one is an attack on all. Our unity, solidarity and collective strength remain the foundation of peace, security, and prosperity for the one billion citizens in our Alliance of free and democratic nations. We remain committed to our 360-degree approach to deterrence and defence.
To counter the long-term threat Russia poses to Euro-Atlantic security and stability, and the persistent threat of terrorism, Allies are delivering on The Hague defence commitment. In 2025, European Allies and Canada increased their investments in core defence requirements by more than $139 billion. Our investments are delivering the capabilities we need while strengthening our industrial base and resilience. Today in Ankara, we announce more than $50 billion in new procurements and commit to expanding collective manufacturing capacity and working with industry to accelerate innovation. We will continue our work to eliminate defence trade barriers among Allies and leverage NATO’s partnerships to maximise defence industrial depth and cooperation.
We are building the future: a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO – a modernised Alliance. European Allies and Canada, working with the United States, are assuming greater responsibility for the Alliance’s defence. NATO’s deterrence and defence rest on an appropriate mix of nuclear, conventional, and missile defence capabilities, complemented by space and cyber assets. We are committed to maintaining our combat advantage. We are investing in our ability to deploy, enable and sustain our armed forces and deliver our capability targets in all domains, including in deep precision strike, integrated air and missile defence, uncrewed systems, cutting edge technologies, and intelligence capabilities. We are developing an interoperable transatlantic warfighting cloud and adopting powerful AI models.
Ukraine contributes to transatlantic security, and Allies stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. European Allies and Canada now finance the vast majority of security assistance to Ukraine through bilateral and multilateral means. Allies underscore that this support must be equitable, predictable, and sustainable in the long-term. For 2026, Allies pledge €70 billion in military equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine and affirm their sovereign commitments to sustaining at least equivalent levels in 2027. To this end, we welcome the European Union’s decision to provide multi-year funding to Ukraine through the Ukraine Support Loan.
The Alliance continues to respond and adapt to the strategic competition, pervasive instability, hybrid threats and recurrent shocks that define our broader security environment. Allies reiterate that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon and call on Iran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
We express our appreciation for the generous hospitality extended to us by Türkiye. We look forward to our next meeting.

ΑΚΟΛΟΥΘΕΙ ΤΟ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΟ ΣΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΚΑΙ ΣΧΕΤΙΚΕΣ ΠΑΡΑΠΟΜΠΕΣ

1. Εμείς, οι Αρχηγοί Κρατών και Κυβερνήσεων της Βορειοατλαντικής Συμμαχίας, συγκεντρωθήκαμε στην Άγκυρα για να επιβεβαιώσουμε την ακλόνητη δέσμευσή μας στη συλλογική μας άμυνα βάσει του Άρθρου 5 της Συνθήκης της Ουάσιγκτον και στον διατλαντικό δεσμό. Μια επίθεση εναντίον ενός είναι επίθεση εναντίον όλων. Η ενότητα, η αλληλεγγύη και η συλλογική μας δύναμη παραμένουν το θεμέλιο της ειρήνης, της ασφάλειας και της ευημερίας για το ένα δισεκατομμύριο πολίτες στη Συμμαχία μας των ελεύθερων και δημοκρατικών εθνών. Παραμένουμε προσηλωμένοι στην 360 μοιρών προσέγγισή μας στην αποτροπή και την άμυνα.

2. Για να αντιμετωπίσουν τη μακροπρόθεσμη απειλή που θέτει η Ρωσία στην ευρωατλαντική ασφάλεια και σταθερότητα, καθώς και τη διαρκή απειλή της τρομοκρατίας, οι Σύμμαχοι υλοποιούν τη δέσμευση της Χάγης για την άμυνα. Το 2025, οι Ευρωπαίοι Σύμμαχοι και ο Καναδάς αύξησαν τις επενδύσεις τους σε βασικές αμυντικές ανάγκες κατά περισσότερα από 139 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια. Οι επενδύσεις μας παρέχουν τις δυνατότητες που χρειαζόμαστε, ενισχύοντας παράλληλα τη βιομηχανική μας βάση και την ανθεκτικότητά μας. Σήμερα στην Άγκυρα, ανακοινώνουμε περισσότερα από 50 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια σε νέες προμήθειες και δεσμευόμαστε να επεκτείνουμε τη συλλογική παραγωγική μας ικανότητα και να συνεργαστούμε με τη βιομηχανία για την επιτάχυνση της καινοτομίας. Θα συνεχίσουμε το έργο μας για την εξάλειψη των εμπορικών εμποδίων στον τομέα της άμυνας μεταξύ των Συμμάχων και θα αξιοποιήσουμε τις συνεργασίες του ΝΑΤΟ για τη μεγιστοποίηση του βάθους και της συνεργασίας στον τομέα της αμυντικής βιομηχανίας.

3. Χτίζουμε το μέλλον: μια ισχυρότερη Ευρώπη σε ένα ισχυρότερο ΝΑΤΟ - μια εκσυγχρονισμένη Συμμαχία. Οι Ευρωπαίοι Σύμμαχοι και ο Καναδάς, σε συνεργασία με τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες, αναλαμβάνουν μεγαλύτερη ευθύνη για την άμυνα της Συμμαχίας. Η αποτροπή και η άμυνα του ΝΑΤΟ βασίζονται σε ένα κατάλληλο μείγμα πυρηνικών, συμβατικών και πυραυλικών αμυντικών δυνατοτήτων, που συμπληρώνονται από διαστημικά και κυβερνο-περιουσιακά στοιχεία. Δεσμευόμαστε να διατηρήσουμε το μαχητικό μας πλεονέκτημα. Επενδύουμε στην ικανότητά μας να αναπτύσσουμε, να ενδυναμώνουμε και να διατηρούμε τις ένοπλες δυνάμεις μας και να επιτυγχάνουμε τους στόχους μας σε όλους τους τομείς, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των επιθέσεων βαθιάς ακρίβειας, της ολοκληρωμένης αεροπορικής και πυραυλικής άμυνας, των μη επανδρωμένων συστημάτων, των τεχνολογιών αιχμής και των δυνατοτήτων πληροφοριών. Αναπτύσσουμε ένα διαλειτουργικό διατλαντικό cloud μάχης και υιοθετούμε ισχυρά μοντέλα τεχνητής νοημοσύνης.

4. Η Ουκρανία συμβάλλει στη διατλαντική ασφάλεια και οι Σύμμαχοι παραμένουν ενωμένοι στην ακλόνητη υποστήριξή τους προς την Ουκρανία για την υπεράσπιση της ελευθερίας, της κυριαρχίας και της εδαφικής της ακεραιότητας. Οι Ευρωπαίοι Σύμμαχοι και ο Καναδάς χρηματοδοτούν πλέον τη συντριπτική πλειονότητα της βοήθειας ασφαλείας προς την Ουκρανία μέσω διμερών και πολυμερών διαύλων. Οι Σύμμαχοι υπογραμμίζουν ότι η υποστήριξη αυτή πρέπει να είναι δίκαιη, προβλέψιμη και βιώσιμη μακροπρόθεσμα. Για το 2026, οι Σύμμαχοι δεσμεύονται να διαθέσουν 70 δισεκατομμύρια ευρώ σε στρατιωτικό εξοπλισμό, βοήθεια και εκπαίδευση για την Ουκρανία και επιβεβαιώνουν τις κυριαρχικές τους δεσμεύσεις για διατήρηση τουλάχιστον αντίστοιχων επιπέδων το 2027. Στο πλαίσιο αυτό, χαιρετίζουμε την απόφαση της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης να παράσχει πολυετή χρηματοδότηση στην Ουκρανία μέσω του Δανείου Στήριξης της Ουκρανίας.

5. Η Συμμαχία συνεχίζει να ανταποκρίνεται και να προσαρμόζεται στον στρατηγικό ανταγωνισμό, την εκτεταμένη αστάθεια, τις υβριδικές απειλές και τις επαναλαμβανόμενες κρίσεις που χαρακτηρίζουν το ευρύτερο περιβάλλον ασφαλείας μας. Οι Σύμμαχοι επαναλαμβάνουν ότι το Ιράν δεν πρέπει ποτέ να αποκτήσει πυρηνικό όπλο και καλούν το Ιράν να σεβαστεί πλήρως την ελευθερία της ναυσιπλοΐας στα Στενά του Ορμούζ.

6. Εκφράζουμε την εκτίμησή μας για τη γενναιόδωρη φιλοξενία που μας παρείχε η Τουρκία. Προσβλέπουμε στην επόμενη συνάντησή μας.

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Η επίσημη ανάρτηση του ΝΑΤΟ για την σύνοδο κορυφής