Welcome again Foreign PolicyStatus Report, where your fellow writers have somehow managed to get through not only another busy international gathering but also the first day without a World Cup match in a week. Both plan to stay up in Turkey to watch France play Morocco.
Well, here’s what’s available for the day: NATO takes stock after Trump’s peaceful departure,, The United States and Iran cease fighting takes more hits, and Turkey has the potential fighter jet success.
Welcome again Foreign PolicyStatus Report, where your fellow writers have somehow managed to get through not only another busy international gathering but also the first day without a World Cup match in a week. Both plan to stay up in Turkey to watch France play Morocco.
Well, here’s what’s available for the day: NATO takes stock after Trump’s peaceful departure,, The United States and Iran cease fighting takes more hits, and Turkey has the potential fighter jet success.
The future of NATO 3.0
The competition is over, the world leaders have left, and Ankara’s traffic is back to normal. And, in particular, the President of the United States Donald Trump – in spite of others hiccups during rest-he left the NATO summit in the capital of Turkey on a positive note.
“(T)here was a lot of love in that room,” Trump said at his final press conference, where he largely avoided criticizing other members of the coalition as he has in the past. “There was great unity in that room,” he added, using a word that NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European leaders tried to emphasize repeatedly over the two-day meeting.
And while those leaders will no doubt be breathing heavily (the situation), making Trump happy wasn’t necessarily their main goal this year.
“How it all ended and communiqué and the press conference, you can almost say it was business as usual with the Trump show on the side,” Torrey Taussig, who served as European director at the National Security Council of former US President Joe Biden, told SitRep in Ankara. last year in The Haguewhere it seemed like everyone was holding their breath to see what the president was going to say, my conversation with NATO officials but also allied officials was a shrug.”
We heard similar calls from officials and conference attendees publicly and privately—that Europe and Canada step up to do more to shoulder their burden within the alliance and protect their own defenses independently of Washington.
They showed progress toward that goal in Ankara, but there are other looming questions the alliance must face—chief among them when and how a non-American NATO will emerge.
“It’s shown a little at the summit but behind closed doors it was: What? NATO 3.0 does it make sense for the alliance going forward?” said Taussig, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “There wasn’t a lot of talk about (the US Department of Defense) force a posture check and what the US involvement and European presence might look like,” he added.
A broken relationship. At last year’s summit, there was “real hope” among NATO allies that “maybe if we propose (Trump) enough, everything will be fine,” Nathalie Tocci, who is director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs and was in Ankara, told SitRep. But now, “no one has any illusions about Trump anymore,” Tocci said, and allies realize that the relationship between the US president and NATO is “broken.”
At the same time, they are in the “business of not revealing the fact that it is broken,” he added, because they cannot keep it “open” in the middle of the war between Russia and Ukraine. They’re looking for Trump to provoke insults, and they’re letting them happen—because it could always get worse (like Trump responding to his threat to pull the US out of NATO).
NATO is now “playing the waiting game,” Tocci said: working to minimize the chances of further bombings by Trump while hoping that “something will happen inside the United States” and that there will finally be “an administration that someone can work with.”
So despite Trump’s parting words, NATO faces an uncertain future – and it remains unclear whether there will be a summit next year. On Wednesday, Rutte confirmed that the next meeting will be in Albania, but said the date has not yet been set. Tocci suspects this is because there are concerns that Trump would not express.
“You can’t have a summit without the United States, unless that’s the summit to declare NATO dead,” Tocci said.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
The conflict between the United States and Iran is breaking out. The week-long agreement between the United States and Iran that began with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in mid-June appears to be in its final stages. The two countries exchanged fire for the second consecutive day on Thursday. Iran’s push to control oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is at the heart of the tension, and fresh clashes have disrupted energy markets, as FP’s Keith Johnson writes.
At a NATO summit on Wednesday, Trump said he thought the ceasefire was “over,” but also gave conflicting messages about what might happen next. He suggested that the United States should not return to all-out war, but that the strike would continue. In fact, the US announced new attacks on Iran just hours after Trump left Ankara. A report from Axios, based on comments from a US official, suggested that the bombing campaign could continue for days or possibly even weeks.
Turkey’s F-35 waiting game. One of the big questions hanging over this year’s NATO summit is how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan it can lift itself his country hosting the meeting and his close relationship with Trump.
Trump said before the meeting that he would remove US sanctions were imposed on Turkey during its first term in 2020 over its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system. He also opened the door to overturning Turkey’s ban on buying F-35 fighter jets from the United States. Doing so would require parliamentary approvalwhile US lawmakers passed the ban into law when sanctions were imposed. It would also be a face great opposition from another important US ally, Israel.
Trump did not offer much more during his final press conference on Wednesday. “We have to make a decision (on) who we’re going to give it to,” he said, referring to the F-35. “Whether we do that or not, I haven’t made a decision yet,” he added, but called Erdogan “a great partner.”
Photo
A crowd of mourners surrounded the procession carrying the coffins of the former Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei and his family members during the funeral procession before his burial in Mashhad, Iran, July 9.Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images
Turn On Your Radar
Monday, July 13: The European Union’s “Union of the Ready” for Ukraine begins a two-day meeting in Paris.
Wednesday, July 15: The 10th anniversary of the coup attempt in Turkey is taking place.
The Senate confirmation hearing for Todd Blanche to be the attorney general of the United States is scheduled to take place.
Thursday, July 16: The election of the leaders of the British Labor Party is expected to be completed.
For Math
59-percentage of American Jews who have an unfavorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new lot of more than 1,000 Jewish adults by The Associated Press and the University of Chicago’s NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Quote of the Week
“It’s difficult – there are a lot of Ukrainian drones in the air.”
– President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, answer the question from Trump about whether he would visit Moscow.
Most Read FP This Week
Whiskey Cucumber Foxtrot
You may remember from yesterday Introduction to SitRep that Trump suddenly decided to fly back from Ankara in an old Air Force One instead of his shiny new Qatar-gifted plane. It is said that the move was made due to unspecified security concerns, but Trump said during his press conference that it was so that the new plane could fly to a few US military bases in Europe so that the troops there could admire it. “We will be going home by normal means,” he said.
But the US president seems to have pulled the switch: switch back for the Qatar plane at RAF Mildenhall in the UK (after the above mentioned a soldier’s salute) for his flight back to Washington. “As the president said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights set on him, and we are using every tool at our disposal — including disruption and disinformation — to address those threats,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said. he told it of New York Times.
