Andre Damon@Andre__Damon, WSWS, 8 July 2026
Representatives of the NATO military alliance met Tuesday in Ankara, pledging to escalate their rearmament and war-making across the globe. The 36th summit of the 32-member alliance, hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at his presidential palace, opened with a wave of new arms contracts and fresh demands that every member spend 5 percent of national output on its military.
Against the backdrop of the summit, the United States again bombed Iran on Tuesday. That evening the US military announced “a series of powerful strikes against Iran,” hitting air defenses, coastal radar and missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz, hours after the Treasury cut off Iran’s oil sales. It was the latest escalation of the war that began on February 28, when US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has now dragged on for more than four months.
The bombing fell as vast crowds mourned Khamenei in Qom and the Iraqi city of Najaf. Iranian state media reported explosions at Bandar Abbas, Qeshm and Sirik, where shrapnel wounded several people at a commercial pier. US President Donald Trump had declared on Monday, in the Oval Office: “We’re either going to make a deal, or we’re going to finish the job.” He added, “It won’t be tough to finish the job.”
The summit’s main business is the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The opening of the summit followed a sustained barrage of long-range strikes by Ukraine deep inside Russian territory, which the assembled powers openly celebrated. “Ukraine has a window of opportunity and is changing the dynamics on the battlefield,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Shekerinska told the summit. “Russia, for the first time, is faced with the reality of war.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the summit’s defense-industry forum that Ukrainian drones had hit a refinery at Omsk, deep in Siberia, 2,700 kilometers beyond the front, and boasted, “We have completely eliminated the very idea of Russia having a strategic rear.” A senior NATO official said Ukraine had launched 10,000 long-range drones at Russia in May and knocked out a fifth of its oil refining.
NATO announced the arms deals Tuesday at the summit’s Defense Industry Forum, which it billed as its “big reveal,” staged to pounding techno music. “I’m coming straight from the NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum, where contracts were signed among Allied companies worth tens of billions of dollars,” Shekerinska said. Alliance members announced the joint purchase of Saab GlobalEye surveillance planes by 11 nations, up to five Northrop Grumman Triton drones by four more, and Airbus refueling and transport aircraft by fifteen.
Britain, France and Germany announced a $50 billion program on Tuesday to build long-range missiles, without US involvement, capable of striking targets more than 2,000 kilometers away—far enough to reach Moscow. Banks including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas had already “mobilized $217 billion” for the buildup, NATO said. By the Associated Press’s account, no prices were attached to the showcased weapons, and some of the deals had been signed long before. The contracts are guaranteed profit for Lockheed Martin, Saab, Northrop Grumman and Airbus, drawn from European treasuries.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called the spending “money well spent.” Shekerinska pressed industry to keep up: “Cash is flowing… We need industry to rapidly produce capabilities and keep up with the increased demand for weapons and equipment.” Allies were spending on “core military requirements—troops, equipment, weapons,” she said, “but also on our collective resilience,” and “investing in our defense industrial base.”
The numbers are staggering. “In 2025 alone, European Allies and Canada increased defense investment by 139 billion US dollars,” Shekerinska said, “an increase of almost 20% compared to the previous year. And just one year into a 10-year project that is the Hague Defence Investment Plan.” European members and Canada will add a further 11 percent in 2026, bringing their total to $634 billion, against a US budget of $850 billion. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen boasted of €800 billion in EU rearmament by 2030.
Shekerinska cast the summit’s aims as “enhanced deterrence and defense” and “defense industrial collaboration,” and said NATO would “breathe life into the concept of NATO 3.0: a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO.” The formula means Europe shouldering more of its own defense so that Washington can concentrate its forces against China; the United States is already pulling troops from Europe, 5,000 from Germany. “We have responsibilities elsewhere in the world, as the world’s only superpower,” the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, told reporters.
Even as they plotted war around the world, the imperialist gangsters quarreled among themselves. Trump renewed his threat to annex Greenland, the territory of NATO member Denmark, calling it “an important part for the United States” that “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” and warned that Washington could “remove all of our soldiers out of Europe.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen answered that a US seizure of the island “is not going to happen.”
Trump opened his part of the summit with a stream of threats. Standing beside Erdoğan, he said he was “very disappointed with NATO” and berated the European powers for refusing to join the war on Iran. “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us? We’ve always been there for them,” he demanded.
Turkey locked down Ankara for the summit. In the weeks beforehand, Erdoğan’s government banned all demonstrations in the capital for thirteen days and detained 225 people—among them leftists, lawyers, a university professor, a gay-magazine editor and a comedian who had mocked the president—jailing 103 of them. On Sunday, police detained scores of anti-NATO protesters and fired tear gas to break up their march.
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