The liberal internationalist narrative has long held that democracies naturally cooperate, building institutions and distributing power based on shared values. But this week's NATO summit in Ankara tells a different story: security imperatives and alliance loyalty are driving defense spending, not ideological alignment.
Arms Deals and Alliance Logic
NATO allies gathered in Ankara to announce arms deals worth tens of billions of dollars, structured largely to demonstrate to the Trump administration that Europe is finally paying its share. The deals—including European procurement of American AMRAAM, PAC-3, and GMLRS-variant missiles—were almost exclusively within the alliance, consolidating a transatlantic defense industrial base that keeps procurement, co-production, and R&D tightly guarded within the treaty perimeter.
President Donald Trump has long demanded quantifiable increases in US defense exports, but the overarching need is for tighter interoperability within NATO, which largely requires common systems. This convergence of industrial and operational logic keeps benefits structurally reserved for alliance members, with the US remaining indispensable—at least for now.
Notably, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney chose Germany's TKMS Type 212CD submarine over South Korea's Hanwha KSS-III, in a contract worth approximately $70 billion. Both platforms met Canada's operational requirements, and both came from liberal democracies, leaving no values-based reason to prefer one. Consistent with alliance logic, Carney emphasized that the deal would “deepen our partnerships with trusted allies” and “open new opportunities for Canadian businesses in European supply chains,” explicitly tying Canada's choice to NATO and European integration. Selecting the German submarine integrated Canada deeper into the European defense industrial web.
In Ankara, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung proposed a “Korea-NATO Defense Industry Partnership 2.0” characterized by joint R&D, co-production, and joint operation of weapons systems, pitched as an upgrade of the conventional buyer-seller model. If the partnership materializes—still a big if—Korean defense firms could move beyond bilateral cooperation with individual NATO members and gain broader access to alliance-wide procurement and co-production programs. Hanwha Ocean's statement after losing the Canadian contract was more circumspect: the Korean company said it had “devoted every effort to winning the contract” but “was unable to overcome the barrier posed by NATO alliances.” That is effectively an admission that non-NATO member status remains a structural ceiling to deeper integration with the defense alliance.
Europe's Strategic Autonomy Push
The missile purchases from US firms signed in Ankara may look like transatlantic solidarity, but they should also be regarded as a transitional phase in a longer European strategic project. In Ankara, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte described the alliance as entering the “early stages of a defense industrial revolution,” with a focus on deep-strike capability, air defense modernization, and autonomous systems. These priorities are now backed by both economic heft and political will. The Netherlands alone announced more than 3 billion euros in deals, including air defense partnerships with Belgium and naval cooperation with Britain.
NATO simultaneously announced it would replace its aging US-built AWACS fleet with a Swedish alternative—Saab's GlobalEye, in a deal worth up to $4.5 billion—backing the Swedish system over a rival solution from US defense contractor Boeing. That is another signal that European substitution of American systems is firmly underway. In April 2026, Germany's Rheinmetall and Dutch firm Destinus announced a joint venture—Rheinmetall Destinus Strike Systems—to produce mass-scalable cruise missiles and rocket artillery from a 100% European value chain, targeting NATO qualification so that the weapons can be procured by all member states.
The EU's European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) and its five proposed joint defense projects of common interest—covering drones, maritime and seabed defense, space, air and missile defense, and the Eastern Flank—carry a combined funding ambition of 190 billion euros by 2036. In the context of future domains like AI, Brussels is already treating autonomous targeting and decision-support systems as strategic infrastructure rather than mere technology, pushing for European-developed models, trusted data pools, and secure compute on the continent. Consistent with the dual-use technology approaches of Washington and Beijing, European defense primes and emerging AI firms will be driven to embed AI into sensors, command-and-control, and weapons guidance—and to do so on European hardware, cloud, and regulatory terms.
The European Commission's explicit goal is to redirect defense spending inward, reducing the roughly half of European procurement that currently flows outside Europe to the United States, Israel, and South Korea. So while European states currently buy American because of urgent capability gaps and superior US production lines, NATO's European members should be expected to continue building alternatives on the continent. Autonomy is the long-term strategic goal, achievable only through the industrial strengthening of states that, per alliance logic, prioritize security over values.
This realist turn echoes patterns seen elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. As we noted in our analysis of the Israel-Turkey rift, strategic calculations often override ideological bonds. Similarly, South Korea's strategic autonomy push reflects a region where security imperatives increasingly dictate alliance choices. The NATO summit in Ankara confirms that in a world of great-power competition, realism trumps values—even among democracies.
