Ankara experienced drama directed by Trump

The Ankara NATO summit was dominated by US President Donald Trump's statements focused on the functioning of the Alliance and allied commitments. His statement that he would not have come to it if his friend, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan, had not arranged for it, did not bode well.

And then one threatening message after another rolled out: Greenland should come under American control, the allies failed to support the American operation against Iran, in the first place it was Spain, with which trade must be interrupted, and American troops may be withdrawn from Europe.

Although the head of the White House said that he was disappointed with "NATO", he also showed his Janusian face: according to AFP, he said that the US wants to stay in the alliance, did not contradict the commitment to collective defense under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and supported the provision of military support to Ukraine in the amount of 70 billion euros for this year.

At the same time, it also shows the ambition to return as a driver of peace negotiations, which should lead to an end to the war in Ukraine. This is indicated by his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the subsequent phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is not clear to what extent it counts on Europe in this.

However, everything may be disrupted by the resumption of the military conflict between the US and Iran. After a series of Iranian attacks, Trump announced the end of a ceasefire and negotiations with the Iranians in Ankara. A further escalation of the war can make Europeans and Ukrainians really dizzy.

Despite the confirmation of the basic political consensus in NATO among the Allies, it is appropriate to rethink its current condition. Only five years after the Afghan debacle, when the alliance was paradoxically revived by Putin's war against Ukraine, Trump is now mainly torpedoing it politically.

Europeans cannot underestimate the signals from Washington about its reluctance to engage more in the defense of the old continent and the consideration that it can only be provided with some kind of indirect support.

Europe faces the urgent task of building real strategic autonomy, within which all European states share political and military responsibility for collective defence. Political declarations are no longer enough, we need to really cooperate, which will require overcoming the still existing mutual political distrust and industrial protectionism in arms production.

And it seems that relations with the host of this year's summit - Turkey, which has NATO's second strongest army, controls access between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and is able to mediate negotiations between Russia and Ukraine - need to be reconsidered.

We may be on the threshold of tectonic changes in transatlantic relations, which needs to be monitored and analysed in detail in the Czech Republic as well. But the "parallel" delegations in Ankara show that this can be a problem. To the detriment of Czech foreign and security policy. 

Miloš Balabán, Právo Daily