Various NATO reports

Hello to our dear friends!

I hope you are enjoying the break, although continued heatwaves are compromising everything we love. Do be careful. Do look after the wildlife. Do look after each other.

I’m sending out this quick update from the NATO summit. Oddly there may not be a NATO summit next year which is interesting in itself .

Eleven Takeaways from the NATO summit  https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/eleven-takeaways-from-the-nato-summit-in-ankara/

The unofficial NATO report!

Trump walked into a summit full of America’s closest allies and got treated like a child who might flip the table. For two days the leaders of the free world took turns managing his moods, bracing for tantrums, and quietly working around him.

Trump gushed over his host, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, praising their “chemistry,” lifting U.S. sanctions, and dangling F-35 fighter jets. He admitted flat out that Erdoğan was the only reason he bothered to show up.

Warmth for the autocrat. Contempt for the democracies.

Because with the allies, he came in swinging. Before the summit even opened, he posted a photo of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni captioned “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED.” He called Spain a “terrible partner in NATO” and threatened its trade. He announced, once again, that the United States should simply take Greenland from Denmark.

Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, didn’t blink. She said her country would defend every inch of its territory, and that American ownership of Greenland was not going to happen. She said it to his face, with the cameras rolling, then walked back into the room.

Watch what the grownups did next.

Mark Rutte, the secretary general, spent the summit feeding Trump compliments about defense spending so he wouldn’t storm off, coaxing him along with lines like “grab the win, it’s there.” European reporters have started openly calling Rutte the alliance’s chief Trump flatterer, and they mean it as a diagnosis, not a compliment.

That was the ceiling of the summit’s ambition. Keep the American president distracted enough to stay in the building.

And it isn’t just talk. The Pentagon quietly told allies it’s running a six-month review of U.S. troop levels in Europe.

Meanwhile a bloc of European members and Canada started drawing up their own naval mission for the North Atlantic and Arctic, one that doesn’t include American forces. They looked at the man threatening to seize Greenland and decided to guard the region without him.

Meanwhile, Trump is planning to put permanent fencing around the White House, pushing the people back further. He said Americans wouldn’t have to vote again before he was elected.

Disgustingly, Erdogan gave every attending leader a revolver, with bullets, as a memento.

The official NATO Ankara Summit Declaration: https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2026/07/08/the-ankara-summit-declaration

Stay strong!

Pippa