Angsty in Ankara

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Trump is (still) not happy with NATO, Anthropic gets another break, and U.S.-Iran talks tick along with little to show for them.

Nothing is certain in this world besides death, taxes, and Donald Trump criticizing NATO. The U.S. president slammed the alliance for the umpteenth time on Thursday morning, returning to his frequent complaint about the United States subsidizing the other 31 members. “The United States spends more money on NATO than any other country, by far, to protect them, without getting any benefit from so doing,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that it was “ridiculous.”

Trump’s long-standing disdain for the alliance may be old hat at this point, but it’s certainly not the message NATO’s European member states and Canada want to hear just days before Trump travels to Ankara for the summit.

Last week, Trump joked that he’s only going to the summit because of his affinity for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Rutte, who was sitting next to him in the Oval Office at the time, quipped: “You would have come for me.” Much of Rutte’s energy at the helm of NATO has been spent managing and mollifying Trump, which was definitely the case at last year’s summit in The Hague, where NATO allies all agreed to boost their respective defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035.

“My expectation is that it will be more of the same from last year,” retired Gen. Richard Shirreff, who served as NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe from 2011 to 2014, told SitRep. “In other words, a desperate effort to try and keep Trump and America in the camp and a continuation of the head-in-the-sand approach of the NATO secretary-general about the reality that America under Trump cannot be trusted as a NATO ally.”

However, Rutte sought to paint a picture of progress during his visit to Washington last week. “At Ankara, we are going to show the world that we are delivering on the commitments we made in The Hague last year,” he said in a speech at the Atlantic Council after meeting with Trump, adding that the alliance “will announce tens of billions of dollars of new contracts” at the summit.

There’s an added question of whether those contracts can produce what Europe needs and who will fulfill them, with the Iran war having severely depleted U.S. stockpiles to the point where Washington is worried about its own supply. “The single greatest threat to America’s national security today is under-investment in military spending,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post last week, calling on Congress to pass Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027.

There are likely some tough conversations to be had on what that means for NATO, especially as the Trump administration continues to tease the possibility of withdrawing some U.S. troops from Europe. But Trump’s statements going into the summit portend that much of Europe’s energy this year—again—will be spent on preventing undue fireworks from the other side of the Atlantic.

Ukraine’s pain. That also threatens to distract further from the top priority for NATO’s European members—ending Russia’s war with Ukraine. Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, this week have killed at least 27 people in one of the deadliest attacks of the war so far, and Europe is keen to move toward a lasting peace.

Trump and his administration have been more positive on Ukraine in recent weeks—largely because of the country’s successes on the battlefield and ability to inflict serious pain on Moscow, as our colleague Sam Skove outlined recently.

An ideal outcome of the summit would be “an agreement by the alliance to design and execute a strategy to support Ukraine and defeat Russia,” Shirreff said.

That will depend once again in large part on whether NATO can keep Trump focused and not feuding (maybe Poland can help).

The Defense Department is looking for someone to oversee its drone programs. A newly created position within the department—the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS for short)—will oversee all autonomous systems used by the military and will report to the deputy secretary of defense, the Pentagon said in a statement on Wednesday.

Another new Trump administration job that has already been filled is the head of a team of scientists tasked with studying the national security threats posed by potential alien spacecraft. The person tapped for the job is Avi Loeb, who served as head of Harvard University’s astronomy department until 2020. Loeb has raised eyebrows among some of his academic peers with questionable theories about UFO sightings.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Fable restored. Eighteen days after the Trump administration abruptly forced AI company Anthropic to bar any foreign nationals from using its latest models (leading the company to suspend them completely), the White House equally abruptly reversed its decision. The administration lifted its new export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on Tuesday evening, the company said in a blog post.

Anthropic said it had made updates to the models’ safeguards to prevent potential misuse and committed to “deeper government collaboration” on model releases. But Trump’s initial decision to cut off access has spooked European allies whose trust deficit may be harder to overcome even with the models back in action. More on that trans-Atlantic tech schism in my latest piece.

Doha doldrums. The United States and Iran concluded their latest round of indirect talks in the Qatari capital of Doha on Wednesday, which reportedly focused on the navigation of ships through the Strait of Hormuz and the unfreezing of Iranian financial assets. Notably absent was any discussion of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, one of Trump’s key stated goals of launching the war. Our colleague Keith Johnson has a piece today on how most of the initial outcomes of the “memorandum of understanding” that stopped the war two weeks ago favor one party to the conflict—and it isn’t Washington.

The United States last week also brokered a cease-fire agreement in the related conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which saw the Israeli military pledge to withdraw from two areas it controlled in Lebanon’s south (Hezbollah was not a party to the agreement, and Israel has now delayed its withdrawal).. But the situation remains tense and Israel is adamant that it will not fully withdraw from the country, in part because of militant group Hezbollah’s use of low-cost drones in the region, as John outlined in a new analysis.

U.S. soldiers and Venezuelan military police patrol the streets of La Guaira, Venezuela, on June 29 following twin earthquakes that have devastated the country. Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images