The July 2026 NATO Summit was another display of performative loyalty to Donald Trump, quantified in percentage points of GDP and multibillion dollar equipment contracts. Ian Davis argues that the UK’s new leadership must think beyond Trump’s transactionalism and foster an honest debate about how we spend to really make Britain and the world safer.
It is to be hoped that Andy Burnham’s refreshed defence spending debate is not reduced to simple slogans. Yes, Europe faces genuine threats – most of them related to potential collapse of eco-systems and climate change. Yes, Russia remains, in the words of last week’s Ankara NATO summit declaration, “a long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and stability” And yes, the UK cannot pretend that other people will do the hard work of European defence forever. But the Ankara summit made one thing clear: simply pouring more money into the military does not automatically make Britain safer.
What the summit exposed was not just a security gap, but a political and strategic one. NATO is being pushed toward “burden-shifting”, with Europe and Canada expected to take greater responsibility for conventional defence while the United States focuses elsewhere. In Westminster, that can sound comforting: the Americans want allies to step up, and the Treasury wants better value for money. But the deeper dynamic is more troubling. Spending is increasingly tied to loyalty, contracts and the politics of appeasing Washington rather than to a sober assessment of what Britain actually needs.
That matters because Britain’s own debate is following the same path. The pressure is all on numbers: 2.5%, 3%, 3.5%, 5% of GDP, as if a single percentage can answer the question of national security. It cannot. Numbers do not tell us what Britain should buy, from whom, or for what purpose. Nor do they explain how to spend more while achieving less.
NATO’s blank cheque
NATO’s answer is becoming familiar: buy more kit, sign more joint procurement deals, and hope the industrial base eventually catches up. At Ankara, allies announced military contracts and consortia worth at least $50 billion, including counter-drone systems, strike capabilities, surveillance aircraft, missile defence and space programmes. That may be good news for defence firms. It is not automatically good news for taxpayers.
Britain should be especially wary of this logic, of letting the debate become a blank cheque for procurement. Once military spending becomes the main political signal, the result is self-justifying: more threat means more spending, more spending means more contracts, more contracts mean more momentum for still more spending. Meanwhile, diplomacy gets sidelined, and the public is asked to accept that security is simply the same thing as rearmament.
Ukraine is a case in point. NATO pledged €70 billion for Ukraine in 2026 and at least the same level in 2027. That is a serious commitment, and Britain should continue to support Ukraine robustly. But military support alone is not a strategy. The wider question of how the war ends was not on the agenda of the Ankara Summit and cannot be answered by alliance armament politics alone. Diplomacy remains urgent, and it is the part too often missing from the British and NATO debate.
Thinking beyond ‘NATO 3.0’
The same applies to Europe’s broader security architecture. The summit described a ‘NATO 3.0’ vision in which Europe takes on more of its own defence while the United States pulls back some of its commitments. For Britain, that means we need to stop thinking of defence as something we outsource to Washington and occasionally top up with speeches. If the US is less willing to underwrite European security in the old way, then Britain has to decide what role it wants to play: bridge between Europe and the US, core military power in its own right, just another country making grand promises without the industrial base to match, or something new and much bolder? There is also an opportunity to link ongoing US reductions to a grander security dialogue with Moscow, which can include mutual limitations to force deployments on NATO’s eastern flank and nuclear arms control.
There is also a warning in the political style of the summit itself. It was shaped by Donald Trump’s demand for loyalty. NATO bent itself around preserving US attention, even at the cost of awkward silence on Greenland, Iran and democratic backsliding in parts of the alliance. That is not a healthy model for alliance management. Britain should not build defence policy around flattering the loudest voice in Washington or pretending every strategic problem can be solved by raising spending targets and buying more equipment.
A serious British position would be more demanding. It would accept that defence spending might have to rise but insist that every extra pound is tied to clear purposes, such as air defence, a specialised Northern Flank navy, stockpiles, logistics and cyber resilience. It would resist vanity projects, power-projection posturing and procurement theatre. It would revisit the radioactive elephant in the room: nuclear weapons, which are an existential risk as well as a financial black hole. And it would focus on ‘silver medal’ technologies—proven, cost-effective, non-exotic systems that are cheaper to acquire and maintain than cutting-edge ‘gold medal’ equivalents.
An honest debate on defence
Above all, Britain needs a broader definition of defence. Climate resilience, energy independence and societal endurance are not side issues; they are core elements of national security. NATO has already begun to recognise this through resilience planning, infrastructure spending and civilian baseline goals. Britain should go further, treating grid reinforcement, critical infrastructure protection and energy preparedness as part of defence (under the NATO 1.5% resilience spending framework), not as separate policy silos. Renewable energy generation and grid-decentralisation projects (such as Baltic and North Sea offshore wind protection), for example, could be recodified as qualifying expenditures within the framework.
The current debate needs more honesty. If ministers argue for higher defence spending, they should explain what security failures it will fix. If they want the public to accept trade-offs, they should say what those trade-offs are. And if they want to claim that Britain is meeting its responsibilities, they should stop treating the defence budget as a symbolic patriotism test and start treating it as a practical plan.
Ankara does not show that defence spending is pointless. It shows that spending without purpose is dangerous. Britain does need to invest more in strengthening its security. But it should do so with open eyes: not as tribute to American politics, not as a subsidy to defence contractors and not as a substitute for strategy. The real test is not how loudly we promise to spend. It is whether we can turn that spending into genuine security.
For a detailed review of the NATO Ankara summit by the author for NATO Watch, click here.
Dr Ian Davis is the founder of NATO Watch, a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation that works to promote public awareness and foster debate on the role of NATO in public life. He is also the Executive Editor of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Yearbook and an Associate Senior Fellow within Conflict and Peace at SIPRI.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Estonian Government Communications Unit (Stenbocki Maja) via Flickr. Representatives of NATO members states with Secretary General Mark Rutte at the NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum in Ankara, Türkiye, 07 July 2026.
