Taking the Pulse: Enough with the Annual NATO Summits, Already?
Over the past ten years, NATO has held almost as many summits as it did during the entirety of the Cold War. Are they still useful, or is it time to stop holding annual meetings?
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Amelie Zima, Research Fellow, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI)
During the Cold War, only ten summits were held, but from the 1990s onward, the pace increased steadily. A particularly notable acceleration occurred during the first Trump administration, when that increased frequency served to demonstrate NATO’s continued relevance to the United States. Annual summits have since become the norm, including after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, frequent gatherings leave less time for negotiating and drafting summit documents and place a heavier burden on the smaller delegations, which often lack the personnel to sustain such an intensive pace. Without entering into the current debate around reducing the number of summits purely to avoid potential public disputes between President Trump and the majority of allies, NATO must address the broader paradox of investing significant diplomatic and administrative resources in organizing annual summits to produce, at times, relatively modest outcomes. This was the case at the 2026 meeting in Ankara. It did not produce any decisions typically expected at NATO summits, such as revising the strategic concept or approving an enlargement.
Reducing the number of summits would help resolve this contradiction.
The absence of any reference in the Ankara communiqué to the location of the next summit suggest that NATO itself increasingly recognizes these institutional challenges.
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> Read the full commentary on Carnegie's website.
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Amélie ZIMA
Research Fellow, Head of European and Transatlantic Security Program, Security Studies Center
Security Studies Center
Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
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