NATO Comes to Ankara: Turkey's Power Abroad, Pressure at Home

In early July 2026, the leaders of the Atlantic alliance gathered in Ankara for a NATO summit — the first hosted on Turkish soil in over two decades. For President Erdoğan, the optics could hardly have been better: the West's most powerful heads of state assembled in his capital, implicitly acknowledging what Ankara has argued for years — that European security cannot be organized without Turkey. Yet the summit unfolded against a domestic backdrop that tells a very different story, one of an opposition under siege and a democracy under strain. The contrast between these two images — Turkey the indispensable ally and Turkey the shrinking democracy — is the defining tension of this political moment.

The Indispensable Ally

Turkey's leverage within NATO has rarely been greater. With Europe racing to rebuild its defense capacity, Ankara holds cards few allies can match: NATO's second-largest army, a defense industry whose drones have proven themselves from Ukraine to the Caucasus, and a geographic position commanding the Black Sea straits and the alliance's entire southeastern flank. European capitals that once lectured Ankara now court it, and the choice of Ankara as summit host was itself a concession to this new reality. This is the culmination of the assertive foreign policy I have written about before: a Turkey that no longer asks for a seat at the table, but expects the table to come to it.

The Crackdown at Home

Yet as the summit convened, Turkish authorities banned demonstrations in the capital and arrested more than two hundred people in the days beforehand. The machinery of the state has been turned on the opposition with a brazenness that stands out even by recent standards. Istanbul's mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu — the CHP's presidential candidate and the man many polls suggest could defeat Erdoğan — has been jailed since March 2025, facing an indictment built largely on anonymous testimony. In May, a court removed CHP leader Özgür Özel and the party's entire national leadership over unproven allegations; days later, police cleared him from party headquarters with tear gas. Human Rights Watch has described the campaign as an encroachment on Turkish democracy "reminiscent of the era of military coups."

What makes this crackdown notable is not its existence but its timing and target. The CHP is no longer the fractured, ineffective opposition of a decade ago. It leads the AKP in opinion polls, governs Turkey's largest cities with visible competence, and has assembled a coalition spanning secularists, nationalists, and disaffected conservatives. Erdoğan, who once won elections on the strength of economic growth, now confronts an electorate battered by years of volatility — and an opponent he cannot easily outpoll. Institutional control has become a substitute for popular consent.

Two Turkeys, One Strategy

It is tempting to treat these as separate stories — foreign policy triumph and domestic repression. In truth, they are one strategy. External indispensability is Erdoğan's insurance policy against external criticism. Every drone sold to a European partner, every mediation between Moscow and Kyiv, every reminder of Turkey's role on NATO's flank raises the cost for Western governments of pressing Ankara on human rights. The summit demonstrated this logic perfectly: NATO leaders gathered a short drive from where opposition activists sat in detention, and the alliance's communiqués said nothing about it. Strength abroad buys silence about weakness at home.

What Comes Next

The question now hanging over Turkish politics is whether this equilibrium can hold. Erdoğan faces a constitutional horizon — a third term would require either early elections or constitutional change, and speculation about both is mounting. The opposition, though battered, has not broken; if anything, the jailing of İmamoğlu has given it a cause and a symbol. Turkey has been here before: periods when the state seemed to have closed every avenue, only for the country's resilient civil society, competitive instincts, and deep institutional memory to reopen them.

For now, Erdoğan has won the optics. But optics are not outcomes. A country cannot indefinitely be both the alliance's rising power and its democratic outlier, and the negotiation between those two identities — like the negotiation between tradition and modernity that runs through so much of Turkish life — remains unresolved. The summit in Ankara did not settle it. It merely put it on display.