Type: op-ed snap

Mentor’s Comment

The 32 heads of state or government of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met at the Ankara Summit on July 7-8, 2026, to review progress since the 2025 Hague Summit and set out a roadmap for implementation. The summit locked in a fivefold rise in the defence-spending pledge and a commitment to build a Europe-wide Defence Industrial Base (DIB), even as Europe’s existing industry struggles to meet current demand.

What four commitments came out of the Ankara Summit?

1. Collective defence reaffirmed: All 32 allies affirmed an “ironclad commitment” to collective defence under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty and to the transatlantic bond.
2. Five per cent spending pledge: Allies unanimously endorsed “The Hague defence commitment,” under which every NATO member undertook to allocate at least five per cent of GDP to defence by 2035, up from the earlier two per cent pledge.
3. Support for Ukraine: NATO declared “unwavering support” for Ukraine’s freedom, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
4. European defence industrial base: Members committed to building a high-technology, high-capacity, Europe-wide Defence Industrial Base (DIB), the network of firms, factories, laboratories and skilled workers needed to build and sustain military power.
5. Focus on implementation: Discussions at Ankara centred on converting these political commitments into military capability through investment, industrial capacity and innovation.

Can Europe’s defence industry deliver on the pledge?

1. Pre-existing shortages: European defence giants MBDA and Rheinmetall had warned of ammunition production shortages even before The Hague’s five per cent pledge.
2. Evidence from the Iran campaign: Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign against Iran, saw the U.S. fire more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles; at the current production rate of 85 a year, replacing them would take a decade.
3. Coordination gap: Many NATO members have capable Defence Industrial Bases (DIBs) individually, but there is little coordination of alliance-wide priorities.
4. Concentrated mismatch: The resulting strategic mismatch found during the Ukraine war has clustered in air defence missiles and interceptors, precision-guided munitions, and artillery rockets.
5. Deepening dependency, not reducing it: The U.S. supplied half of Europe’s defence spending between 2022-2024, up from 28% in 2019-2021, and without a major revitalisation of Europe’s own industry, the five per cent pledge will only deepen dependence on the U.S.
6. Rising U.S. sales to Europe: Foreign Military Sales (FMS) notifications to the U.S. Congress for European customers have quadrupled since 2008, to $76 billion in 2024.

How does NATO’s spending surge affect global arms buyers like India?

1. Buyer’s market turning seller’s market: As NATO spends more, the international arms market is shifting from a buyers’ market to a sellers’ market for the world’s big arms buyers, including India.
2. First warning sign: U.S. firm General Electric Aerospace has delayed supplying F-404 fighter jet engines, critically needed for the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme.
3. Competing demand: Asian allies’ rising demand for U.S. weaponry is competing directly with ongoing European needs for the same suppliers.

What must India do in response?

1. Growing reliance on new-age technology: India’s defence increasingly depends on drones, artificial intelligence (AI), cyber warfare, electronic warfare, and resilient networks.
2. Self-reliance as the necessary response: India’s defence industry must achieve self-reliance in these technology areas rather than depend on suppliers who are themselves overstretched fighting their own battles.
3. Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerabilities: Avoid over-reliance on single-source western suppliers like General Electric who face competing allied demands. Push local aerospace and defense firms (such as HAL and private sector partners) to prioritize delayed components like fighter jet engines.
4. Giving a big push to the private sector: Funding and orders should be increased for domestic defense startups working in the fields of drones, artificial intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity.
5. Further expansion of the ‘Negative Import List’: The scope of the existing ‘Positive Indigenisation List‘ should be further expanded. There should be further expansion of the ‘Negative Import List‘. India’s Positive Indigenisation Lists (PIL) ban military imports, forcing procurement strictly from domestic makers. Managed via the Srijan Portal, key tracks include the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) lists for major platforms and the Department of Defence Production (DDP) lists for components.
   

Conclusion

NATO’s Ankara Summit converted last year’s spending pledge into a five per cent-of-GDP commitment and a mandate to build a European Defence Industrial Base (DIB), but ammunition and missile shortages already visible in the Ukraine war show capacity, not political will, is now the binding constraint. Because higher NATO spending is shifting the global arms market from a buyers’ to a sellers’ market, without a rapid European industrial build-out the pledge will deepen dependence on the U.S. rather than reduce it, and it is squeezing supply for outside buyers like India, making self-reliance in new-age defence technologies the necessary Indian response.

Why in the News?

Talks in Doha over Iran’s nuclear programme have stalled, with Tehran pressed to fully dismantle its enriched uranium stockpile even as it insists on its sovereign right to enrich. This demand exposes the selective enforcement of the global non-proliferation order, which places no comparable disarmament obligation on existing nuclear weapon states.

How has the non-proliferation framework institutionalised inequality rather than eliminating nuclear weapons?

1. Structural hierarchy: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) divided the world into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” binding the latter to restraint while the former continue to modernise their arsenals.
2. Restraint without reciprocity: Non-nuclear states carry the entire compliance burden; disarmament by existing powers remains indefinitely deferred.
3. Iran’s legal route: Iran pursued enrichment within a declared legal framework, unlike states that stayed outside the treaty altogether.
4. Selective demand: Only Iran currently faces an ultimatum to disarm; the five recognised weapons powers and Israel face no equivalent demand.

What does the differential treatment of India, Pakistan, Israel, and Iran reveal about the double standards in enforcement?

1. India and Pakistan: Both remain outside the NPT, hold substantial nuclear arsenals, and are treated as strategic partners by the same powers that police the non-proliferation order.
2. Israel: Its nuclear programme is an open secret; it has never submitted to inspection and is routinely excluded from proliferation-risk discourse.
3. Iran: Pursued enrichment within a legal framework and submitted to the most intrusive inspection regime in arms-control history under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
4. Outcome mismatch: Iran’s compliance was met with unilateral American withdrawal, renewed sanctions, and the threat of military destruction, punishment despite compliance.

On what historical foundation does the current nuclear order’s moral authority rest?

1. Founding act: The global nuclear order is anchored in the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the only instances of nuclear weapons deployed in conflict.
2. Precedent of justified use: This act established both the catastrophic potential of nuclear arms and the precedent that their use could be absorbed into the language of strategic necessity.
3. Designated guardian: The state that used the weapons survived the act morally and emerged as the self-appointed guardian of the nuclear order it now enforces.
4. Compromised authority: A state that has used nuclear weapons against civilians occupies a singular position when regulating other states’ nuclear ambitions; its authority derives from prior use and the dominance that use consolidated.
5. Einstein’s warning: Humanity must choose between abolishing war and facing annihilation; that choice remains deferred, most effectively by states holding the largest arsenals.

What does the collapse of the JCPOA reveal about the reliability of nuclear agreements with existing powers?

1. Genuine achievement: The JCPOA, negotiated under the Obama administration, represented a genuinely achieved instance of multilateral diplomacy.
2. Unilateral collapse: The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, despite Iran’s compliance.
3. Signal to other states: The withdrawal sent a message extending beyond Tehran, that future arms agreements with the US carry no guarantee of compliance.
4. Proximate cause: Should the Iran nuclear crisis deepen further, the destruction of the JCPOA will stand as its proximate cause.

Is the current global order a rules-based system or a structure of selective tolerance?

1. Reframing the question: The real question is not whether Iran should or should not enrich uranium, but whether the framework posing that question is coherent, consistent, or just and by any honest reckoning, it is none of these.
2. Not a rules-based order: Punishing Iran for compliance while rewarding other states for defiance, alongside indefinite deferral of the NPT’s disarmament obligation, does not constitute a rules-based order.
3. A chosen tolerance: This is a system that has knowingly chosen to tolerate the most destructive weapons in history rather than eliminate them.
4. 1955 answer: Einstein and Bertrand Russell asserted in 1955 that nuclear weapons must be abolished altogether, by all states, without exception, or the logic of deterrence will produce the catastrophe it claims to prevent.
5. The remaining choice: The only question left is whether this choice is confronted through policy or through catastrophe.

Conclusion

The Iran nuclear crisis is not fundamentally a dispute over enrichment rights. It is evidence that the non-proliferation order is a selectively enforced hierarchy, anchored in the founding legitimacy the US drew from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rewards defiance in some states while punishing compliance in others. Unless this framework is confronted directly and reformed toward the universal abolition proposed as early as 1955, the logic of deterrence will keep reproducing the very catastrophe it claims to prevent.