BS Summary: This article contains 41 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Appeal to Authority, and Framing Effect, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 39.5% saturation with 794 hits. Analysis detected 4,760 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,010 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 53.5% and a BS Rank of 56% (9,693 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 55.70% of the article peer group.
The Nato summit in Ankara was a showcase of Turkish hospitality and ruthless authoritarian efficiency.
Journalists were showered with Turkish delights, perfumes, and porcelain coffee cups, and even Turkey’s cats were enlisted in the charm offensive: white Angora kittens were introduced to cooing journalists in the press center.
The roads were freshly paved and the shiny Nato shuttle buses all ran on time.
The entire spectacle was sustained by staggering levels of security: roughly 70,000 personnel secured the event — almost double the number present at last year’s Nato summit in The Hague.
In the weeks leading up to it, all protests were banned and hundreds of Nato critics and Left-wing activists were arrested.
While Trump praised the spectacle, some liberal Atlanticists present told me they were a touch squeamish about the entire display.
In their view, the Ankara summit was a deviation from enlightened Euro-Atlanticist democracy, something supposedly intrinsic to the alliance.
However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots.
In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration.
The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel.
As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”.
In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense.
At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time.
The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”.
Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands.
One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”.
Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.
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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending.
“That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.”
During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum.
Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets.
“Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned.
He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months.
If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato.
This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara.
It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions.
In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.
To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution.
Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union.
As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat.
But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion.
The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”.
From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric.
Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo , or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”.
The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate.
The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”.
When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil.
French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population.
Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership.
In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.
Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations.
Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”.
As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous.
While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later.
Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss.
In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives.
In the end , a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”.
Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued.
If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.
“If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.”
The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense.
As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”.
The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe.
As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.
Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles.
He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato.
In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success.
A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space.
The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.
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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate.
Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties.
Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”.
Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion.
All of this has won admiration from Trump.
Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”.
Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.
Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit.
During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits.
Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year.
Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history.
Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million.
In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks.
“The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me.
“There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.”
It’s a critique now shared by some other allies.
While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.
Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences.
Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty.
This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world.
Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way.
While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all.
Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”.
If it does, it does so at a steep cost.
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