NATO leaders are meeting in Ankara, Turkiye on Tuesday and Wednesday.The summit gets underway as US President Donald Trump renews pressure on member states over defence spending. European nations are expected to respond with billions of dollars in new military contracts.At the NATO summit last year, members agreed to increase their target to 5 percent of GDP: 3.5 percent on military spending by 2035 and 1.5 percent on security-related needs.Who is there and what is at stake?Leaders from all 32 NATO member states are at the summit in Turkiye this week.Two non-alliance heads of state will also be there: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung.Australia, Japan and New Zealand are sending defence or foreign ministers, as are Gulf countries affected by the US-Israel war on Iran: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is not expected to attend the summit but is holding a bilateral meeting with Trump in Ankara. What Trump wants from NATO alliesTrump has questioned NATO’s value since his first presidential campaign. He argued that the US carried an unfair share of the costs. At the time, only five countries spent the agreed two percent GDP on defence.His questions about shared defence responsibility have produced some results in recent years within the alliance as member states pledged an in …
