The NATO Summit in Ankara and the Changing Strategic Role of Energy Security: An Assessment of the Alliance’s Next Twenty Years

The NATO Summit held in Ankara on 7–8 July 2026 marks perhaps one of the most critical turning points in the Alliance’s transformation since 1949. The Summit, at which the heads of state and government of NATO member states gathered in Ankara on 7–8 July 2026, was the Alliance’s 36th summit and marked the second time Turkey had hosted the event since the Istanbul Summit in 2004. The location and timing of this summit are no coincidence; given Turkey’s geopolitical position at the crossroads of Eurasian energy corridors and its growing strategic importance within NATO’s southern and Black Sea axes, the country has become a natural focal point for the Alliance’s energy security discussions. In a statement on 6 July 2026, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte emphasised that the summit would focus on the theme of ‘delivery’, demonstrating how allies would translate the commitments made in The Hague into concrete capabilities. However, to interpret the summit’s agenda as being limited solely to defence spending and support for Ukraine would be to overlook the multidimensional nature of today’s security environment. Indeed, in pre-summit assessments, it has been particularly emphasised that the recent instability in the Middle East has heightened concerns regarding maritime transport routes, supply chain resilience, the protection of critical infrastructure and energy security.

The Return of Energy Security to NATO’s Core Agenda

NATO’s founding philosophy was shaped around the classic principle of collective defence (Article 5), with the perception of threat defined largely in terms of conventional and nuclear military aggression. However, developments over the past decade have revealed that this definition of threat is no longer sufficient. Sabotage attempts against energy infrastructure, attacks on undersea pipelines and communication cables, have irreversibly broadened the Alliance’s security agenda. A chain of events, ranging from the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022 to the successive cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, has demonstrated that critical infrastructure can no longer be considered in isolation from military targets. Assessments suggesting that NATO’s Allied Command Transformation was unprepared to counter these threats have highlighted how the Balticconnector pipeline incident laid bare the risk of deliberate damage across Europe.

In this context, the Alliance launched the ‘Baltic Sentry’ operation at the start of 2025; this operation is designed as a model utilising frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and a small fleet of unmanned underwater vehicles, with the aim of strengthening the protection of critical subsea infrastructure and enhancing the capacity to respond to sabotage. The ‘Arctic Sentry’ initiative, developed along similar lines, also aims to extend the functions of unmanned maritime systems – including submarine surveillance, the protection of critical infrastructure and the provision of deterrence in a distributed manner – to the Arctic region.

These developments demonstrate that the protection of energy infrastructure has moved beyond being a ‘secondary’ or ‘supporting’ task for NATO to become an integral component of collective defence. Indeed, in its 2023 Annual Report, the Alliance committed to enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure; this commitment has been expanded to cover not only traditional military threats but also non-military challenges such as cyber-attacks and infrastructure sabotage. At this point, it is possible to make the following observation: over the next twenty years, the protection of energy infrastructure will attain a priority equivalent to that of conventional territorial defence; indeed, in some scenarios, it will rise to an even more decisive position. For the hybrid nature of modern warfare manifests itself not on the front line, but in the energy transmission lines, natural gas pipelines and electricity grids that sustain the daily lives of societies. This situation creates a new security environment that challenges the explanatory capacity of traditional deterrence theories — a point which also forms the starting point for the conceptual framework we shall detail below.

However, it must also be noted that infrastructure protection still harbours serious structural weaknesses. During the Balticconnector incident, as NATO-wide information sharing was not fully operational, several allies and NATO bodies learnt of the incident independently of one another and were only able to commence an investigation subsequently. Whilst certain solutions—such as replacing undersea communication cables with satellite-based systems—are on the agenda, these are costly and the Alliance’s plans remain subject to uncertainty. This situation reveals that, whilst NATO prioritises energy security at a rhetorical level, it is still undergoing a process of maturation in terms of operational and legal capacity.

From Resource Ownership to Technological and Mineral Dominance: The Shifting Ground of Power

The question of what will determine the global balance of power over the next twenty years actually requires an understanding of the historical evolution of energy geopolitics. Throughout the twentieth century, physical ownership of oil and natural gas reserves was the key variable determining states’ strategic positioning. The Middle East’s geopolitical centrality stemmed largely from this ownership of reserves. However, the energy transition is gradually shifting the source of power. Ownership of reserves is now being superseded by control over critical mineral supply chains and the production capacity of energy technologies. Heavy rare-earth elements such as neodymium, praseodymium and terbium, along with strategic raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, graphite and boron, are taking over the role of geopolitical determinant that oil played in the last century, as indispensable components of the 21st century’s technological infrastructure.

The fundamental dynamic driving this transformation is the concentrated vulnerabilities within the supply chains of clean energy technologies. According to the International Energy Agency’s 2026 report, virtually every clean energy technology’s supply chain contains at least one critical weak link; dependence on specific countries for critical minerals, semiconductors and production equipment is transforming the energy transition directly into a geopolitical risk area. This point is also confirmed in the academic literature, which states that technological production capacity and innovation capability are among the determining factors of strategic power in the energy sector; conversely, the vast majority of strategic minerals are concentrated in a limited number of countries, creating a vulnerability referred to as ‘new raw material dependency’.

The appropriate response at this juncture should be to accept a ‘hybrid power’ framework in which these two variables are intertwined, rather than establishing a sharp dichotomy between resource ownership and technological/mineral dominance. Whilst owning the resource was sufficient in the fossil fuel era, in the era of energy transition, merely possessing the mineral is no longer enough; the capacity to process, refine and transform that mineral into a technological product has become the decisive factor. China’s dominant position in the rare-earth elements market stems not only from its wealth of reserves but also from its monopolistic position in processing and refining capacity. Consequently, what will determine the balance of power over the next twenty years is how this dual equation—between possessing raw resources and possessing technological transformation capacity—is managed. Countries that possess reserves but lack processing capacity will continue to be the most vulnerable link in the supply chain; conversely, actors with technological transformation capacity will be able to maintain their strategic autonomy even if they do not possess the raw materials themselves. In this regard, the primary strategic priority for middle powers, including Turkey, must be not only resource diversification but also the development of processing, refining and technology transfer capacities.

Energy Corridors, Critical Infrastructure and the Future of Warfare

The crises of recent years — the energy dimension of the Russia–Ukraine War, tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime transport crisis in the Red Sea and the successive acts of infrastructure sabotage in the Baltic Sea — strongly support the thesis that future conflicts will be shaped not so much by traditional front lines as by energy corridors and critical infrastructure. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the nature of conflict: rather than striking military targets directly, the adversary now prefers to inflict political and economic costs by disrupting the energy flows that sustain society’s daily life. As submarine cables, pipelines and offshore energy links are structures that transcend borders, tactics aimed at sabotaging or monitoring them likewise take on a borderless character; this situation makes regional alliances the backbone of infrastructure security. Indeed, the example of the cable cut on Taiwan’s Matsu Islands demonstrated that, without the use of a single explosive device, 13,000 residents were left with virtually no internet access for fifty days, banking transactions ground to a halt, and even emergency communications were disrupted. This example proves that attacks on critical infrastructure can create a far wider societal impact at a much lower cost than conventional armed conflict.

A cautious assessment is required regarding NATO’s level of preparedness for this new threat environment. On the one hand, the Alliance is taking concrete operational steps such as the Baltic Sentinel and Arctic Sentinel operations; these operations aim to combine the principles of ‘deterrence-by-denial’ (preventing incidents from occurring) and ‘deterrence-by-punishment’ (imposing sanctions on perpetrators). On the other hand, there are serious obstacles to the full implementation of these operations, including a lack of both manned and unmanned naval capabilities, as well as limited legal authority to stop and search foreign-flagged vessels in international waters. This situation demonstrates that whilst NATO has correctly identified the threat to energy corridors and critical infrastructure, the process of transforming this assessment into a fully-fledged deterrence architecture has not yet been completed.

It is precisely at this point that we must highlight the limitations of classical deterrence theory’s explanatory power. Traditional deterrence approaches are largely built upon the symmetrical or asymmetrical military balance of power between state actors. However, hybrid threats targeting energy infrastructure—characterised by uncertainty regarding the perpetrator (the attribution problem), low-intensity but sustained pressure, and the blurring of the civil-military distinction—make the direct application of classical deterrence logic difficult. The ‘resilience deterrence’ conceptual framework we are developing in this study aims precisely to fill this gap. According to this framework, deterrence against threats to critical energy infrastructure stems not only from the capacity to punish the aggressor, but also from the redundancy, diversification and resilience of the target system itself. In other words, the extent to which an energy system can absorb the impact of an attack and return to normal operation quickly and at low cost serves as a deterrent by nullifying, from the outset, the strategic or economic benefit the attacker expects to gain. This approach re-conceptualises deterrence not merely as a pre-attack balance of threats, but as a continuous deterrent capacity derived from the system’s structural resilience. Interpreting NATO’s energy security architecture for the next twenty years within this framework will more clearly highlight the strategic importance of the Alliance investing not only in detection and response capabilities but also in the structural resilience of energy systems.

Turkey’s Position as an Energy Corridor and Its Strategic Weight within NATO

Turkey’s geopolitical position at the heart of energy corridors holds significant potential for enhancing its strategic weight within the Alliance; however, the extent to which this potential is effectively transformed into a strategic advantage requires careful assessment. Pre-summit analyses emphasise that Turkey views the summit as an opportunity to consolidate its diplomatic visibility within the Alliance, showcase its expanding defence industry and strategic capabilities, position itself as a facilitating actor in regional dialogue and crisis management, and strengthen its increasingly interconnected influence in the areas of security, energy and geopolitical stability. This assessment reflects Turkey’s efforts to position its energy diplomacy not only at the level of bilateral relations but also as a ‘weight-increasing’ factor within the multilateral alliance architecture.

Turkey’s strategic value in this context can be understood in three dimensions. Firstly, the physical transit potential afforded by its geographical location: Turkey serves as an indispensable transit route for energy resources from the Caspian Basin, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean to reach European markets. Secondly, its capacity for multi-vector energy diplomacy; Turkey’s ability to maintain simultaneous and balanced relations with different suppliers (Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Eastern Mediterranean actors) elevates it beyond the status of merely a ‘pipeline country’ to that of a regional centre for energy diplomacy. In this context, assessments that Turkey—which stands out for its geopolitical stability, robust infrastructure and multi-vector energy diplomacy—ranks among the few countries capable of meeting the needs of global decision-makers support this thesis. Thirdly, there is the dimension where defence industry capacity intersects with energy infrastructure security; Turkey’s defence industry expertise, ranging from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies to maritime surveillance systems, holds the potential to make a tangible contribution to NATO in the field of the physical protection of energy infrastructure. However, transforming this potential into a strategic advantage is possible not merely through the passive existence of geographical location, but through active diplomatic and institutional investment. For Turkey to increase the weight of its energy diplomacy within NATO, it must make a tangible contribution to the Alliance’s critical infrastructure protection framework (such as southern/Black Sea versions of initiatives like the Baltic Watch and Arctic Watch), act as a ‘centre of knowledge and coordination’ on energy security matters amongst allies, and play a leading role in the security of subsea infrastructure in the Black Sea. To the extent that these steps are taken, Turkey’s geographical advantage will cease to be merely a rhetorical potential and will transform into tangible strategic capital.

NATO’s Greatest Test for the Next Twenty Years

Finally, when it comes to the question of what the greatest challenge facing NATO over the next twenty years will be, it would be methodologically reductive to provide an answer by isolating a single variable. Energy security, great power competition, technological transformation, climate-induced crises and regional conflicts are not independent of one another, but rather intertwined and mutually reinforcing dynamics. As emphasised in CSIS analyses, cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, energy pressure and sabotage remain central tools of Russia’s strategy; as undersea cables and pipelines underpin economic stability, military communications and energy security, threats to them pose a direct challenge to NATO’s resilience.

However, if a hierarchy were to be established, it could be argued that the factor set to shape NATO’s future most significantly over the next twenty years will be the ‘hybrid resilience gap’ arising at the intersection of these five dynamics. Great power rivalry and regional wars form the political backdrop to the conflict; energy security and dependence on critical minerals determine its material infrastructure; whilst climate-induced crises further complicate this equation by increasing both energy demand and the fragility of infrastructure. The real test facing NATO is defined as making the tripartite balance—keeping the Americans committed, empowering the Europeans and keeping the Russians in check—functional; unity is seen not as an aspiration, but as a prerequisite for deterrence. However, this tripartite balance is now directly linked not only to military capability but also to the resilience of energy systems. In this respect, as suggested by the framework of ‘resilience-based deterrence’, NATO’s future will be measured not only by its capacity to deter the enemy but also by its ability to maintain the functionality of its own energy and infrastructure systems even under attack. Should this test be successfully passed, the Alliance will emerge as a structure strengthened not only militarily but also in terms of economic and social resilience; otherwise, despite its classical military superiority, it will face a security architecture that is constantly eroded in the face of low-intensity hybrid threats.

Conclusion

At this historic juncture marked by the Ankara Summit, it is clear that energy security has become a permanent fixture on NATO’s core agenda. However, this process of integration is not yet complete; whilst the Alliance has correctly identified the threat, it is in the midst of transforming this diagnosis into a fully-fledged operational and legal framework. The shift in global power balances over the next twenty years—from resource ownership towards technological and mineral dominance—necessitates a transformation of the analytical framework of energy geopolitics. During this transformation, Turkey will be able to permanently increase its strategic weight within the Alliance to the extent that it can convert the potential offered by its geographical location into active diplomatic and institutional contributions. Ultimately, NATO’s greatest challenge over the next twenty years lies not in any single threat category, but in the hybrid resilience gap where energy security, great power competition, technological transformation, climate crises and regional conflicts intersect. Closing this gap requires a new concept of deterrence — ‘resilience-based deterrence’ — which goes beyond classical deterrence theories and draws strength from the system’s own structural resilience.