Please Follow us on Truth Social, X , Youtube , Minds, Telegram, Rumble, GETTR, Gab, Instagram
The Ankara NATO summit closed Wednesday with Trump performing one of his signature pivots: arriving hostile, leaving warm. The substantive headline is real regardless of the theater around it — Trump told Zelenskyy the US will grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense interceptors domestically, something Kyiv has requested for years and Washington had consistently refused. “We’re gonna give you a license to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said at a joint press conference. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly.”
Whether they can is a separate question. Patriots are expensive, technically complex, and take time to produce at scale — the manufacturing license addresses the supply-chain bottleneck in principle but is not a short-term battlefield fix. Ukraine’s air defense remains critically thin right now, not in 18 months when domestically built interceptors might plausibly come online. The real-money test is what bridge supply the US is providing in the interim. That was not spelled out publicly.
On the collective declaration: NATO allies pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to sustain equivalent levels in 2027. The Guardian noted — correctly — that this “largely reflects commitments already made.” It is a re-packaging of existing pledges rather than new money, a pattern NATO communiqués repeat with reliable consistency.
Trump also used the summit to publicly savage Spain as “a terrible partner in NATO,” repeating threats to cut off trade after Madrid declined to join the US Iran campaign. He arrived demanding European allies’ support in Iran and left praising “unity” — neither characterization was quite accurate. NATO Secretary-General Rutte, for his part, called the US strikes on Iran “absolutely necessary” and told Trump: “I’m with you on this.” Whatever you think of the Iran strikes, having the NATO chief functioning as a presidential cheerleader on a non-Article 5 unilateral US military campaign is worth watching.
Meanwhile, Denmark’s PM Frederiksen felt compelled to state publicly that her country is “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” after Trump reopened the Greenland question at the summit itself. That a NATO summit requires an ally to publicly reaffirm sovereignty over its own autonomous territory speaks to how strained the foundational norms have become.
The U.S. granting Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptor missiles likely stems from a realization that the Ukraine war is not ending soon, and the Iran war is ramping up again, straining U.S. production capability.
The provision of American technology to Ukraine, although a possible short-term fix, may lead to America regretting the decision down the road as technology in Ukraine gets sold to the highest bidder.
‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM! Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!
