Erdoğan Plays Trump Whisperer as NATO Summit Opens in Ankara

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Thirty-one NATO leaders need President Donald Trump to show up to their Turkey summit.

One is getting him there.

When Trump lands in Ankara on Tuesday, he’ll be a guest of the NATO ally with whom he shares the most natural kinship: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two men share a distrust of European liberalism, a disdain for institutional processes and a belief that the world bends for those willing to act.

But the relationship, those familiar with it say, is built on something more durable than affinity — a decade-long track record of where Trump asks and Erdoğan delivers. It’s a notable contrast with other leaders, including some of America’s closest historical allies, who Trump has often chided as weak and unhelpful.

“It’s not just a similar worldview. The German world is ‘Macher’ — people who do things rather than talk, and have commissions and debates — and he sees Erdoğan that way,” said James Jeffrey, ambassador to Turkey during the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. special representative for Syria engagement in the first Trump administration. “But he also gets real things done with him because Erdoğan is very transactional. Trump is very transactional.”

When Trump in 2018 sanctioned Turkey’s defense sector and threatened to collapse its economy over the detention of an American pastor, Erdoğan released him . When Turkish troops massed on the Syrian border in 2019 and a military confrontation with U.S.-backed Kurdish forces seemed imminent, Erdoğan agreed to a ceasefire brokered by top Trump officials. When Trump last year launched his Gaza peace board, Erdoğan signed on immediately , lending an air of credibility with Middle East leaders.

Those actions built an unusual trust between Erdoğan and Trump, with the U.S. president claiming the Turkish leader is the only reason he’s even attending the summit, even as White House officials concede he likely would have gone anyway. Speaking to reporters in an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte last month, Trump called Erdoğan a “friend” and “a respected man and respected leader.”

Importantly, he added, “everything I’ve ever asked him for, he’s done.”

It’s a dynamic that has turned what could be a NATO liability — an autocrat credibly accused of dismantling Turkish democracy — into an asset for the alliance.

“The optics of that transforms Erdoğan and Turkey from being the Trojan horse within NATO to the savior of NATO,” said Gonul Tol, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who focuses on Turkish politics.

The role has taken on an added significance in the wake of a falling out between Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni over a disputed photo after last month’s G7 summit in France. The feud has sidelined Meloni, who had once been called Europe’s “Trump whisperer,” leaving a vacuum Erdoğan is well-positioned to fill.

Inside NATO, there is relief that Turkey is hosting the annual summit following the repeated disputes between Trump and western European allies. Trump is unlikely to want to embarrass Erdoğan, two NATO diplomats said.

“Erdoğan has a very good relationship with President Trump” and that plays a “hugely important role” said a third senior NATO diplomat. “I can name a number of European countries that if the summit was there, Trump might not be there but because it’s Erdoğan — he will be.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly described Erdogan as an “incredible partner in the region” and described the two men as having a “great relationship.”

“The President looks forward to traveling to Ankara this week for the NATO Summit, which will include a bilateral meeting with President Erdogan,” Kelly said.

The Turkish embassy in Washington and Turkey’s presidential office did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet Erdoğan remains an uncomfortable peacekeeper for much of NATO. At home, he has spent the last year methodically dismantling what remains of Turkey’s political opposition, jailing Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and deploying riot police to storm the headquarters of the country’s main opposition party. Ahead of the summit, Turkish authorities detained roughly 200 people planning to protest NATO’s presence in Ankara, and the country is under fire for denying press credentials to Turkish journalists.

He also maintains an open line of communication with Moscow even as European allies demand a harder line on Russia. Europe doesn’t love any of it — and yet Erdoğan is the one they’re counting on to pull off the summit without any major blow-ups or diplomatic faux pas.

“The Europeans think that with Erdoğan there, maybe they’ll be spared the scolding and criticism and humiliation, and that Trump will actually allow this to be sort of a normal NATO summit, not one with scandal and headline-grabbing humiliation,” said Asli Aydintasbas, director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution.

What appalls Europe about Erdoğan doesn’t appear to bother Trump, who sees the relationship in pragmatic terms and himself maintains an open line of communication with the Russian president.

“The president has come to the conclusion that, like with many relationships that are difficult or potentially adversarial, one of the best ways to manage that is by having a cordial and friendly relationship with a difficult leader, so that he can potentially have more leverage to influence,” said Alex Gray, a former NSC official in Trump’s first term. “It’s better to be on the inside — able to make strong and pointed criticism from the inside, from a position of credibility — than it is to be on the outside having no access and no leverage and just having a totally adversarial personal relationship.”

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the Trump-Erdoğan relationship, described Trump saying he was going for Erdoğan as the president “trying to be nice,” adding that the president “was always planning on going.” The official also described the idea that the Trump-Erdoğan relationship would prevent any blowups as “a fruitful idea.”

“The beauty of the president is he does what he wants. I don’t think anyone can predict what’s going to happen.” said the official, conceding that Trump and Erdoğan do have a good relationship and that’s “not nothing.”

Erdoğan, meanwhile, has been choreographing his role as a bridge not just within NATO but between East and West. In the days before the summit, he announced that he had invited Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to Ankara, positioning Turkey, not Brussels or Washington, as the connector between NATO and a reordered Middle East. And in a speech Monday, Erdoğan called for an “unconditional” security network stretching “from Texas to Ankara.”

“This summit is the kind of thing Erdoğan lives for and dreams [of]. He, like President Trump, very much prizes the sense — the performative, the presentational sense — that he is more than the president of Turkey. He is the leader of the Muslim world. He is the key interlocutor between North and South, East and West, the inheritor not of Ataturk but of the Ottoman sultans,” said one former senior administration official who served in both the first Trump and Biden administrations, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the bilateral relationship. “This is a role history and destiny have granted him, and no one else in the world has this kind of presentational ability.”

For all the good vibes between Erdoğan and Trump, the one thing the Turkish president wants most heading into the summit remains out of reach. The countries have not been able to broker an arrangement that would allow Turkey to take possession of the F-35s it ordered nearly two decades ago. The sale has been blocked because of Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 missile defense system.

In the Oval Office last month, Trump deferred questions about the F-35 to Vice President JD Vance, who said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “and the entire team are reviewing this right now.” In the meantime, the U.S. appears to be moving ahead with a $700 million jet engine sale to Turkey — still a controversial move among some lawmakers, but far less fraught than the F-35 question.

“That’s the lowest hanging fruit from the Trump administration’s point of view compared to these other big promises,” Tol said.

Yet for all of Erdoğan’s careful cultivation, the relationship rests on a foundation that even its closest observers acknowledge is inherently unstable. Trump has upended relationships with theoretically more reliable allies over even momentary provocations, and Erdoğan has shown throughout his career that he is not above dramatic reversals when his political interests demand them.

“Both are known to be volatile,” Jeffrey said, “so one cannot predict the details of the dynamic.”

Victor Jack contributed to this report.