The NATO Summit in Ankara

The greatest wealth-transfer in a generation

Today NATO’s leaders open their summit in Ankara, and hours before they did, the alliance held what its officials openly branded the “big reveal”: a Defence Industry Forum at which member states announced arms deals worth tens of billionsof dollars, many of them with US defence companies. Secretary-General Mark Rutte set the register — “We will announce tens of billions in new contracts that will provide the crucial kit we need to deter and defend” — and credited the surge to Donald Trump, who had been “extremely forceful” in demanding it; Europeans, he said, had made “staggering” increases in defence spending.

Trump has arrived, fresh from America’s 250th, to force the alliance onto the path to 5% of GDP “with urgency,” pitching “NATO 3.0” in which Europe pays more so Washington can pivot elsewhere; he meets Zelensky on Wednesday, with Ukraine’s fifth year of war the summit’s backdrop. Two details in the wire copy do the real work. First: many of the unveiled contracts were “drawn up and some signed long before the summit” — the reveal is choreography, a staged unwrapping of things already decided, performed to be seen. Second: some of the purchases are financed through an EU system of cheap defence loans of up to $170 billion raised on capital markets (Washington Post; NPR; CNBC; Al-Monitor). Europe is borrowing, at scale, to buy weapons — many of them American. The frame everyone will reach for is resolve: the alliance stepping up, deterring a threat. That is the small question.

The large one lives in a piece published four days ago, on the same machine, one country deep. “The BlackRock Chancellor and the Missiles” dissects Friedrich Merz’s German rearmament as “an arrangement that no law forbids and no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden.” Its subject is narrow — a man who chaired BlackRock’s German supervisory board from 2016 to 2020, then, as chancellor-in-waiting, drove through the March-2025 amendment gutting the constitutional debt brake for defence, lifting German military spending 24% to $114 billion and enriching the very contractors (Rheinmetall, Hensoldt) his old firm holds, after asking Washington to sell Germany Tomahawks (RTX) and the Typhon launcher (Lockheed), both companies BlackRock also holds. But its mechanism is the whole alliance’s.

The essay names a self-financing loop: the threat justifies the spending, the spending enriches the contractors, and “the contractors’ largest shareholders sit on both the buyer’s and the seller’s side” — so a “national” arms buildup is, at the equity layer, “one pool of capital collecting on both ends of an alliance.” It names the accounting sleight: a %-of-GDP target is “an input dressed as an achievement,” and “the gap between the money poured in and the security produced is exactly where contractors and shareholders make their living.” And it names the engine: “the buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer” — SIPRI has Russian spending growing 5.9% in 2025 against Europe’s 14%, so the arms race justified by the Russian threat is also its accelerant.

Now run Ankara through that. The “big reveal” is not a demonstration of security; it is the loop closing, in public, as ceremony. Contracts signed weeks ago are unwrapped today as breaking news — the 5%-of-GDP pledge presented as the achievement, when it is only the input. Europe borrows $170 billion on the markets to buy weapons that largely flow back to American factories — the money going out one door and returning through another, and, the essay argues, the same institutional owner waiting at both. Rutte supplies the fear that justifies the invoice; Trump supplies the pressure; the contractors supply the kit; and no one in the room breaks a single rule. That is the article’s flat verdict, and it is the sentence to carry into the summit coverage: “The scandal isn’t any single transaction. It’s that the whole thing is legal.” The piece is one country’s worth of proof for what all thirty-two are performing in Ankara today.

👉 The BlackRock Chancellor and the Missiles: https://karat.substack.com/p/the-blackrock-chancellor-and-the