Turkey is a NATO member. It is also the country that brokered the 2022 Black Sea grain deal with Russia, has sold armed drones to Ukraine while maintaining gas contracts with Moscow, and has hosted ceasefire talks that no other alliance member could credibly conduct. None of those things are contradictions in Ankara's view. They are a strategy.

President Erdogan has spent the last decade constructing what his foreign ministry calls 'strategic autonomy.' In practice, this means Turkey engages with Russia, Iran, and Gulf states in ways that would be politically impossible for a Western European capital, while retaining the security umbrella and arms access that NATO membership provides.

This balancing act is becoming harder to sustain as pressure from both sides increases. Washington wants Turkey to restrict Russian financial flows through Istanbul. Moscow wants Turkey to close the Bosphorus more aggressively to Western naval vessels. Ankara is doing neither.

For NATO, the question is practical: what does collective defence mean when one of the alliance's largest armies operates on a different threat assessment than the rest? Turkey does not view Russia as an existential threat. It views it as a neighbour that must be managed.

The alliance has not found an answer. It has instead found a working language of ambiguity that lets everyone attend the same summits while pursuing different objectives. That language holds for now. Whether it holds through the next crisis is less certain.