NATO’s heads of state met in Ankara on July 7 and 8 for the alliance’s 36th summit, its second hosted by Türkiye. The gathering opened with a defense industry forum where Secretary General Mark Rutte announced new transatlantic contracts worth, in his words, tens of billions of dollars. The goal was explicit: reassure Donald Trump that European allies are serious about the 5% of GDP defense spending target agreed at The Hague in 2025, split between 3.5% on core defense and 1.5% on broader security, to be reached by 2035. Rutte said European allies and Canada raised core defense investment by 139 billion dollars in 2025 alone, and by 258 billion dollars combined across 2025 and 2026. Trump arrived still angry at European allies over what he called their refusal to back the United States in its war with Iran alongside Israel.
Africa was not on the summit’s agenda. But the resource logic on display in Ankara has a direct bearing on Europe’s African posture, and that connection is worth drawing out even though NATO did not draw it itself.
France has spent the last three years withdrawing from a military footprint it held across West and Central Africa for more than sixty years. Mali ended its defense agreement with Paris in 2022, Burkina Faso in 2023, Niger the same year. Chad and Senegal followed in 2024 and 2025. The Ouakam base in Dakar, handed back to the Senegalese army in July 2025, was the last permanent French installation in West Africa. What remains is a lighter model: liaison detachments and shared camps in Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon, a larger garrison of about 1,500 troops in Djibouti. From roughly 7,000 soldiers on the continent two years ago, France now fields a fraction of that.
This is the backdrop against which Ankara’s numbers matter. A NATO alliance directing tens of billions of dollars in new contracts toward the capabilities Rutte described, deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank, industrial cooperation, joint procurement, is an alliance allocating resources toward a specific theater. That theater is not the Sahel or the Gulf of Guinea. The same European treasuries being asked to hit 5% of GDP for collective defense are the ones that, a decade ago, funded expeditionary operations like Barkhane. Money and political attention are finite. When both are pulled toward Ukraine and NATO’s border with Russia, there is less of either left for out-of-area African engagement, at the exact moment France’s own bilateral presence has already shrunk to its lowest footprint in decades.
The vacuum this leaves has not stayed empty. Russia’s Africa Corps has expanded into Mali and other Sahelian states since 2022. China and Turkey have both increased their security and infrastructure engagement. Türkiye’s own position is worth noting here: it hosted this summit while simultaneously building one of the more active African defense-export relationships of any single country, supplying drones and training to several of the same governments France once garrisoned.
What to watch next: whether any of the contracts unveiled in Ankara carry out-of-area or expeditionary components, rather than pure territorial defense; whether France’s own 2027 defense budget planning shows any earmark for African security cooperation given the twin pressure of NATO’s spending target and its shrunken African footprint; and whether Sahelian governments now dealing directly with Russia, China, and Turkey read Ankara’s focus on Europe’s eastern flank as confirmation that Western security guarantees for Africa are no longer on offer.