July 07, 2026

Good morning! Today is Tuesday, July 7th 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Luke Nicastro warns that Europe's rearmament pledge is a trap designed to keep American troops on the continent, and argues the case for unilateral U.S. withdrawal is stronger than the tired "freeriding" critique suggests. Eldar Mamedov reads Israel's sudden recognition of the Armenian genocide as an opportunistic maneuver aimed at isolating Turkey, warning that the campaign's real audience is Washington and its endpoint a U.S. confrontation with a NATO ally. and now for the details. We begin this morning in Ankara, Turkey, where NATO leaders are gathered for the annual alliance summit. Much of the agenda is devoted to demonstrating progress on last year's pledge that every NATO member spend three and a half percent of GDP on core defense, plus another one and a half percent on defense-adjacent priorities, by 2035. According to NATO, non-U.S. members boosted defense spending last year by some ninety billion dollars, and billions more in new contracts are set to be announced. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had prepared to announce sweeping additional troop cuts in Europe, but that proposal was blocked after national security adviser Marco Rubio and other senior officials weighed in. Writing for The American Conservative, Luke Nicastro argues that European rearmament is not what it appears. As Nicastro reports, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and other European leaders are deliberately using the spending pledge as a mechanism to keep American forces on the continent — and they've been careful to credit President Trump for the entire five percent commitment. Nicastro warns that the dominant "freeriding" critique of NATO, which focuses on Europe not paying its fair share, quietly concedes two premises: that the conventional defense of Europe against Russia is critical to American security, and that it is under-resourced. He challenges both. The non-U.S. members of NATO have a collective GDP more than ten times Russia's, and over six hundred million Europeans to Russia's one hundred forty million. Nicastro contends that eighty thousand American troops in Europe are not necessary to deter Moscow, that their presence reinforces Russian fears of encirclement, obstructs a settlement in Ukraine, and exposes American servicemembers to unnecessary risk in a live war zone. His prescription: unilateral, unconditional cuts to the U.S. military presence in Europe, with an eye toward getting out entirely. He closes with Thomas Jefferson's 1823 counsel to James Monroe that America should never take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Turning to the eastern Mediterranean, the Israeli government has voted to formally recognize the World War I-era Armenian genocide, a resolution that still awaits ratification by the Knesset. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar framed the vote as a moral duty and said Israel now joins thirty-two countries that have acknowledged the historical truth. Writing for The American Conservative, Eldar Mamedov urges a skeptical reading of the move. As Mamedov reports, for decades Israeli governments avoided this recognition to preserve ties with Kemalist Turkey under the so-called periphery strategy. That calculus has changed. Israel's deepening partnership with Azerbaijan — which now supplies roughly forty percent of Israel's oil and provides an intelligence foothold on Iran's border — culminated in Baku's 2023 expulsion of about one hundred thousand indigenous Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, an event in which, according to Haaretz, Israel's fingerprints were visible. Mamedov notes the moral duty invoked by Sa'ar was absent then. He argues the real target of the recognition vote is Turkey, now cast by Israeli leaders and allied Washington think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as the head of a new Sunni axis, a successor threat to Iran. Armenia's own reaction was lukewarm; Azerbaijan's was hostile. Mamedov's conclusion is that the campaign is aimed less at the region than at Washington, with the endpoint being a U.S. confrontation with a NATO ally. He urges American policymakers to make clear that Israel is free to pursue its own foreign policy, but that the United States will not be drawn into another Middle Eastern war. Those are today's highlights. For the full stories and more, visit theamericanconservative.com. Thank you for starting your morning with us.