The NATO summit in Ankara convened at a time when the alliance's agenda is largely focused on the requirements of rearmament: production capacity, munitions stockpiles and the implementation of the 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) investment pledge adopted at The Hague in 2025. However, this debate largely remains one level above where the real vulnerability lies.

Modern military systems depend on a narrow set of processed critical minerals, and rare earth permanent magnets in particular are indispensable inputs for precision-guided munitions, unmanned systems, sonar arrays, electronic warfare suites, and fifth-generation aircraft. A single F-35 contains roughly 417 kilograms (919.33 pounds) of rare earth materials, while a Virginia-class submarine requires over 4 tons.

NATO itself acknowledged this reality in December 2024 by publishing a list of 12 defense-critical raw materials, with rare earth elements at its core. In other words, deterrence begins with materials, and the materials question deserves a central place on the Ankara agenda.

Dependency measured in numbers

This material base is currently controlled to a large extent by NATO's principal long-term competitor. China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare earth elements production and up to 92% of processing capacity, and it controls the extraction or processing of 10 of the 12 materials on NATO's defense-critical list. Beijing has demonstrated its willingness to use this position: the October 2025 expansion of export controls, which extends even to goods containing trace amounts of Chinese-processed inputs, has transformed a commercial chokepoint into a declared instrument of leverage.

At April's OECD Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul, Secretary-General Mathias Cormann noted that export restrictions on critical minerals had risen from 3% of all trade measures in 2017-2019 to 36% by 2024, even as EU rare earth demand is projected to grow sixfold by 2030 and the alliance plans a 130% rise in defense spending by 2035.

Western capitals have recognized the significance of this dependency: in July 2025, the Pentagon acquired a direct equity stake in MP Materials, and the EU is mobilizing 3 billion euros for strategic mining projects. In other words, Western capital is now being directed toward precisely the type of resource base that Türkiye possesses.

Beylikova reserve, sequencing

It is in this context that Türkiye's position requires closer attention, not at the level of rhetoric but at the level of geology and industrial capacity. The Beylikova deposit in Eskişehir, identified through more than 125,000 meters (410,105 feet) of drilling across 310 locations and over 59,000 laboratory samples, contains 694 million tons of complex ore hosting an estimated 12.5 million tons of rare earth oxides across 10 of the 17 elements, along with commercially significant fluorite and barite. Ore grades exceed 1% total rare earth oxide, clearing the profitability threshold typical of bastnäsite-hosted deposits. Ankara describes it as the world's second-largest reserve after China's Bayan Obo. Even under conservative estimates, it is one of the most significant undeveloped rare-earth bodies outside China.

What matters even more than the geology itself is the sequencing of policy, as Türkiye has moved from announcement to industrial policy. Eti Maden's pilot plant at Beylikova has been operational since 2023, processing 1,200 tons of ore annually. In 2026, the government announced a $600 million industrial complex to process 570,000 tons of ore per year and produce some 10,000 tons of rare earth oxides annually, targeting a place among the world's top five producers. That output roughly corresponds to the production level targeted by the entire Pentagon-backed program in the United States.

Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar has designated Beylikova the cornerstone of Türkiye's forthcoming Critical Raw Materials Strategy. A detail that is often overlooked abroad is also instructive: because the ore body contains thorium, the project is licensed through Türkiye's Nuclear Regulatory Authority with dedicated radiological waste management, an indication that Ankara is constructing a full-cycle industrial and regulatory architecture rather than a stand-alone extraction project.

Separation bottleneck

At this point, the decisive variable should be identified clearly: separation capacity. The solvent-extraction technology required to split individual oxides is 80-90% concentrated in China, and a 2024 memorandum with Beijing stalled precisely over technology transfer.

Türkiye's response is dual-track: an accelerated domestic program coordinated by the Turkish Energy, Nuclear and Mineral Research Agency (TENMAK) with leading technical universities, and a widening network of minerals diplomacy, from a January 2026 critical minerals agreement with Uzbekistan to June's formal Energy and Minerals Partnership with Germany.

Ankara's governing principle is equally clear, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stated it publicly: the reserve remains under Turkish ownership, and partnership proceeds on the basis of technology and co-investment rather than concession. This is not resource nationalism; rather, it is the same doctrine of strategic autonomy that built the country's defense industry through two decades of embargoes, now applied one layer deeper, to the materials themselves.

NATO's evolution

This issue concerns the alliance as a whole rather than a single national mining project, because the alliance itself is changing form. If NATO 1.0 was the Cold War pact of territorial defense, 2.0 the post-Cold War expeditionary alliance, and the contours of NATO 3.0 are already visible in The Hague documents: an alliance whose central competition runs through production capacity, technology, and the materials beneath both. The 1.5% resilience tranche adopted in 2025, explicitly covering the defense industrial base and critical supply chains, can be considered the first budget line of this new alliance.

In NATO 3.0, strategic weight goes not only to those that field forces but also to those that control the chain extending from ore to finished system. Very few allies are positioned across this entire chain, and Türkiye is one of them.

Türkiye is located in a geography where the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus and the Middle East converge. It holds the alliance's second-largest army and a defense industry that exported $10.54 billion in 2025, up 48%, with 56% flowing to the EU, NATO members and the United States on an industrial base exceeding 80% localization. And now it is demonstrated that Türkiye has one of the largest undeveloped rare earth bodies outside China. All the trajectories point in the same direction: the strategic weight Türkiye carries in the emerging alliance will exceed even what it carries today, provided Ankara sustains the long-horizon statecraft that produced this convergence.

The same trajectories are transforming the European dimension as well. The EU's White Paper for European Defense and the 150-billion-euro Security Action for Europe (SAFE) program instrument were designed for a continent that must rearm rapidly. SAFE's current rules require 65% European content and cap Turkish components at 35% absent a bilateral agreement. However, these rules reflect an earlier period, when the raw materials question had not yet entered Europe's rearmament agenda. When they are read together with the EU's own Critical Raw Materials Act, which mandates that by 2030 no single third country may supply more than 65% of any strategic raw material, the direction of change becomes clear.

Türkiye does not approach this architecture as a country requesting flexibility; it is the variable to which the architecture will adapt. That paradigm shift will become plainly visible in the coming years.

Every strategic era has been shaped by its critical materials. The postwar order was built on coal and steel, and the digital age on semiconductors. The emerging era of alliance competition will, to a significant extent, be defined by the elements that convert electricity into motion and signals into precision.

Türkiye possesses one of the most significant reserves of these elements, is located at the intersection of the security environments of three continents, and has developed the industrial base required to transform this resource potential into deterrence capacity. It is rare in history for geology, geography, and industrial capability to align so closely in a single country at a time when the international system is placing renewed strategic value on all three. Today, this convergence exists in Türkiye. The Ankara summit should therefore be understood not as the moment when the allies discovered this reality, but as the moment when it could no longer be ignored.