Introduction
Recent shifts in NATO’s strategic agenda invite a broader reassessment of Türkiye’s role within the Alliance. Territorial defense, force readiness, and conventional deterrence remain NATO’s core functions. Resilience, critical infrastructure protection, supply-chain security, energy continuity, civil preparedness, cyber defense, and defense-industrial capacity, however, can no longer be treated as peripheral; they increasingly form part of the conditions that make deterrence and defense effective. The 2021 Strengthened Resilience Commitment, the 2022 Strategic Concept, and the defense-investment trajectory sharpened by the 2024 Washington Summit and the 2025 Hague Summit all suggest that security is now shaped not only at the front line, but also through the infrastructural, industrial, and civilian capacities that sustain continuity under stress. In this setting, security cannot be reduced to force posture alone; it also depends on the arrangements of connectivity, resilience, and continuity that make that posture credible and sustainable.
This reorientation also alters the meaning of economic security within NATO. It can no longer be treated only as a matter of securitization or economic coercion; it is increasingly tied to the operational foundations of military-strategic effectiveness. Defense production, access to critical inputs, infrastructural resilience, supply continuity, energy security, and civil-military preparedness now help shape the credibility of deterrence and defense. Economic security, in this sense, is not simply about moving economic issues into the security realm. It is also an operational field that helps define the conditions under which military effectiveness can be sustained. As a result, both the protected values and referent objects of economic security are expanding.
