The War Barons' Ankara Bazaar: A Guide to the 36th NATO Summit for Young Comrades

History's Dialectical Wheel and the Dark Clouds Over Ankara

Young comrades, since the dawn of human history one philosophical law has never changed: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Tearing apart the pages of history filled with lies the rulers wrote to fortify their profit towers, and taking up truth in its shattering nakedness, is revolutionary youth's noblest task. Today, as calendars show July 2026, the ancient city of Ankara is hosting the dirty bargaining of the most organized, most savage, and most hypocritical armed organization humanity has ever known. The masters of global finance capital, ledgers washed in innocent peoples' blood in hand, are parading through our capital's streets to extend their order of exploitation a little further.

In this article we set out to hold a class torch to the minds of our youngest comrades who have no theoretical knowledge of the subject yet and ask "What is NATO, why does capital feed on war?" We will extinguish the false fireworks bourgeois media launches on glittering screens; we will examine with the plainest dialectical details that disgusting class bond between the barbarism choking worker children in the street and the champagne popped to Mehter marches in palace halls.

Written in the light of historical and class documents: every imperialist war jet flying in Ankara's skies is surplus value stolen from the working class's wallet, future, and bread—made concrete in the heavens.

"Capitalism cuts down the tree whose shadow it cannot sell; the peace it cannot sell it converts to profit by bombing with global war machines. NATO is precisely that bloody apparatus of conversion."

Now lean back, comrades; we are lowering the curtains on this dark summit where the rulers tremble with fear and cover poverty with screens, in chronological order from the first day of exploitation. History is calling us—and dialectics does not lie!

What Is the Purpose and Agenda of the NATO Summit? The Global Agenda of Exploitation and Blood

Young comrades, let us begin with the most basic rule of dialectical materialism: No military alliance, no international summit, and no "security" pact can be discussed independently of the economic interests behind it. The meeting the rulers sell you on television screens and in glittering halls as "global peace, democracy, and defense cooperation" is in reality a feast of wolves where international finance capital gathers to redistribute spheres of exploitation, create fresh lakes of blood, and enlarge the profit margins of arms monopolies.

In the light of current dialectical data, let us break the summit's real purpose, its hidden agenda, and the political-economic backstage into chronological pieces so that comrades entirely unfamiliar with the subject can grasp it clearly.

Chronological Background: Ankara 2026 as a Turning Point on the Threshold of a Second Cold War

To understand this summit, we must look at the heated developments of 2026, the year we are living through. The 36th Leaders Summit held in Ankara is not an ordinary routine meeting.

28 February 2026 Attack on Iran: The joint attack on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February 2026, Iran's missile retaliation, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz shook global energy lines and the Middle East equation entirely.
The Class Role of the Bases: The active role played by NATO collective defense systems at imperialist bases in Turkey (such as Incirlik and Kürecik) in intercepting missiles launched from Iran openly proved how this country has been turned into a subcontractor of disaster by the ruling classes.
The Transatlantic Rift: Most European countries wanting to distance themselves from Israel because of the ongoing savage massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, while US President Donald Trump accuses European allies of "not giving sufficient support to the US against Iran," deepened the struggle for market share and influence within the imperialist bloc. The Ankara Summit is an effort by the rulers to close these rifts among themselves and equalize the division of spoils.

The "NATO 3.0" Global Offensive Concept

The summit's most discussed and theoretically most dangerous agenda item is the new strategic roadmap that imperialists call "NATO 3.0." For young comrades who know nothing about the subject, let us explain it as follows:

NATO 1.0: During the Cold War, a counterrevolutionary organization masked as "defense," established to suppress the awakening of the working class against the USSR and the socialist bloc and to murder revolutionaries through Gladio (counter-guerrilla) structures.

NATO 2.0: After the collapse of the USSR, the stage of global gendarme that, under the cloak of "humanitarian intervention," tore Yugoslavia apart and drenched Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in blood.

NATO 3.0 (2026 Agenda): This new phase being implemented in Ankara today is NATO's transformation from a merely regional alliance into a global offensive machine covering the entire world (especially the Pacific and the China front). Encircling Russia completely, extending the Ukraine War indefinitely in line with the interests of arms monopolies, and building a military barrier against China's economic expansion are the summit's primary goals.

Political-Economic Imposition: The 5% GDP Trap

Marxist philosophy shows us that the budgets of bourgeois states are a field of class struggle. The biggest imposition Trump brought in his bag when coming to Ankara is the obligation for member countries to raise military spending to 5% of gross domestic product (GDP).

This is not a dry economic figure; its class equivalent is as follows: For countries like Turkey already struggling with deep economic crisis, high inflation, and livelihood hardship, raising military spending to this level means billions more lira stolen from the worker, from the laborer's pocket, from the minimum-wage earner's throat, from the people's education and health budgets. The real reason the bourgeois government dismisses with "no resources" the humane interim raises that should be made in July for minimum-wage workers and pensioners is the diversion of the people's resources to NATO's gluttonous military agenda and imperialist arms industry.

Defense Industry Forum: The Profit Feast of War Barons

The summit's most concrete and bloody output was the Defense Industry Forum, included in the summit program for the first time in history. This was operated in the full sense as a "market of death."

An $11 Billion Split: Imperialist war barons signed military production contracts worth more than $11 billion in a single day in Ankara's halls.
Growing Capital with Blood: The largest deals were between US Lockheed Martin and German Rheinmetall monopolies under the control of global finance capital's giants BlackRock and Vanguard Group. In a system where the cost of every missile raining on children's heads in Palestine, Lebanon, and the Middle East is $1.5 million, war barons grow their profits while the bill is again paid by the world working class with its lives and poverty.

As you see, young comrades, there is neither a "security" concern nor a "defense" need at hand. What is happening is decaying Western imperialism, whose hegemony is disintegrating, dragging the world toward a new global war through limitless banditry—and the race of the local collaborating bourgeoisie to grab new roles at this bloody counter.

What Are Revolutionaries and the Working Class Opposing? The Political Economy of Colonialism

Young comrades, to expose that dirty truth bourgeois media tries to hide behind bright lights, let us ask: What exactly are revolutionaries and the working class opposing at the cost of their lives in the streets, being beaten, choked? This anger is not an ordinary "foreign policy" objection or dry stubbornness; it is a class rebellion that directly defends our right to life, our labor, and our common future.

Let us examine piece by piece, with philosophical and historical grounds, why revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements have declared total war on this bloody alliance:

We Oppose Not "Security" but the Order of "Growing Capital with Blood"!

NATO is presented to you in rulers' textbooks and mainstream media's polishing shows as a "defense and security organization." Yet dialectical materialism shows us that NATO has never defended anything; from its first day it has been an offensive organization protecting and expanding the exploitation zones of international finance capital.

Geoeconomic Plunder: In recent times the imperialist practice called "geoeconomics"—seizing or controlling natural and economic resources through military force—has grown rampant. Revolutionaries oppose leaving peoples face to face with new lines of tension in the geography encircling us from the Caucasus and Black Sea to the Middle East.
The Profit Partnership of War Barons: The $11 billion in military production contracts split in a single day at the summit is the most concrete proof of how imperialist capitalism feeds on war. The working class resists with its life the turning of the Middle East, Palestine, and regional peoples into lakes of blood and the legitimization of these massacres for these barons' profit.

We Oppose the Sacrifice of Our Labor to Arms Monopolies!

There is a direct and linear connection between military spending and the working class's wallet. The budgets of capitalist states are not a magic bag; the rulers take from one class and give to another.

The 5% GDP Trap and the Seizure of Social Rights: The goal of raising defense spending to 5%, imposed by US imperialism and eagerly embraced by Turkey's one-man regime, is open economic war against the working class. The huge resources allocated from the budget to weapons, missiles, and warplanes mean cuts from workers' wages and social rights, from public infrastructure spending, from health and education budgets.
The Order That Condemns Laborers to Hunger: While fuel prices rise again and again in Ankara's streets, the fact that humane interim raises due in July for minimum-wage workers and the lowest pensions are not even discussed with the excuse of "no resources" is no accident. The regime cuts the people's resources from the minimum-wage earner's throat and transfers them to the budget of missiles produced by bloody monopolies like Lockheed Martin, each costing $1.5 million. Revolutionaries raise their voices against this organized theft.

We Oppose the Historical Blood Debt and the Gladio/Counter-Guerrilla Legacy!

Young comrades, the Turkish working class's bond with NATO rests on an old and very bloody account. Turkey is under the hidden occupation of US imperialism and NATO militarily, politically, and economically through the present one-man regime.

Counter-Guerrilla and Gladio Crimes: NATO has positioned itself directly against communism, socialism, and anti-imperialist national liberation movements. To suppress independence-seeking awakenings within member countries, it has had Gladio (counter-guerrilla) organizations established in the bosom of states. Behind the murder of revolutionary youth on these lands advocating full independence, behind coups and unresolved killings, stands this dark NATO apparatus.
The Memory of the 6th Fleet: Those who attacked revolutionary youth protesting the American 6th Fleet anchored in the Strait in the 1960s with knives, and those who prostrated themselves before those imperialist ships, are the very conservative and collaborating bourgeois mentality that today welcomes Trump with official ceremonies and acrobatics in Ankara. The working class never forgets this historical hypocrisy.

We Oppose Climate Destruction and the Darkening of Our Future!

There is another hidden agenda the summit's glittering screens never show and bourgeois media's blind imitators never write: the ecological destruction caused by the arms race madness.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Despite NATO defining climate change as a supposed risk, the alliance's plans to increase defense spending and military mobilization contain a massive contradiction with existing climate targets. The armaments goal uncontrollably increases greenhouse gas emissions, deepening the climate crisis and destroying humanity's common future. Revolutionary youth bar the planet's murder for monopolies' profit hunger.

We Oppose Turning Workers' Children into Imperialist "Cannon Fodder"!

Class-collaborationist bourgeois reaction, to grab new political roles from the West and the US, offers this country's sons as subcontractors to new military adventures.

Military Subcontracting: Trump's effort to shift the military burden from Europe to countries like Turkey means worker and laborer children dying on the borders of imperialist monopolies. While the rich's children celebrate billion-dollar profit deals in ultra-luxury palaces, those sent to the front will again be this country's poor children. Revolutionaries oppose in the harshest terms worker children being made "cannon fodder" in colonial wars.

Barbarism Behind the "Local and National" Mask: The Rulers' Fear and the Anatomy of State Violence

Young comrades, the greatest skill of bourgeois ideology is hiding relations of exploitation and belly-tied dependence on imperialism behind ornate concepts. The "local and national" rhetoric the rulers never drop from their tongues today is precisely such a philosophical illusion. The 36th NATO Leaders Summit held in Ankara on 7–8 July 2026 showed us in a single day how this mask shatters and what remains beneath it: the naked violence apparatus of a class state serving international capital.

In making these assessments, we take as our guide the data and chronological facts that openly lay before us all these practices of violence by the bourgeoisie and the savagery inflicted on the working class's children. Let us examine step by step, day by day, how the ruling class barbarizes against its own people to please colonial barons.

The Chronological Chain of Repression: Step by Step Closing the Streets

The capital state, knowing how powerfully the voice of the working class and revolutionary youth would ring out, activated its violence apparatus days before the summit, as it were under a concept of "preventive terror." The process advanced through this chronological chain in which constitutional rights were systematically seized:

5 July 2026 (First Wave Before the Summit): 139 citizens who are members of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) were hastily detained on the grounds of the anti-imperialist NATO protest they held in Kızılay. Class fear was so dominant that the prosecutor unlawfully extended the revolutionaries' detention by one more day despite the absence of any concrete element of crime.
6 July 2026 (Digital Blackout and Censorship): The bourgeoisie, thinking it could cleanse the streets, thought it could also imprison the digital sphere. To prevent anti-NATO calls such as "NATO Get Out" and "Summit Growing Capital with Blood" from reaching the people, access blocks were placed on progressive institutions' accounts. In this wave of censorship, the Instagram account of Genç Hayat magazine, the voice of young workers and students, was completely blocked in Turkey.
7 July 2026 (First Day of the Summit and the Kurtuluş Park Savagery): The crowd gathering at Ankara Kurtuluş Park at 10:00 on the call of the "No to NATO Coordination" met the encirclement of thousands of police before they could even shout their words. Demonstrators were surrounded with shields, local journalists were prevented from filming, and press workers were forcibly "swept" from the area. At the same hours in Eskişehir, platform members began to be detained from their homes and streets before action time even arrived.

The Naked Anatomy of Savagery: Choking, Stamping on Heads, and Class Hatred

Young comrades, the savagery a police officer displays when choking a revolutionary in the street or stamping on their head with boots is not individual anger; it is the outward expression of the ruling class's collective fear and class hatred.

Savagery in the Metro and on the Streets: In Istanbul, a young comrade protesting NATO and Trump, partner in the Gaza massacre, inside the metro was beaten until breathless, subjected to inhuman treatment with their throat squeezed by plainclothes police and private security. Revolutionaries shouting "Down with imperialism" in Ankara's streets and on Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue were dragged on the ground, their heads stamped on, tortured with reverse handcuffs, and carried to holding cells.

The philosophical explanation of this barbarism is clear: While Donald Trump's plane landed in Ankara and the regime performed a welcoming show with Janissaries and mounted police to please him, outside the honorable children of this country had their throats squeezed. This is the naked and bloody application of the message the bourgeoisie sends its global masters: "To protect your exploitation budget, I can crush my own people if necessary."

The Collapse of Law: "No Crime, Still Detention" and the Blockade of Deputies

The ruling class did not hesitate to throw even the bourgeois laws it wrote and constitutional rights into the trash to protect the colonial war apparatus. Throughout the summit, a literal "summit of lawlessness" was lived in Ankara's streets.

Barricades Against Deputies: The class state displayed an aggressiveness blind enough to target even people's representatives with constitutional immunity. Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) Chair Erkan Baş, TİP Spokesperson Sera Kadıgil, DEM Party Deputy Keziban Konukçu, and EMEP Deputies İskender Bayhan and Sevda Karaca, standing with workers and youth at Kurtuluş Park, were encircled with police barricades. Law enforcement barbarized to the point of daring to seize people's deputies by the collar.
The "No Crime, Still Detention" Doctrine: As many jurists, including Contemporary Lawyers Association (ÇHD) Istanbul Branch Chair, stated, throughout the summit a "Potemkin village" law was operated with no legal basis. People were not detained because they committed a concrete crime, but preventively because they had the potential to break the "smooth/peaceful Turkey" illusion the rulers wanted to present to imperialist partners—and were beaten until hospitalized.

The Mirror of Bourgeois Hypocrisy: Feast Inside, Handcuffs Outside

Young comrades, one of the clearest findings of Marxist philosophy is how the bourgeoisie turns moral and legal concepts upside down through its ideological apparatuses. To understand the philosophical squalor and hypocrisy behind the "great and powerful state" polishing in the capital's media, we must examine in depth the scenes of 7 July 2026.

Bourgeois hypocrisy at the summit's door turned almost into a physical class wall. On one side feast tables opened to representatives of global capital; on the other handcuffs struck on the honorable sons of these lands... Let us decipher this instructive contradiction piece by piece:

Feast for Foreign Press, Accreditation Block for Opposition Journalists

The bourgeois state apparatus divided the press in two to present imperialist masters with an illusion of "peaceful and democratic" order:

The Communication Directorate's Luxury Tables: Before the NATO Summit, the Presidential Communications Director met foreign press members at luxury feast dinners. Glittering tables were set for Western journalists to appear sweet to global public opinion.
Accreditation Censorship for Local Press: The same Communications Directorate and NATO administration denied accreditation to local opposition and critical journalists trying to write the truth in Turkey and carry the working class's voice, and threw them out the door.
TRT's Naked Censorship: Even inside the summit hall the censorship apparatus worked without pause. The state broadcaster TRT showed the true character of bourgeois media by censoring live a vital question a Dutch journalist asked during the summit.

Rutte's "Free Media" Speeches and Class Reality

The summit's most absurd and philosophically most hypocritical moment came when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stepped before the cameras and played the "liberal democracy preacher":

A Dutch journalist openly asked Rutte how appropriate it was to hold this summit with Erdoğan in an environment where journalists, comedians, and opponents were being detained and arrested in Turkey.
Rutte beat around the bush before this question and delivered ornate speeches: "Democracy is not only elections; democracy is the free media in this room, your ability to ask whatever question you want."
Yet while saying these words, Rutte tries to hide that they themselves blocked dozens of honorable local journalists from entering that room through accreditation lists they approved.

The Bloody Balance Sheet Behind Security Tales

Class Analysis: For the bourgeoisie, "freedom" and "democracy" are abstract concepts valid only as long as they are within profit partnership with their own class. While Rutte tells freedom tales inside and beats around the bush, immediately outside the hall progressive jurists, journalists, and revolutionary youth—including the Contemporary Lawyers Association Istanbul Branch Chair—are being detained with torture for saying "Leave NATO, close imperialist bases."

Young comrades, the bill for bloody monopolies welcomed inside with Mehter marches and $11 billion military profits shared in luxury hotels is being cut to worker children whose throats are squeezed outside. The bourgeoisie's "local and national" mask falls the moment it sees imperialism's ledger; what remains is a naked tyrannical regime that feasts for colonizers and reserves reverse handcuffs for its own workers and journalists.

Those Who Grow Fear Will Lose

Young comrades, it is time to reach our final consciousness by filtering all we have recounted through philosophical dialectics. This bloody fair shows that the bourgeois state apparatus is not the unshakable power claimed, but on the contrary possesses deep helplessness and class fear. This tyrannical mechanism that savagely chokes worker children in the streets, erects flesh barricades before deputies elected by the people, barbarizes because it is aware of its own illegitimacy.

We must engrave in our minds the rulers' fear before this rotting order and the dialectical collapse through these basic class headings:

The Fragile Illusion of Capital: Closing Ankara's streets with screens, trying to hide poverty and plunder ruins in worker neighborhoods from colonial eyes, is proof of the state's ideological weakness. Those signing $11 billion death contracts inside to Mehter marches tremble at a single anti-imperialist slogan a young comrade might shout outside.
The Collapse of Imported Legitimacy: The bourgeois government ashamed of and afraid of its own laborers seeks the mass support it lost in Donald Trump's luxury planes and NATO's bloody corridors. Yet Marxist philosophy shows us that no fake praise imported from colonial finance capital and no military subcontracting role protects regimes from the organized anger of the working class.
The Limits of the Violence Apparatus: Those barbaric hands trying to cut our comrades' breath in the metro, reverse handcuffs, and the digital censorship wave against progressive platforms like Genç Hayat are the last cartridge left in the bourgeoisie's hand. As the state apparatus that itself tramples rights and laws is exposed, the "rule of law" fairy tale in the masses' eyes is demolished to the same degree.

Young comrades, never be discouraged or afraid by the barbarism the state's law enforcement scatters in the streets. The ruling class accelerates its own end the more it grows fear. This giant war machine before us may plunder budgets and steal from the people's minimum wage to sacrifice 5% of GDP to arms barons, but it cannot stop history's dialectical advance.

Our primary task is to tear off the nationalist and chauvinist blindfolds the rulers want to tie over our eyes; to grow the struggle for independence, democracy, and peace against collaborating bourgeoisie and NATO, its global patron, by uniting it in every factory, every campus, and every street.

Remember: those who handcuff their own people for the comfort of colonial killers will lose; the working class that creates this world with its labor and does not bow to imperialism will win!