Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The "world's most successful alliance" begins its two-day summit in Ankara in dire straits with the two shores of the North Atlantic further apart than ever.

The alliance is meeting after one of the worst years in North Atlantic relations, complete with US President Donlad Trump's tariffs rupturing centuries of North Atlantic economic integration, his threats to make Canada the US' 51st state and to take over Greenland from Denmark, Vice President JD Vance's insulting lectures about Europe committing "civilizational suicide," and, with the US-Israeli war on Iran, leaving the US and Europe prioritizing different wars.

Never known to fear making bad things worse, President Trump, who had already cast a pall over the summit saying he did not wish to go and was only going "out of respect" for his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, arrived at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Ankara once again musing about the US needing to "control" Greenland.

The outcome of the summit will be determined by many contingencies, including, as so much else these days, by Trump's volatile personality and conflicting political compulsions. However, NATO has already weakened irrevocably, weakening not so much the "defense" of its member countries – NATO's threat perception was always overhyped, during and since the Cold War – but the structures of imperialism itself. NATO's problems are rooted in the long-term decline of the senile, financialized, productively enfeebled capitalisms of its leading members.

Against this backdrop of decline, the US and other NATO members are prioritizing different wars, which seems to confirm Leo Tolstoy's famous quote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." At the summit, President Trump will berate his NATO allies for not supporting him in his war with Iran. His allies will be seeking to recommit him to the war in Ukraine. Secretary General Mark Rutte, having failed to convince Trump with his facts and figures about European and Canadian spending on defense, has, in his desperation, taken to raising alarm over a routine Chinese missile test. Making claims like "what happens in the Pacific is relevant to what is happening in the transatlantic" has become, in recent years, a routine European "concession" to a US increasingly concerned about China.

Ankara cannot heal this military rift, only deepen it. 

Having already lost his ill-advised war on Iran, with no face-saving off-ramp available, all Trump can do is try to keep the issue simmering on a safe back burner until the critical November mid-term elections are over. It was a war of choice, but also of decline.

Elections which must (so far at least) be won to serve the US' unproductive, financialized monopoly corporate capitalist class require acknowledging the difficulties of ordinary working citizens and promising a great deal to rectify them. As, inevitably, Trump broke his promises and sent his approval ratings plummeting, he became desperate for some triumph to save his political bacon in the November midterms and proved susceptible to Netanyahu's siren call for a war with a quick-and-easy win over Iran. It proved anything but.

The Europeans, for their part, are committed to prolonging the Ukraine war. Trump may repeat for the time that a deal on Ukraine is close – "we're getting much closer than people realize" – the Europeans keep encouraging President Volodymyr Zelensky to make, and stick to, maximalist demands.

While the war undermines the European economy, strains its budgets, makes governments unpopular and, above all, jeopardizes Europe's security, whose sine qua non is peace, if not amity, with Russia. It provides Atlanticist governments with their raison d'etre, which is useful in repressing dissent, provides an industrial strategy, however difficult to implement, that can rely on government expenditure on arms as a stimulus amid collapsing demand, and is Europe's last best hope of keeping the US committed to European "security."

NATO's decline will not be lamented. It was not just a Cold War alliance but a club of imperialist countries which targeted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as the strongest anti-imperialist force. That is why it could not, and did not, end with the Cold War. That is why its decline must come with the decline of capitalism in its homelands and their imperialism. That decline is not over. It can yet cause death and destruction. But it is unfolding. 

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