It took me a while to understand exactly what happened at the latest NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye. What had made the task artificially difficult was the initial faulty assumption: that something happened there. In fact, the summit was about exactly nothing.

Most commentators and analysts focused on things that Donald Trump said at the meeting, but what they neglected to notice was that Trump’s public utterances no longer carry any meaning at all. Whatever he says about annexing Greenland, or Canada, or destroying Iran, or any number of other such statements, are just noise. He is still trying to use such bloviation to move markets, to make a bit of money from day trading. For instance, he apparently thought that he found a way to gambling success by fighting weekend wars: trade on Friday before the close, then bomb Iran over the weekend, then trade some more on Monday. But even the dumbest market algorithms seem to have caught up to him. Whatever will he come up with next?

Aside from his sporadic bloviation during the summit, he just sat there quietly and then signed whatever piece of paper was being proffered. And what was proffered was very much more of the same, with a few minor refinements. For example, instead of the US spending money on the former Ukraine directly, the Europeans will now borrow that money, the US will essentially underwrite the debt using a USD/EUR currency swap via the Federal Reserve, and the Europeans will then give the money to US defense contractors. Everybody will get a cut, everyone is happy.

Whoever voted for all of these clowns should perhaps be told that the level of NATO military spending is preposterously huge, yet it doesn’t move NATO an inch closer to being able to defeat Russia. Consider the chart above. NATO has committed to spending around $250 billion just on the former Ukraine before 2028; Russia spends a tiny fraction of that and is winning. And yet NATO has no air defense that can stand up to the new Russian rocketry and has no ability to develop any. Some amount of equipment will no doubt be produced, but given the rapid rate of change at the Ukrainian battlefield, it will be obsolete by the time it is ready. As for the gigantic pile of cash, it will be evenly smeared across numerous private bank accounts, allowing the rich to continue getting richer even as the economies of NATO countries continue their steady deterioration.

There has been quite a bit of commentary devoted to Trump’s removal of Russia from the latest US National Security Doctrine document. Well, just with everything else that Trump has done — be it the now illegal tariffs or the attempts to negotiate a peace deal between Russia and the former Ukraine, or the various threats against NATO — this meant nothing at all. The adults in the room told him that NATO is a major cash cow and that he will not be allowed to slaughter it. Furthermore, they explained to him that the Ukrainian conflict is a wonderful opportunity and as long as it is there and willing to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, neglecting to take full advantage of that opportunity would be quite foolish.

Essentially, there is nothing to see here, keep moving. I am sure that lots of ink will be spilled and lots of hot air expelled over whether Trump was successful as an agent of destruction or whether things would have fallen apart at exactly the same rate anyway. But that’s in the future; for now, there is one important conclusion that is ready to be drawn already: the noises Trump makes are just noises. They don’t matter and he doesn’t matter. It is as if he never existed.