The last few weeks have brought NATO back to the centre of all major crisis theatres. Turkey had to defend itself against ballistic missiles fired by Iran against its territory; Trump threatened NATO’s future if European allies refused to contribute to security in the Strait of Hormuz, explicitly tying the Alliance’s solidarity to participation in the Gulf campaign. Finally, in Oslo, the Nordic countries and Canada met not only to discuss Arctic security, but to signal that they are preparing for a future without American protection.

This fragmentation of fronts is disrupting the classical pillars of transatlantic defence

For seventy years, NATO built its deterrence on the idea of collective mutual aid. Today, the Alliance finds itself operating in a much more ambiguous intermediate space: intercepting missiles, protecting infrastructure, defending maritime traffic, managing regional escalations. These are military acts in their own right, but they are not called war. NATO 2026 is doing something the Alliance has never done before: stopping real wars without formally entering into them.

On the night of 13 March, the sirens of the Incirlik base sounded over Adana

A missile headed for Turkey was intercepted in the eastern Mediterranean by NATO units: it was the third shoot-down in a few days. Turkey thus became the operational laboratory of a new collective defence: neutralising real missiles directed at an ally without reaching the political threshold of Article 5. The distinction is not academic; it changes the very nature of the intervention. Almost at the same time, thousands of kilometres further north, thousands of Alliance soldiers were conducting Arctic warfare scenarios against a hypothetical Russian attack during Cold Response 26: logistical convoys crossed the Norwegian tundra, F-35 fighter jets simulated scramble towards the border, and multinational brigades tested their ability to operate for weeks in the polar ice.

The NATO of 2026 lives on two overlapping operational maps: Arctic and Mediterranean, Russia and Iran, exercise and real fire. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Alliance is no longer a defensive structure built around one front and one adversary, but is becoming a mechanism that has to manage different crises simultaneously without turning them all into a NATO war.

The North: the American Shadow and the Canadian Response

In Northern Europe, the story is a familiar one. Cold Response 26 has been planned for months as a readiness test of the Alliance’s new Arctic flank: a region now stretching from Norway to Finland and Sweden, which have just joined NATO.

But something deeper also happened. In Oslo, the Arctic ‘middle powers’ have started to act like a blockade. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called American pressure on Greenland totally unacceptable. Her Icelandic counterpart Kristrún Frostadóttir spoke of a global leadership vacuum. Mark Carney’s Canada – which has just announced a 35 billion plan to strengthen its military presence in the North – claimed readiness to defend the Arctic individually and collectively, with necessary measures to protect sovereignty.

The translation is one: Ottawa and the Nordic partners will defend their Arctic, with or without the US. It is a sign that automatic dependence on American protection is coming to an end, accelerated by that Davos compromise on Greenland that is transforming the old US-Denmark defence agreement into a framework of functional sovereignty where the territory remains formally Danish and European, but operational decisions and political responsibility shift to Washington. The Arctic thus becomes the first space where Atlantic security is separated from European democratic and jurisdictional control constraints, normalising grey areas where legality can be suspended in the name of Trump’s political and military needs.

The South: Air defence as a new frontier

In the Mediterranean, the picture is completely different. The escalation stems from Washington and Jerusalem’s decision to militarily strike the regime in Tehran, which responded with ballistic missiles and drones against targets linked to the US and its regional partners.

Here, there is no months-long planning. Within days, NATO had to use its integrated capabilities to protect a member country from missiles fired by a hostile state. Operationally, everything runs through a network of sensors and defence systems built up over the past fifteen years: ground-based radars, surveillance satellites, Aegis-equipped destroyers, land and naval interceptors. So far, the situation has remained under control because no missile has hit a city, but if one day one of those carriers were to slip through the defences and fall on a population centre in Turkey, the question “are we at war?” would suddenly cease to be theoretical. And this is where Incirlik becomes a political test.

Secretary General Mark Rutte immediately ruled out activating Article 5, while reiterating solidarity with Turkey; Ankara, for its part, spoke of hostilities and violations, carefully avoiding the formula of armed attack. It is in this distinction that the new complexity of the Alliance emerges. Article 5 has never been a circuit breaker: it states that an attack against one member will be considered an attack against all, but leaves it up to each ally to decide what measures to take. Today, that flexibility is no longer a theoretical clause; it is the political space that allows NATO to act militarily without turning every incident into a formal war.

The Italian node

In all this, Italy is not a bystander. Italian ships operate in the eastern Mediterranean integrated into the NATO air defence network, while the air command at Poggio Renatico contributes to the radar surveillance of the theatre. Italian troops are deployed a few hundred kilometres from the frontlines, between Iraq and Lebanon. In other words, we are already part of the operational management of this crisis.

Yet, in the Italian public debate, this reality remains invisible. Giorgia Meloni continues to play the part of the reluctant spectator: so as not to break the fragile internal truce with Matteo Salvini, so as not to frighten an electorate that has grown up with the idea that Italy can stay out of conflicts, and to hide the strategic embarrassment of having to wait for instructions from Washington. This hesitation reveals a political class that is afraid to explain reality.

What it means to be an Atlanticist today

Being Atlanticists today means having the courage to declare that the defence of Incirlik or the protection of Arctic routes are the pillars of our own national security. Italy must stop inhabiting NATO as a morose tenant hiding the use of common services. It is time for Rome to claim its operational participation as an asset of sovereignty, transforming its contribution to collective defence from a secret to be hidden – just as it does with military contributions to the active defence of Ukraine – into the foundation of our international posture.

If Italy is able to translate its operational participation into political weight, it will arrive at the NATO summit in Ankara next July as an ally that counts and capable of influencing strategic decisions. If not, it will remain a comprimario that suffers the choices of others.

The Meloni government has a choice to make: it can continue to hide behind the rhetoric of ‘we are not at war and we will not go to war’ and circle-jerkery or it can explain and claim before the Italians that collective defence is paid for by participation, and that participation also means having the right to count. The real question is not whether we are part of NATO. The question is whether our political class has the courage to admit it – and to act accordingly.