The US-led military bloc will not hold a top-level meeting in Tirana in 2027, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has said
NATO has dropped plans to hold a leaders’ summit in 2027, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has said. The summit was supposed to be held in the Albanian capital of Tirana. The decision comes as tensions between Washington and its European NATO allies continue to mount.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Washington’s European NATO allies over their defense spending and refusal to support the US military campaign against Iran.
Speaking on Thursday, Rama said that “there is not yet a common position on when the [NATO] summit will happen, for sure not in 2027.” He added that “in 2028, if it will be a summit, it will be in Tirana.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, meanwhile, played down the change, telling the Associated Press that the military bloc is “flexible” with its summits and will convene one “when a necessity is there.”
The declaration adopted at NATO’s 2025 summit in The Hague stated that the leaders looked “forward to our next meeting in Türkiye in 2026 followed by a meeting in Albania.” However, any mention of the Balkan nation was conspicuously absent from a similar document issued after this year’s gathering in Ankara.
In April, Reuters reported, citing several officials speaking anonymously, that NATO members were considering holding fewer summits, breaking with the recent practice of annual gatherings. Some of the sources cited a desire to avoid confrontations with Trump.
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