India, July 3 -- When the leaders of the 32 NATO member states convene in Turkey next week, the primary focus will ostensibly be a routine assessment of defensive capabilities, modernisation budgets, and regional security coordination.

Yet beneath the choreographed diplomacy of the alliance lies a profound and pervasive dread.

The defining variable of the July summit is not a collective policy initiative, but rather the unpredictable disposition of the American president. Diplomats and security officials across Europe are quietly walking on eggshells, deeply uncertain whether they will encounter a transactional commander-in-chief willing to talk business, or a fuming iconoclast determined to tear at the fabric of the Western world's mos...