– Erman Akilli is a professor of International Relations at Ankara Haci Bayram Veli University and a research fellow at SETA.
ISTANBUL (AA) – The North Atlantic Alliance was built for a world in which power was measured by divisions, warheads and industrial output. For over seven decades, this arithmetic held, first during the Cold War and then in the unipolar era, when the military and economic supremacy of the Western narrative appeared uncontested. The 21st century has overturned these conditions. In the new order, conceptualized in my previous writings as the technopolar world, the defining assets of international competition are computing power, data, artificial intelligence models and the narratives that flow through them. Sovereignty itself is being redefined in this process. It no longer denotes merely the control of territory; it has become the capacity to make decisions over data, algorithms and infrastructures without coercion or concession, the ability of a state to govern the algorithm, the data and the computing power on which modern decision-making rests.
Why is classical logic of deterrence eroding?
NATO stands at the center of this transformation, confronting the misalignment between its founding codes and the realities of the 21st century. The alliance retains its conventional military capacity, yet the struggle has shifted to a domain where that capacity remains necessary but insufficient, and the classical logic of deterrence is eroding at three points. First, the attack surface is acquiring an infrastructural character while remaining below the threshold of armed attack. The submarine cable networks of the Red Sea are the clearest example: the fiber optic arteries passing through this corridor carry the overwhelming share of data capacity between Europe and Asia, and an adversary that cut or degraded them could paralyze financial clearing, cloud-dependent trade and logistics across three continents without firing a single bullet, concealing the damage behind a ship’s anchor or seismic activity.
The second and more silent factor is epistemic dependency. If a state’s algorithms, models and computing power are controlled from outside, the information that state produces is also controlled from outside. This dependence is more insidious than any reliance on energy or hardware because it operates invisibly: when a state interprets its own data through another’s algorithm, sovereignty over that data has already changed hands, and foreign assumptions are quietly written into national decisions. An alliance attempting to build deterrence with borrowed models may fail to see, with its own eyes, the danger it is obliged to counter.
Third is the partial nature of the institutional response. NATO recognized cyberspace as an operational domain at the 2016 Warsaw Summit, adopted its first artificial intelligence strategy in 2021 and revised it at the 2024 Washington Summit with a focus on testing and verification against the asymmetric threats of generative models. This evolution from normative framework to operational doctrine is necessary, but it is not yet proportionate to a problem that spreads across the entirety of the digital infrastructure.
The tech-consumer trap
The deeper fault line runs through the interior of the alliance. The 32 allies diverge in technological capacity not by degree but by kind: some are producers and standard setters; others are structural consumers of technologies designed and governed elsewhere. Divergence in models, cloud systems and data governance fragments not only technical systems but also the shared situational awareness on which collective defense rests. The credibility of that defense is therefore measured not by the strongest member but by the most vulnerable digital link. This internal asymmetry is sharpened by the geometry of the global supply order. The most advanced semiconductors are produced in a few hubs, and the Pax Silica initiative launched by the US Department of State in December 2025 converts this supply geometry into a geopolitical hierarchy, turning technological cooperation into a filtering mechanism that stratifies states. Eleven states signed the founding declaration, and Türkiye, a NATO ally, was not included in the first circle. For an excluded ally, the lesson is not to wait for inclusion but to build sovereign capacity. Türkiye has drawn this lesson and has begun to act upon it.
The Artificial Intelligence Action Plan announced by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on June 13, 2026, covering the years 2026 to 2030, embodies this will across four strategic legs: “Perceive, Harness, Forge and Govern.” Its true weight cannot be read off an economic ledger; it becomes fully legible through the framework of cognitive diplomacy, advanced in our previous writings as the keystone of digital autonomy and resting on three interdependent pillars of presence, practice and resilience. Read through this triad, the plan reveals itself as the first sustained attempt by a state to operationalize all three pillars at once.
Presence is the deliberate occupation of cognitive space, the projection of a state’s narrative and values across the algorithmically mediated commons where global opinion is formed. A state that cannot build its own language model cannot compose its own sentences in the digital sphere; it borrows the syntax, and therefore the worldview, of others. The sovereign large language model Bilge, developed under the leadership of TUBITAK, is in this sense an act of presence before it is a feat of engineering. The Great Turkic Language Model initiative, encompassing the Oguz, Kipchak and Karluk branches in partnership with the Organization of Turkic States, extends this presence into epistemic entrepreneurship, building a shared cognitive ground for the Turkic world before that geography is surrendered to architectures designed in San Francisco or Shenzhen. Türkiye has likewise signaled its intent to act as a norm entrepreneur at the OECD, the United Nations and the G20, insisting on a human-centered standard rather than accepting one drafted on its behalf.
Practice, the everyday capacity to innovate, deploy and regulate in alignment with national interest, is supplied by the productive legs of the plan: a data center capacity approaching one gigawatt by 2030, the commitment of at least two percent of public investment to artificial intelligence and a National Artificial Intelligence Fund to scale domestic ventures abroad.
Resilience, finally, is built in its most foundational form through a national literacy program aiming to reach five million citizens across 81 provinces and to train one hundred thousand professionals, together with the National Data Library, which opens public data for use while preserving its sovereignty. These are declared goals rather than completed achievements, yet their direction is clear, and the three pillars interlock rather than merely add.
The path to connected sovereignty
Herein lies the dual meaning of Türkiye for NATO. To its decades-long contribution on the southern flank, from counterterrorism to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, Türkiye now adds the identity of a producer, norm setter and infrastructure provider, developing immunity against shocks that would paralyze cloud-dependent neighbors and offering, as a terrestrial digital corridor between Asia and Europe, a secure alternative to threatened maritime transit points. The principle extending from its example to the alliance as a whole is connected sovereignty: neither absolute dependence, which erodes autonomous judgment, nor autarky, which sacrifices the resilience of cooperation. An alliance capable of redefining sovereignty as the capacity to govern algorithms, data corridors and computing architectures will carry itself into the future. Türkiye, as proof that states building agency early in the technopolar order are rewarded, is already demonstrating the path that strengthens the alliance from within.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu.
