Trump greeted by Turkey’s Erdogan as he arrives for high-stakes NATO summit

President Donald Trump has arrived in Turkey for this year’s North American Treaty Organization leaders summit as tensions between the United States and the rest of the 32-member defensive alliance remain at an all-time high. Trump was greeted by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he disembarked from the former Qatari luxury jet he is using as Air Force One in Ankara and shortly after the two leaders participated in an arrival ceremony at the Turkish presidential residence. As Trump and Erdogan reviewed troops, a military band played the John Phillip Sousa march “Stars and Stripes Forever” while Turkish fighter jets performed a flyover while trailing red, white and blue smoke. Erdogan, whose authoritarian tendencies have led some of Trump’s critics to compare him to the longtime Turkish leader, welcomed Trump to Turkey and called him his “valuable friend” at a bilateral meeting shortly after the arrival ceremony. For his part, Trump praised Erdogan as his “great friend” and said he has “a lot of respect” for Erdogan while lauding the “special relationship” between the two leaders. “I just want to say that I have a lot of respect for the President, and I think it's really to the benefit of both countries ... it's an honor to be with you, and we're going to have a lot of good meetings, we're going to have good dinners, good food, we're going to have a good time, but mostly we're going to have a lot of work, and we're going to do good things for our countries,” he said. Trump later suggested that he would not have chosen to attend the annual gathering had it not been in Turkey this year and said he was “very disappointed” in NATO for not participating in the war he started against Iran even though NATO is a defensive alliance and had no role in the conflict. “Frankly, if it weren't held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it's possible that I wouldn't have attended. I felt I had to attend because of the fact that you know I know he's gone all out. It was a big thing to have NATO come to Turkey or anyplace else. It's a big thing, but we weren't treated well because we did something in Iran,” he said. He then launched into a stem-winding rant about various NATO allies’ reaction to the war, first claiming he did not want help from any of them while complaining about the “trillions of dollars” the U.S. has “invested” in the alliance “to protect European countries” from Russia. “I say that's fine, but you would think that they'd be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren't,” he said. “We didn't need any help at all, and in a way I was testing people, I was testing to see whether or not they'd be there, because I've long said that we helped them, but I'm not sure that they'd be there for us. And Italy turned us down, and Germany turned us down, and France turned us down, and it's okay, but you know, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they're not there for us, we've always been there for them.” More follows...