NATO will not hold a summit in Albania in 2027 despite previous plans to do so, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said on Thursday. Speaking in Dublin ahead of the European Political Community summit, Rama said the issue is that there is not yet a common position on when the summit will happen, for sure not in 2027. He added that in 2028, if there is a summit, it will be in Tirana.
A NATO official confirmed on Thursday that the next NATO summit will be held in Albania and that a decision on the date has yet to be made. The hosting role itself is therefore not withdrawn; what has collapsed is the 2027 date. In the declaration adopted at the June 2025 summit in The Hague, alliance leaders wrote that they looked forward to meeting in Turkiye in 2026, followed by a meeting in Albania.
Reuters reported in June that plans for an alliance summit in Albania in 2027 had been thrown into doubt due to resistance from the Trump administration and dissatisfaction among NATO members with Tirana’s low defence spending. NATO has also been considering ending its recent practice of holding annual summits, a move that would avoid a potentially tense leaders level encounter with President Trump later in his term.
The gap matters because the summit is the alliance’s main venue for settling defence spending commitments and Ukraine policy at leaders level. With no 2027 meeting, those questions default to ministerial meetings and to the European track now running through the Abu Dhabi format, where European representatives are set to join the next round of Ukraine talks.