Transcription
I want to start with a photograph because I think it tells you almost everything you need to know before we even get into the details. It is July 7th, 2026. Air Force One lands at Etameshgut Air Base outside Ankura. Rajep Taip Erdogan is standing on the tarmac and Donald Trump walks down the steps toward him and the two men shake hands in front of the cameras like old friends meeting at a wedding.
A few hours later, inside the beste presidential palace, Trump says something that if you know the last seven years of this relationship should stop you cold. He says the United States will lift sanctions on Turkey. And when a reporter asks him directly about F-35s, he doesn't say no. He says we will consider it.
Now, if you don't follow defense policy for a living, that sentence might sound like nothing. Politicians hedge. That's what they do. But I want you to sit with us for a second because that sentence undoes something that took the United States government the better part of a decade to build. And to understand why it matters, we have to go back further than most people bother to go.
Let's go back to 1999. This is the year Turkey signs on as one of the founding partners in what becomes the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program. Not a customer, a partner. There's a difference and it matters. The F-35 wasn't just built in Fort Worth, Texas, and shipped around the world like a car off an assembly line. It was designed from the start as a multinational project with different countries manufacturing different pieces of the aircraft and feeding them into a single global supply chain. Turkey ends up producing 937 distinct parts for the F-35. Landing gear components, cockpit displays, structural parts for the fuselage. Turkish Aerospace Industries becomes deeply embedded in the actual manufacturing of the aircraft, not just a buyer waiting in line. This is important because it tells you Turkey wasn't some marginal actor angling for a favor. It was by design on the inside of America's most expensive and most closely guarded weapons program in history.
And for about two decades, that's how things stay. Turkey orders over a 100 aircraft. Pilots begin training. There's even a public rollout ceremony in 2018 where a Turkish F-35 is unveiled, painted, ready, and then it all falls apart. And it falls apart over a single decision made in Ankura that in hindsight looks almost impossible to walk back from. Erdogan decides to buy the S400 air defense system from Russia, not the American Patriot system which Washington had offered on comparable terms, the Russian one.
And I think it's worth pausing on why he does this because the why tells you something about how Erdogan has run Turkish foreign policy for 20 years. He wasn't buying the S400 because it was necessarily the better missile system. He was buying it because he wanted to prove that Turkey was not a client state. That Ankura could pick and choose from Washington and from Moscow and from Beijing, playing them against each other. And that nobody, not NATO, not the Pentagon, not Congress, got to dictate Turkey's choices. It's a message about sovereignty as much as it's a message about air defense.
And it's also, and I don't think this gets said enough, a hedge against his own domestic position. Erdogan survived an actual coup attempt in 2016. Tanks in the streets, F-16 buzzing his hotel. A man who has lived through that does not make defense procurement decisions the way an ordinary head of state does. He was thinking about coup proofing his own regime as much as he was thinking about Russian jets shooting down Turkish jets.
So in July 2019, Turkey takes delivery of the first S400 batteries. And Washington does something it has never really done before to a NATO ally at that scale. It expels Turkey from the F-35 program entirely. Not a slap on the wrist, a full removal from the manufacturing consortium, an end to the supply contracts, a freeze on the roughly $1.4 billion Turkey had already paid toward its own jets. Six fully built F-35s that were meant to be Turkish end up sitting in storage in Arizona, painted, finished, paid for, and never delivered. They're still sitting there today, 7 years later.
Then a year and a half after that, in December 2020, Congress goes further and applies CATSA sanctions, the Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act, a law that was actually written to punish countries for doing business with Russian, Iranian, or North Korean defense industries. Turkey becomes the first NATO ally ever sanctioned under that law. Think about how strange that sentence is. A founding member of the Western Alliance sanctioned under a statute designed for adversaries.
And here's the part that I think really explains why we're back here again in 2026. The sanctions never actually worked in the sense of changing Turkish behavior. Erdogan didn't give the S400 back. He didn't apologize. If anything, in the months right after the expulsion, he floated the idea of buying more S400s, and he made noises about the Russian SU35 as a replacement for the F-35 he just lost. The threat of American punishment, which is supposed to be the whole point of a sanctions regime, simply failed to bite hard enough to reverse the original decision. And once the missile system physically exists on Turkish soil, once the technicians have been trained and the radar has been calibrated, there's no clean way to undo that. You can't undeliver an S400.
So, both sides settle into what becomes a six-year standoff. Washington holds the line, insisting no F-35s until the S400 is gone. Ankara holds its line, refusing to give it up while quietly building its own indigenous fighter jet program called Khan as a kind of insurance policy in case Washington never relents. That's the 20-year story leading up to yesterday's handshake.
Now, let's talk about why this particular week, this particular NATO summit in Ankura has become the moment everything might actually shift. I think there are three separate forces converging here. And if you only look at one of them, the picture doesn't make sense.
The first is the sheer weight of time and regional pressure. By 2025, the strategic map around Turkey looks nothing like it did in 2019. Russia is bogged down and diminished by years of war in Ukraine. Iran, as of just the last few months, has been through direct strikes from the United States and Israel. Its supreme leader killed, its regime visibly shaken. Millions marching in a funeral procession we watched unfold literally this week. Syria has gone through total regime collapse and a chaotic transition with Emmanuel Macron himself standing in Damascus this week telling the new Syrian president that dictatorship has to give way to genuine rule of law. All while explosions were going off near the presidential palace during his visit.
In that kind of neighborhood, a NATO planner in Brussels or Washington starts asking a different question than how do we punish Turkey? The question becomes, can we actually afford a hollowed-out, alienated Turkey, sitting on the most strategically important terrain in the entire alliance? Turkey controls the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, the only sea route in and out of the Black Sea. It borders Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Caucasus. It hosts Incirlik air base, which Erdogan has previously threatened, not idly, to close to American operations. When the region around you is on fire, you think twice about keeping your most geographically important ally locked out of your best equipment.
The second force is more human, more personal, and it's the one that gets underplayed by people who only read the policy papers. Trump and Erdogan have an actual working relationship going back to Trump's first term. It shows up again and again in how this dispute has been managed. Trump has at various points publicly blamed the Obama administration for mishandling the original Patriot missile negotiations that pushed Turkey toward Russia in the first place. He's called Erdogan a leader he respects. And you can see if you follow the last year of reporting closely the outlines of a workaround being engineered specifically to give Erdogan a face-saving path back into the program without technically breaking the letter of the law that Congress passed.
There were reports, credible ones, of a plan where Turkey would remove a single component from the S400, declare the system inoperable, and let that stand in for full divestment. Critics, and there were many, including inside Trump's own administration's orbit, pointed out the obvious problem. A system you can turn off with the removal of one part is a system you can turn back on with the reinsertion of that same part. It's the equivalent of taking the firing pin out of a rifle and calling the rifle destroyed. It solves the political problem of appearing to comply with the law. It does almost nothing to solve the actual technical problem the law was written to prevent, which is Russian radar sitting close enough to NATO F-35s to learn their electronic signatures.
And that technical problem is the third force. And it's the one I think deserves the most careful explanation because it's not abstract lawyer talk. It's actual physics. The F-35 is fundamentally a stealth aircraft. Its entire value. The reason it costs what it costs, the reason air forces around the world want it is that its radar cross-section is small enough that it can operate inside contested airspace without being reliably tracked and targeted. The S400 is fundamentally a radar and detection system built by Russia specifically to hunt exactly that kind of aircraft.
Now imagine those two systems sitting on the same runways in the same country operated in reasonably close proximity even if they are never formally together. Every time an F-35 takes off, lands, taxis or flies a training sortie anywhere near an active or even a supposedly dormant S400 installation. That Russian system has an opportunity to collect telemetry, radar returns, electronic emissions, the raw data that lets engineers reverse engineer exactly how stealthy the aircraft actually is and at what frequencies it becomes visible. You don't need the two systems to be plugged into each other for that risk to exist. You just need them close enough, long enough. That is why American defense officials have said bluntly that the issue was never really about whether Turkey fires missiles at anybody. It's about tracking and telemetry, about what a lingering Russian system, even a switched off one, can quietly learn about the alliance's most sensitive stealth technology and whether that knowledge could ever make its way back to Moscow.
So when Ambassador Tom Baric stood up at a conference in Abu Dhabi late last year and said the S400 issue was nearing resolution and that the batteries are not in use. That was the signal everyone in this world had been waiting for. Not full divestment, not the missiles shipped back to Russia, just an assurance that they're switched off. And apparently for this administration, that was enough of an opening to walk through.
Now let's talk about who is furious about this because the opposition here is not theoretical and it is not coming from one direction. It's coming from at least three distinct places and each one has a completely different reason for objecting which is itself revealing.
Start with Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been remarkably blunt about this, speaking to American television just this week, calling Turkey a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing Erdogan of praying for Israel's destruction, of hosting Hamas leadership, of threatening to enter Israel the way Turkish forces entered Libya and Nagorno Karabakh. Now, you can read that as pure rhetoric if you want, but there's a very concrete strategic interest underneath it. Israel's entire regional posture, the ability to strike Iranian convoys to deter Hezbollah to fly missions over Syria and Lebanon with something close to impunity, rests on a specific assumption that Israel, and only Israel in that immediate neighborhood flies fifth generation stealth aircraft. The F-35i that Israel operates is a customized variant deeply integrated with Israel-made components, including wing sections and the helmet-mounted display system built by Elbit Systems. If Turkey acquires F-35s, too, even the standard export version, Israel loses something it currently has close to a loan in that region, an unambiguous qualitative edge in the air. And there's a more specific worry sitting underneath that one. Because Israeli companies manufacture parts that go into every F-35 built anywhere in the world, there's a real possibility that components engineered in Israeli factories could end up indirectly inside aircraft flown by a government Israeli officials openly describe as hostile. That is not an abstract fear. That is a supply chain sitting inside a geopolitical rivalry.
Then there's Greece. And Greece's objection while it overlaps with Israel's comes from an entirely different history. This is not about the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas. This is about the Aegean Sea, about decades of disputed maritime boundaries, about Turkish Coast Guard vessels escorting fishing boats into Greek territorial waters, about armed Turkish F-16 entering Greek airspace, about Cyprus, which Turkey has occupied in its northern half since 1974 and which remains a live unresolved wound in the relationship between two NATO members who are technically supposed to be allies against the same adversaries. Athens has responded to Turkey's rising military ambition with its own multi-year modernization plan, something in the range of 2 to 2.5 billion euros a year through the mid 2030s, buying its own F-35s, developing an integrated air and missile defense network with heavy Israeli involvement called Achilles Shield. And I think this is the detail that really tells the story here. In the days immediately before this NATO summit, Greek and Israeli fighter jets were flying joint exercises together over Crete with Israeli tanker aircraft refueling Greek F-16s in the air. A capability Greece doesn't have on its own. That is not a coincidence in timing. That is two countries sending a very deliberate, very public signal to Ankara days before Trump's plane touches down that they can operate together at a level Turkey currently cannot match. It's diplomacy conducted in formation flying instead of communiques.
And then there's the third source of resistance and this one is entirely domestic, entirely American and in some ways the most legally serious of the three. Congress wrote section 1245 into the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act and it is not written as a suggestion. It requires the secretaries of defense and state to certify in writing 90 days before any transfer that Turkey no longer possesses the S400, has pledged never to reacquire it, and hasn't taken on any other Russian system that could compromise the aircraft. Turkey has not met one of those conditions. Not one. Which means that any executive branch effort to simply wave the jets through to call the S400 inoperable and move on runs directly into a statute that a bipartisan Congress passed specifically to prevent an executive branch, any executive branch from being talked into exactly this kind of workaround. You have members of both parties, from the Armenian-American community's longtime allies in Congress to Hellenic-American advocacy groups to Republican senators who spent years building the legal case against Turkey's return. All lining up to say this cannot simply happen by administrative fiat. There is a real fight coming not just between Washington and Ankara but inside Washington itself between an executive branch that wants a deal and a legislature that wrote a law specifically to prevent one.
So where does that leave us? Sitting here on July 7th watching Trump and Erdogan shake hands at Etimsgut watching Trump tell reporters he will consider the F-35s. I think the honest answer is that nobody, not the analysts, not the Pentagon, not Congress, not even the two presidents themselves, fully knows how this resolves. But I want to leave you with three things worth thinking about because I think they matter more than the day-to-day headlines.
The first is what this tells us about the actual durability of American export controls and alliance discipline in a multipolar world. For years, the working theory in Washington was that CATSA sanctions on Turkey would function as a deterrent, a warning to other countries eyeing Russian military hardware. Buy from Moscow and you lose access to the best American technology permanently. If Turkey walks its way back into the F-35 program without fully divesting the S400, without genuinely paying the price the law demanded, that deterrent effectively evaporates. Every country that has ever considered hedging between Washington and Moscow, India among them, since India operates its own S400 batteries and has faced its own version of this exact dilemma, will watch this outcome very closely. If Turkey gets away with a symbolic fix, a removed component, a declaration of inoperability, then the lesson other governments learn is that American red lines are negotiable if you're patient enough and strategically important enough. That is not a small lesson. That reshapes how the entire architecture of American arms control leverage functions going forward.
The second thing worth sitting with is what this does to the Eastern Mediterranean specifically because that region has quietly become one of the most militarized, most tightly wound corners of the planet and almost nobody outside foreign policy circles is watching it. You have Turkey building the Typhoon Block 4 ballistic missile, testing speeds above Mach 5, aiming for mass production this year. You have Turkey's Steel Dome air defense program explicitly described by Erdogan as designed to instill in his words confidence in friends and fear in enemies. You have Greece's Achilles Shield responding in kind. You have Israel and Greece deepening a security partnership that looks less like routine alliance management and more like a hedge against a specific named neighbor. Layer F-35s for Turkey on top of that, and you're not adding one new variable to a stable system. You're adding fuel to a regional arms race that is already running hot in a part of the world that sits directly between Europe's energy supplies, the wreckage of the Syrian state, and whatever comes next in Iran.
And the third thing, the one I actually think is the most important is a question about what kind of alliance NATO is trying to be in this decade. For most of its history, NATO worked on the assumption that shared democratic values and a shared adversary in Moscow were enough glue to hold together countries with wildly different histories and interests. What we're watching play out this week in real time in Ankara is a test of whether that glue still holds when one member state's leader has spent years threatening another member state. When the alliance's most advanced technology becomes a bargaining chip in a personal relationship between two presidents. And when the loudest objections aren't coming from Moscow or Beijing, but from Athens and Jerusalem, watching nervously as Washington decides just how much strategic patience Ankara has actually earned.
I don't think there's a clean, satisfying answer to give you here, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended there was. What I can tell you is that whatever gets decided in the closed door meetings this week, whether it's a full sale, a partial workaround, or another few years of stalemate, it will tell us something true about how power actually moves in a world where old alliances are being renegotiated in real time. Not around shared values, but around who controls the Bosphorus, who flies the stealthiest jet, and who Donald Trump happens to like standing next to on a tarmac. That more than any single headline is the story worth watching.