The Time is Right to Sell F-35 to Turkey
Ankara Should Take the Leap on S-400
In an auditorium in Dallas in 2018, local Texans learned for the first time about the legend of Hezarfen Ahmed Celebi, an Ottoman-era renaissance man that many in Turkey believe flew across the Bosphorus with fabric wings in the 17th century. The myth is pervasive and powerful but, of course, is probably more fiction than fact. Regardless, at the ceremony in Texas for Turkey’s first completed F-35, Americans watched with keen interest as a man dressed as steam-punk Hezarfen danced around a stage to celebrate the history of Turkic flight. The ceremony made sense to those who have children that watch Turkish cartoons, but was certainly strange and an outlier amongst the normal crowd at a Lockheed Martin ceremony in Texas.
Regardless, the lively ceremony papered over the deterioration of the US-Turkish relationship. The United States and Turkey have been at odds over Syria since the start of the Syrian civil war, the subsequent US-led war against Islamic State, and over the Turkish decision to punish America for its displeasure in the Middle East through the purchase of a Russian air defense system: the S-400. Ankara’s decision to do so resulted in it being booted from the multi-national consortium to build the F-35. Turkey’s decision was remarkably unwise and has set back Turkish aviation considerably, even if it has galvanized local investment in a domestic fighter program. Thus, one year after steam punk Hezarfen danced in Dallas, Ankara was booted from the very program it had invested billions of dollars in.
The reality is that the tumultuous turn in US-Turkish relations has had a negative impact on the Turkish Air Force. Ankara was subjected to a de-facto US arms embargo for its invasion of Syria in 2019, delaying necessary upgrades and weapons purchases for Turkey’s aging F-16s. Turkey’s decision to delay the accession of Sweden to NATO exacerbated this issue, but ultimately created the conditions for a bargain with the Biden administration. In exchange for agreement on Sweden joining NATO, the administration would put pressure on Congress to move ahead with the sale of new F-16 Block 70s to Turkey, modernization kits for current Turkish F-16s, and various weapons needed to arm them. The deal was finalized after months of tedious negotiation in 2024, but has since been slowed down as Ankara considers how to invest in its future fighter fleet.
The Turkish government should seize the moment, stop being intransigent on “saying yes” to a compromise on a S-400 solution, and take the much-needed step to recapitalize its aging fighter fleet.
The time is right for renewed negotiations regarding the sale of the F-35 to Turkey. The United States Air Force may be forced to cut the overall buy of the jet to pay for other budgetary priorities, all but ensuring that pressures to export the jet to new customers will increase. Turkey is open to the sale and US President Donald Trump has tried for years to overcome Congressional resistance to export the jet to Ankara. The Turkish government should seize the moment, stop being intransigent on “saying yes” to a compromise on a S-400 solution, and take the much-needed step to recapitalize its aging fighter fleet.
Trump Hemmed in by Legislative Branch
The push and pull between Trump and his Republican party mates in Congress is an important part of the ongoing—and tedious—US-Turkish back and forth about fighter exports. Trump has long sought ways to expand executive power and views the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA)—the binding sanctions Congress imposed on Russia in 2016—as usurping presidential power. CAATSA was not designed with Turkey in mind. It was designed with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in mind. CAATSA mandates sanctions on Russia and threatens secondary sanctions on countries that do “significant transactions” with a list of Russian companies, including the maker of the S-400.
The legislation, importantly, does not have a presidential national security waiver, thereby limiting what many in Congress know to be the case (that Trump would lift sanctions on Russia if allowed), but without actually having to say it out loud. Turkey was warned that its purchase of the S-400 would trigger CAATSA but pursued it anyway. Thus, after Ankara secured Russian financing and received its first S-400, its defense procurement agency was sanctioned. The sanctions remain in place, although there are obvious “work arounds” that have enabled a recent resumption of US-Turkish arms sales.
Independent of this, Ankara’s fielding of the system led to concurrent Congressional efforts to remove Turkey from the F-35 consortium (against Trump’s will) and led to a worst case outcome for Ankara: Its options to buy US fighters were hindered by CAATSA and it lost the F-35, along with the billions in supply contracts Turkish firms had been awarded to arm and service the jet. To make matters worse, Turkey never actually deployed its S-400, making this a truly bewildering decade of decision-making.
Curious Negotiations
The US-Turkish negotiations about the export of the F-35 have never completely stopped. However, they are limited by a very clear provision in the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Specifically, Section 1245 bars the transfer of the F-35 to Turkey unless Ankara “no longer possesses the S-400 air and missile defense system or any other equipment, materials, or personnel associated with such system.” The language is very clear. Thus, for close to half-a-decade, US government officials have proposed all sorts of ways to let Ankara have the jet it helped pay for. The Biden administration asked Turkey to send the S-400 to Ukraine. Ankara did not. There was a proposal to send it to Azerbaijan. It was not sent. And now there is talk of sending it to Syria.
I have proposed keeping it in Turkey but allowing a NATO team to monitor that it is never used with open-source satellite imagery. Others have proposed a variation of the same thing. The details of the solution to S-400 aren’t all that important. What really matters is if Ankara is willing to compromise and risk tensions with Russia to find a way forward with the Trump administration.
The details of the solution to S-400 aren’t all that important. What really matters is if Ankara is willing to compromise and risk tensions with Russia to find a way forward with the Trump administration.
The case of Sweden’s NATO accession and the export of the latest F-16 variant is a good example of how challenging this still may be. Ankara strenuously objected to Sweden’s accession to NATO over Stockholm’s relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a terrorist group based in Northern Iraq. Turkey has been negotiating with the group’s imprisoned leader for close to two decades to end the now forty-year-old insurgency. The bargain that the Biden administration proposed to Turkey was simple: accept Sweden in NATO and the administration would make the case to Congress to authorize the sale of the F-16. The negotiations dragged on and were tedious. Ultimately Ankara relented on Sweden and former US President Joe Biden helped to grease the wheels in Congress to authorize the sale. Turkey has since scaled down the purchase, foregoing modernization kits, in favor of an agreement for the export of new build aircraft. The decision most probably is to save money, although Ankara will frame it differently.
The saga over both the F-35 and the F-16 has prompted some in Turkey to pursue fighter diversification. Turkish officials have approached the Eurofighter consortium for the purchase of up to two squadrons of the European-made jet. The agreement is still being negotiated and, I believe, Ankara may be trying to use the prospect of diversifying suppliers to force Lockheed Martin to be more forthcoming with offsets and pricing on the F-16. Regardless, the idea that Ankara should have two fighter fleets is one that sounds good in theory but breaks down immediately when subjected to scrutiny about logistics, sustainment, and total cost.
The idea that Ankara should have two fighter fleets is one that sounds good in theory but breaks down immediately when subjected to scrutiny about logistics, sustainment, and total cost.
Simply put: Operating modern jet fighters costs a lot. Operating two jet fighters of different types requires two training pipelines for pilots, maintainers, and building new facilities—on top of the total cost of buying the jets. For Turkey, this would appear to be prohibitively expensive, or at least a poor use of finite resources at a time when its fighter fleet needs upgrades, and so much money is being poured into domestic alternatives that remain in the development stage.
The insistence on some sort of drawn-out negotiation is odd, considering the strength of the F-16 export market and the still strong orders for the F-35.
Future of the US F-35 Buy
This is why the time may be right for Turkey to make a concession and approach the Trump administration about the F-35. The chasm between US and Turkish policies vis-a-vis Ukraine has narrowed. Trump does not care about Turkish officials arresting the main opposition candidate, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Trump share a similar point of view on Syria. The two countries have a narrow window to resolve this irritation in relations.
The domestic reality in the United States may also make Congress more amenable to a more modest Turkish concession on the S-400 issue. Here is why: I believe that the looming Air Force budget request for FY 2026 all but guarantees that the total American F-35 buy will be cut. This is on top of the multi-causal (and not all Trump-related) Canadian reasons for considering slashing its total F-35 buy, perhaps from eighty-eight jets to as little as twenty-four.
I could be wrong. The Air Force may get all that it wants from Congress. It could also add extra jets to an unfunded priority list, thereby giving allies in Congress the means to “plus up” defense spending over and above the first budget cut to buy more jets. However, I believe that the reasons for future cuts to the United States’ F-35 fighter are a set of multi-causal factors that all point to one conclusion:
Powerful people in the Trump administration do not like the program and have called for it to be cancelled.
President Trump authorized the development of the F-47, which will cost a considerable amount to research and develop, thereby requiring finite funds to be moved around to pay for it.
The modernization of the Air Force’s leg of the nuclear triad is woefully over budget.
The Trump administration wants the United States to build expensive space based missile defense, which will require lots of money to build. If you add all of this together, it is quite clear that certain things will have to be cut and the largest item in the budget is the F-35.
Now, there are ample reasons for the F-35 program to continue forward. The jets are on the precipice of a major upgrade, which Air Force and civilian officials have cited the technology upgrade and the jet as necessary for future war planning against China. The F-47, too, is likely to be fielded in comparatively small numbers, with the plans to augment the jet with unmanned loyal wingman still nebulous and undefined. Thus, for the US Air Force, it is important to have a large, high-low mix of aircraft with the F-35 as the backbone of future fighter aviation, with the additive benefits of the F-47 and other unmanned aircraft that it could be paired with.
It is important to keep the production lines filled, even if the total US buy is cut down. Thus, there will be pressure to find new markets for the F-35. The most obvious candidates are the Gulf Arab states, which have had a long-standing interest in buying the jet. The other is India, which is more complicated, and was already approached. The last is Turkey, the booted partner, whose leadership still wants to buy the jet to compete with Greece. This creates a series of interlinked incentives to revisit the S-400 issue and finally find a way out of this current situation. Ankara may never get a better shot at finding a fig leaf with the United States and using Trump’s power over his Republican allies to find a way to export jets to Turkey.
Ankara may never get a better shot at finding a fig leaf with the United States and using Trump’s power over his Republican allies to find a way to export jets to Turkey.
Getting to Yes (and the challenges that will remain)
As an obvious first step, Ankara should use this opportunity to finally decide about the future of the air defense system it does not currently use. The most straightforward option is to send the S-400 system to Ukraine, which was the Biden administration’s offer. This would free up the Trump administration to turn the screws on Congress to sell the jet to Turkey (and others), which may become a more salient topic if the overall jet buy for the US Air Force is cut. If Turkey chooses not to do this, it should be more forthright about how to verify the non-use of the system inside the country. This could be done with satellite imagery, a multi-national team, or some other creative way that allows for Ankara to put this issue behind it.
Beyond the obvious way to resolve the S-400 issue, the Turkish side is almost certain to demand that they be re-admitted to the F-35 program, or at least be re-awarded contracts they lost when booted from the program.
It is important to be clear about how hard this will be, even if a consensus is reached. Beyond the obvious way to resolve the S-400 issue, the Turkish side is almost certain to demand that they be re-admitted to the F-35 program, or at least be re-awarded contracts they lost when booted from the program. Ankara’s curious decision to buy the S-400 meant that the domestic aerospace firms that had won contracts to provide parts and maintenance for the F-35 in Europe were cut off from a set of lucrative contracts. The F-35 is certain to be the backbone of Europe’s Air Forces for the foreseeable future. Turkey stood to benefit from this. With its removal from the program, Turkish firms lost out on production contracts in Germany and in the United States. Ankara will be in a position to purchase the jet but will almost certainly demand offsets in return. This will bog down any agreement in tedious negotiations, so people should be clear eyed about how much work will remain once (and if) the S-400 issue is dealt with and the US and Turkey agree on negotiations for the sale of the jet.
Regardless, there is now a narrow window to resolve the S-400 issue. The interests in the United States are converging. It requires bold and decisive leadership, identifying the obvious trends in the US fighter market, and taking a step forward. In other words, it is the basic story of Hezarfen, the steam punk renaissance man who reportedly strapped on wings and jumped from a high tower to fly across the Bosphorus. Making a concession on the S-400 requires far less bravery and the time is right for Turkey to consider taking that leap.
Aaron Stein is the President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).
Mr. Stein made only passing reference to Greece. That is whistling past the graveyard. Greece's supporters in the United States will fight tooth and nail to prevent the sale from happening. They will probably lose but will exact conditions such as a Turkish public pledge with US guarantees not to use the F 35s against Greece (or any other NATO Ally) and to refrain from using the F35 in any violations of Greek space and Maritime boundaries.
These requirements Will be unacceptable to Erdogan and to the nationalist majority that now runs Turkish politics. It's going to be tough no matter what you do. There are probably a lot of other issues out there that will raise their heads, uglier otherwise, should it appear that the F35 sale has traction. A more Western-oriented Turkish government than Erdogan's could try and reach an agreement with Greece on its disputes which would lesson Greek opposition. Erdogan can't or won't, not clear which.