The Trump Administration is right that America needs friends that are awake to the world’s accumulating threats and prepared to defend themselves. But a test of sincerity is coming at next week’s NATO summit. Will President Trump sell F-35s to Turkey? “Model allies,” to borrow the Administration’s phrase, don’t buy Russian air defenses.
An F-35
Asked recently whether Ankara might get the F-35, Mr. Trump replied: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “is a strong member of NATO. I’m going to probably do something that’s going to make him very happy. He’s a respected man, a respected leader, and he’s been a friend of mine.”
America’s premier fighter jet should be a nonstarter for Ankara as long as it owns an S-400 missile-defense system. The first Trump Administration was right to boot Turkey from the F-35 program when it bought the S-400 in 2019. The Trump Pentagon said at the time that it had offered Patriot defenses to Turkey and warned Ankara multiple times.
Allowing the two systems to work together would amount to letting Vladimir Putin conduct target practice on the free world’s pilots. “Turkey’s possession of both the S-400 and the F-35 is so dangerous,” as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explained last year, “because the two systems operating in proximity or networking together could give Moscow valuable intelligence.”
The F-35’s stealth technology and sensors are a core reason the U.S. and Israel owned the skies over Iran during operations Epic Fury and Midnight Hammer. The stakes of cracking the F-35’s tech are especially acute given Russia is working with China and Iran in a larger competition with the U.S. Military strategist Mick Ryan says the world’s bad actors have formed a “new adversary learning and adaptation bloc” to socialize the lessons of warfare from Ukraine and the Middle East.
Turkey is lurking in the strategic background of the Iran war and wants to exploit any power vacuum left by a weakened Tehran, which the U.S. should hedge against. But the U.S. can still offer Ankara F-16 jets and other equipment.
Selling the F-35 to Turkey would fuel European cynicism that Mr. Trump cares less about European defense spending than he does about pleasing the illiberal strongmen he views as pals. Congress also won’t like the sale, and the President has far better uses for his political capital. One use would be fixing the foreign military sales system so America’s best allies can buy all the U.S. air defense they need in a timely fashion.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently gave a speech about building a new NATO “focused on hard power and real deterrence.” That would mean not handing the alliance’s prime adversary a potential cheat code on the West’s best military aircraft technology.
