ANALYSIS: Trump Lifts Turkish Sanctions and Reopens the Door to Erdogan's F-35s

"We don't sanction our friends"

Donald Trump announced, at the NATO summit in Ankara in early July 2026, that the United States would lift the sanctions imposed on Turkey since 2020, while leaving open the possibility of a Turkish return to the stealth F-35 fighter program. Seated next to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump declared: "I can tell you we're going to lift the sanctions, okay? It's time. We don't sanction our friends."

This declaration, as spectacular as it was sudden, reopens a six-year-old file that had deeply fractured the relationship between Washington and Ankara, two capitals nonetheless bound by their shared membership in the Atlantic Alliance.

A file born from the purchase of a Russian system

The dispute originates in Turkey's 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 air-defense system, a decision that triggered Ankara's immediate exclusion from the F-35 program and the imposition of American sanctions under the CAATSA law in December 2020. Six years later, this file remains technically unresolved, even as Trump appears determined to close it unilaterally.

Understanding what this announcement actually changes, and what it does not yet change, requires separating presidential rhetoric from the legal constraints that continue to weigh on this file.

I understand the strategic interest in reconciling Washington and Ankara against Russia and Iran. But I refuse to applaud a gesture that rewards a partner who chose, at a critical moment, Russian military hardware over Western solidarity.

Zelensky, meanwhile, keeps fighting to get a tenth of the diplomatic courtesy Trump just handed Erdogan in a few sentences. That contrast should give pause to anyone claiming Ukraine gets preferential treatment in Washington.

A system still physically present in Turkey

The Russian S-400 system, at the heart of this dispute since 2019, remains physically present on Turkish territory. No official source has confirmed its withdrawal or dismantlement, which means the fundamental legal condition that justified Turkey's exclusion from the F-35 program remains, to this day, still in force despite Trump's statements.

This material reality directly contradicts the spirit of the presidential announcement: you cannot simply declare a national-security problem resolved while the equipment that caused the problem in the first place is still sitting on the ground.

A persistent ambiguity maintained on purpose

On the specific question of returning to the F-35 program, Trump was noticeably more cautious than on general sanctions: "That's a decision we're going to make. It's a great plane, by far the best, and it's certainly something we're going to consider." This carefully vague phrasing gives the administration considerable room to maneuver, without any firm commitment or precise timeline.

This calculated ambiguity lets Trump present himself as a generous ally in front of Erdogan, while avoiding a formal commitment on a file the American Congress could block.

A Russian defense system still installed on the soil of a NATO member, and no one seems willing to treat it as a serious obstacle: that is exactly the kind of strategic inconsistency that weakens the credibility of the entire Alliance in the face of Moscow.

A clause with no possible presidential waiver

The 2020 US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contains an explicit clause barring any transfer of F-35s to Turkey until it no longer possesses the S-400 system, or any equipment, materiel or personnel associated with it. Congress wrote this provision with no presidential waiver mechanism, which means Trump cannot, on his own, authorize the sale of F-35s to Turkey without a legislative change or a complete, verifiable resolution of the S-400 file.

This legal constraint explains why Trump has carefully avoided formally promising the sale of F-35s, settling instead for talk of a future "decision" without removing the fundamental legal obstacle that has blocked this file since 2019.

A bipartisan opposition that complicates the political calculus

Several Republican lawmakers, including Representative Nicole Malliotakis and five other members of Congress, sent a letter to Trump in early July 2026 opposing the lifting of sanctions without a verifiable guarantee on eliminating Turkey's S-400 system. This opposition, coming from the president's own political camp, illustrates the real limits of his ability to unilaterally push through this file, even with the best political will in the world.

This internal fracture within the Republican Party over a national-security file shows that the Turkish question isn't simply a tug-of-war between Trump and Congress, but reflects strategic concerns shared well beyond the usual partisan lines.

Seeing Republican lawmakers push back against the president's wishes on this specific file reassures me a little. It proves there are still, in Washington, institutional safeguards capable of restraining the more impulsive decisions of a president who is otherwise indispensable against Russia and Iran.

Israeli air superiority at stake

Turkey's potential return to the F-35 program particularly worries Israel, which had gained, by seeing Turkey excluded from the program in 2019, a form of guaranteed qualitative air superiority in the region. A Turkish return would reshuffle the regional deck, at a time when relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv remain tense on numerous issues, notably the Palestinian question.

This regional dimension, often overlooked in media coverage focused on the bilateral American-Turkish relationship, deserves serious attention: every additional F-35 delivered to a country in the region shifts the strategic balance of the entire Middle East.

Greece, a historic Aegean rival

Greece, Turkey's historic rival in the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, shares similar concerns. Athens invested heavily in its own F-35 capabilities precisely to maintain a qualitative edge over Ankara, a strategic calculation that would be directly upended by a Turkish return to the program without additional conditions.

These two regional oppositions, Israeli and Greek, add a layer of diplomatic complexity Trump will have to manage if he genuinely wants to turn his verbal promise to Erdogan in Ankara into reality, beyond a simple media announcement.

The West must remain the world's strategic center of gravity, but that means not weakening its most reliable partners, like Israel and Greece, to satisfy the ambitions of a Turkish partner whose loyalty to the Alliance remains, at best, ambivalent.

A strategically indispensable Turkey

Turkey occupies a unique geographic and military position within NATO: it controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, fields the Alliance's second-largest army, and plays an active diplomatic role in several sensitive regional files, including the war in Ukraine itself. This strategic position explains why Trump treats reconciliation with Erdogan as a priority, despite the legitimate objections raised by some allies.

Fully reintegrating Turkey into the Western defense architecture could, by this logic, strengthen the Alliance's cohesion against Russia, while reducing Ankara's incentive to keep drawing closer militarily to Moscow for its air-defense needs.

A risky bet that could also backfire

But this calculation carries a real risk: by lifting sanctions without securing a firm guarantee on withdrawing the S-400, Washington could send a dangerous signal to other allies tempted to buy Russian military hardware while hoping, eventually, to escape the consequences of that choice through a simple later political negotiation.

This precedent, if the Turkish file closes without a clear resolution on the S-400, would weaken the coherence of American arms-export control policy, an essential tool for maintaining discipline within the Alliance against Russian attempts to fracture the Western camp.

Trump remains, despite his excesses and personal digressions, a necessary evil for the West on the geopolitical level. But this Turkish file also shows his limits: he sometimes negotiates like a real-estate developer, not like the guardian of an entire alliance's strategic coherence.

A Patriot license announced the same day

This Turkish announcement did not happen in a vacuum: it coincided, the same day in Ankara, with Trump's promise to Volodymyr Zelensky to grant Ukraine a production license for Patriot interceptors. This temporal overlap fed legitimate questions about the real order of priorities of the American administration at this summit, between the Turkish file and Ukraine's urgent needs.

Several observers present in Ankara noted that media coverage of the Turkish file sometimes overshadowed the far more immediate urgency of Ukrainian air defense, even as Kyiv continued to suffer massive Russian strikes while the summit itself was underway.

Kyiv struck the day after the diplomatic smiles

On July 9, 2026, the day after the summit closed, a barrage of Russian missiles and drones killed thirty-one civilians in Kyiv, the deadliest attack on the Ukrainian capital of the year. This brutal contrast between diplomatic negotiations over Turkey and F-35s, and the deadly reality of the Ukrainian front, sums up on its own the difficulty of judging a summit solely by its spectacular bilateral announcements.

This sequence is a reminder that every minute the American administration spends on secondary bilateral files, however strategically important, unfolds in a context where Ukraine's emergency knows absolutely no diplomatic pause.

Thirty-one dead in Kyiv, twenty-four hours after smiling handshakes over the Turkish question: that contrast should haunt every Western leader who spends diplomatic time on secondary files while an allied people gets bombed.

Moscow watches for potential Alliance fragmentation

The Kremlin watches with obvious interest any internal tension within NATO, seeing in it a chance to show that Western unity remains fragile on complex bilateral files like Turkey's. Every visible crack between allies, even on a subject that doesn't directly concern Ukraine, feeds Russian propaganda about the supposed decadence and division of the Western camp.

This dynamic partly explains why some Western analysts call for resolving the Turkish file quickly and clearly, rather than letting a persistent ambiguity feed Russian narratives about the disunity of the Atlantic Alliance.

An ambiguous signal sent to Moscow on sanctions

There's also a subtler risk: by relatively easily lifting sanctions imposed on an ally for buying Russian hardware, Washington could unintentionally weaken the credibility of its own sanctions regime more broadly, including the sanctions imposed directly against Russia itself for its invasion of Ukraine.

This risk of political contagion, if not carefully managed by the American administration, could complicate broader Western efforts to maintain coherent, credible economic pressure against Vladimir Putin's regime.

Putin must be delighted to watch Washington negotiate away, so easily, sanctions tied to a NATO ally's purchase of Russian hardware. That sends a dangerous message about the West's real firmness when it comes to its own tools of economic pressure.

Tehran watches every Western hesitation

Iran, already engaged in direct military confrontation with the United States and Israel, is also watching this Turkish file closely, seeing it as an indicator of the real consistency of American sanctions policy toward regional partners who source military hardware from Russia or maintain ambiguous relations with Moscow.

Any perceived inconsistency in how American sanctions are applied could, according to several regional analysts, encourage Tehran to keep pursuing its own strategy of evading international sanctions regimes, convinced that Western firmness remains negotiable under the right political conditions.

Beijing, an attentive observer of Western cohesion

China, for its part, is also following this Turkish file as one indicator among others of the real strength of the Western security architecture. Every example of complex bilateral negotiation between NATO allies feeds Beijing's strategic calculations about the long-term reliability of American commitments to its partners, a factor that weighs directly on tensions around Taiwan.

This global dimension of the Turkish file, often overlooked in analyses focused solely on the bilateral American-Turkish relationship, shows how every American foreign-policy decision now resonates simultaneously across several distinct strategic theaters, from Ukraine to Taiwan by way of the Middle East.

China, Iran, Russia and North Korea form an informal axis that benefits from every Western inconsistency, however minor it may appear. That is precisely why Washington cannot afford to treat this Turkish file lightly.

2019, the exclusion that started it all

It's worth remembering that Turkey's exclusion from the F-35 program, in July 2019, was not an arbitrary or punitive decision without basis: it responded to a real, documented technical security concern raised by the Pentagon, according to which integrating the Russian S-400 system on Turkish territory could allow Moscow to collect sensitive data on the stealth capabilities of the Alliance's most advanced aircraft.

This technical concern, at the root of the dispute, has never been formally resolved through a verifiable withdrawal of the Russian system, which means the fundamental security problem that justified Turkey's exclusion in 2019 remains, on a strictly technical level, still valid in 2026.

2020, sanctions imposed reluctantly

The December 2020 CAATSA sanctions were themselves imposed with some reluctance by the American administration of the time, under direct pressure from Congress, which had threatened to impose its own legislative sanctions if the executive branch didn't act voluntarily. This historical context shows that the American Congress has always played a driving role in this file, far more than the executive branch itself, regardless of which administration holds the White House.

This institutional dynamic, where Congress firmly pushes for toughness while the executive seeks diplomatic compromises, is repeating today almost identically with Republican opposition to Trump's announcement, suggesting this file will likely remain stuck in Congress regardless of presidential will.

What strikes me about this file is the consistency of the American Congress against the inconsistency of the executive branch, no matter who holds the presidency. That may be the best institutional guarantee that this file won't be settled by a simple presidential whim.

A strategic rehabilitation, not just an aircraft

For Erdogan, a potential return to the F-35 program represents far more than a simple acquisition of military equipment: it's a complete strategic rehabilitation within the Western Alliance, after six years of partial isolation caused by Turkey's choice to buy the Russian S-400 system. This symbolic dimension explains Ankara's particular insistence on this specific file, beyond even its concrete military value.

Turkey is also seeking to strengthen its broader regional negotiating position, particularly against its traditional rivals in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, where possessing F-35s would significantly shift the military balance perceived by its neighbors.

A lever also used on the Syrian and Kurdish files

Several regional analysts note that Turkey is also using this F-35 file as a broader negotiating lever on other sensitive regional issues, notably the situation in post-Assad Syria and the Kurdish question, two files where Ankara seeks additional American concessions in exchange for its continued cooperation within the Alliance.

This transactional approach to Turkish diplomacy, which systematically links several distinct files together, further complicates Washington's ability to resolve the S-400 problem alone without other Turkish demands progressively attaching themselves to it.

Erdogan negotiates with real skill, turning every bilateral file into leverage for several others. But that skill shouldn't make us forget that Turkey made a deliberate choice in 2019, and that choice carries consequences that don't disappear with a simple handshake.

A prolonged legislative deadlock, the most likely scenario

Given the bipartisan opposition already expressed in Congress and the absence of any sign of Turkish S-400 withdrawal, the most likely scenario for the coming months remains a prolonged legislative deadlock, where Trump's announcement stays largely symbolic without any concrete translation into actual F-35 deliveries to Turkey.

This scenario, however frustrating for Ankara, would match the historical trajectory of this file since 2019: repeated political announcements, followed by legal and institutional obstacles that indefinitely delay any concrete, lasting resolution.

A partial compromise on a gradual S-400 withdrawal

An alternative, more optimistic scenario would involve a technical negotiation allowing for a gradual withdrawal or a verifiable neutralization of the Turkish S-400 system, in exchange for a clear timeline for reintegration into the F-35 program. This compromise, though technically complex and politically delicate for Erdogan domestically, would offer an honorable way out for both sides.

Whichever scenario materializes, this file will keep illustrating the permanent tension between Trump's spectacular diplomatic impulses and the American institutional constraints that, so far, have always ended up prevailing on this specific subject.

I remain skeptical of any quick resolution to this file. The history of the American-Turkish relationship since 2019 shows that Trump's spectacular announcements almost systematically run into legal and institutional realities he doesn't control alone.

An Alliance that must manage its own internal contradictions

This Turkish file is a reminder that NATO, despite its displayed unity against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, continues to manage significant internal contradictions among its members, ranging from certain allies' purchases of Russian equipment to historic regional rivalries like the one between Turkey and Greece. These contradictions, though rarely highlighted publicly, potentially weaken the Alliance's overall strategic coherence against a common adversary.

Resolving this kind of complex bilateral file transparently and coherently would, over time, strengthen the credibility of the entire Western security architecture, rather than letting these unresolved internal tensions indefinitely feed Russian propaganda narratives about Western disunity.

A missed opportunity for collective firmness

Some analysts believe this file should have been resolved collectively by the entire Alliance, rather than through an improvised bilateral negotiation between Trump and Erdogan on the sidelines of a summit devoted mainly to Ukraine. This unilateral approach, however diplomatically skillful, deprives other allies of a decisive voice on a file that directly affects the regional strategic balance they also depend on.

This institutional criticism, though rarely voiced publicly by European governments themselves, circulates quietly in diplomatic circles that watch, with some concern, Trump's tendency to negotiate major strategic files bilaterally and personally rather than collectively.

The West must remain the world's strategic center, but that requires collective cohesion, not just improvised bilateral negotiations between two presidents who happen to like each other personally. This Turkish file reveals a deficit of method the Alliance will need to fix.

A marked preference for personal gestures

This Turkish file confirms a pattern already observed many times in Trump's diplomacy: a marked preference for spectacular personal gestures, announced directly in front of the cameras, rather than for gradual institutional processes negotiated collectively with all parties involved, including the American Congress itself.

This approach, while it sometimes produces quick symbolic results, regularly runs into the same structural obstacles once the media euphoria fades: existing laws, parliamentary opposition, institutional resistance that doesn't simply vanish because a president made a favorable announcement in front of the cameras.

A method that works better on urgency than on law

This personal diplomatic method seems to work better on files of immediate urgency, like the Patriot license promised to Ukraine the same day, than on files structurally blocked by American law, like the Turkish F-35s. This distinction, essential for assessing the real reach of each presidential announcement, should guide any serious analysis of this administration's diplomacy.

It is this distinction between urgency and law that will make it possible, in the coming months, to judge whether Trump's Turkish announcement translates into concrete reality or joins the long list of presidential promises that, sooner or later, run into the institutional limits of the American system.

Trump excels at the art of the spectacular announcement, but this Turkish file, like so many before it, risks demonstrating once again that governing takes more than a handshake in front of the cameras. American law, for its part, doesn't get negotiated in a summit photo.

Other NATO countries are watching closely

Several other NATO member countries, facing their own military-procurement dilemmas, are watching closely how the Turkish file resolves, as a potential precedent for their own future negotiations with Washington. If Turkey manages to secure complete rehabilitation despite its past purchase of Russian hardware, that could send an encouraging signal to other capitals tempted by similar arrangements with Moscow or with other non-Western suppliers.

This precedent risk, largely underestimated in media coverage focused solely on the bilateral American-Turkish relationship, should nonetheless weigh heavily on Washington's thinking before any final resolution of this file, whatever Trump's personal fondness for Erdogan may be.

The credibility of the American sanctions regime at stake

Beyond the Turkish case alone, it is the overall credibility of the American sanctions regime that gets tested by this file. A sanctions regime that appears negotiable under the pressure of a personal relationship between two leaders mechanically loses part of its deterrent force against every other actor who might, in the future, consider circumventing Western rules by betting on a future political reconciliation.

It is precisely this kind of precedent that Russia, Iran and North Korea are watching with the greatest interest, looking to identify any crack in Western coherence they could exploit themselves in their own future negotiations with Western powers.

Every precedent matters in this multipolar cold war. If Turkey walks away without real consequence after buying Russian hardware, the West sends a dangerous message to everyone watching, including Pyongyang and Tehran.

A symbolic announcement, not yet a legal reality

The announcement Trump made in Ankara about lifting Turkish sanctions constitutes, at this stage, a symbolic political gesture rather than a completed legal reality. The S-400 system remains physically present in Turkey, American law still bars any F-35 transfer without a verifiable resolution of this file, and bipartisan opposition has already emerged in Congress against any hasty lifting of sanctions.

This file illustrates, once again, the persistent gap between spectacular presidential rhetoric and the real institutional constraints that continue to shape, in the final analysis, American foreign policy, regardless of the sitting president's personal will.

A test for broader Western coherence

Beyond the bilateral American-Turkish file alone, this affair constitutes a revealing test for the coherence of the entire Western sanctions policy, at a moment when the West needs unity and firmness against Russia, Iran, China and North Korea more than ever. How this Turkish file gets resolved, or fails to get resolved, in the coming months will say a great deal about the real solidity of the Western security architecture beyond mere summit declarations.

Until then, this file remains suspended between two realities: the words spoken in Ankara, and the laws that, for now, continue to contradict them.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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