ANALYSIS: Turkey and the F-35, a Political Promise Against a Legal Lock

Introduction: a promise made in Ankara, a law written in Washington

A sentence that lit up headlines across two continents

Some sentences travel faster than the policy behind them. On July 7, 2026, in Ankara, U.S. President Donald Trump declared: "We're going to lift the sanctions... It's time. You don't sanction your friends," according to Reuters. Within hours, the sentence had circulated across Turkish, American and European outlets as if the F-35 question for Turkey had already been settled at the stroke of a presidential statement.

It has not. Behind this political promise sits a legal architecture that a single presidential sentence cannot simply erase, built over years of congressional legislation specifically designed to survive exactly this kind of executive enthusiasm. This analysis exists to separate the political theater in Ankara from the legal reality in Washington.

Why this gap matters beyond a single fighter jet program

This story matters because it reveals something structural about how promises made by an American president interact with a legislative system built, in part, precisely to constrain presidential improvisation on matters of national security cooperation with allies who have also cooperated with adversaries. Turkey's case is the clearest test of that tension currently playing out in NATO.

Understanding this gap also matters for Ukraine and the broader alliance, because the credibility of any American promise made to an ally, at a summit or elsewhere, depends partly on whether that promise can actually survive the legal machinery that governs its implementation.

I find something almost instructive in watching a promise this confident collide with a law this stubborn. It says a great deal about how much weight a single presidential sentence should, or should not, be given in matters this technical and this consequential.

I want to be honest about the limits of my own certainty here: legal texts can be amended, waived or reinterpreted under enough political pressure. What I can say with confidence is that, as things stand today, the law does not bend simply because a president wants it to.

How Turkey lost its place in the F-35 program

The S-400 purchase that triggered the exclusion

To understand the current legal lock, one has to go back to 2019, when Turkey was formally excluded from the F-35 program after proceeding with the purchase of the Russian-made S-400 air defense system. The core American concern, still cited today, is that the S-400's radar systems could theoretically gather sensitive data about the F-35's stealth signature, compromising the jet's effectiveness against Russian air defenses precisely because Ankara possesses the very system designed to detect it.

This exclusion was not a symbolic slap: it removed Turkey from co-production of F-35 components, ended Turkish pilot training on the aircraft, and blocked delivery of jets Turkey had already partly paid for. Ankara has argued for years that this punishment is disproportionate; Washington's national security establishment has largely maintained that the risk remains real as long as the S-400 remains on Turkish soil.

A dispute that hardened into permanent legislation

What began as an executive branch decision under the first Trump administration did not remain a purely executive matter. Congress moved to codify the exclusion into law, transforming what could have been reversed by a simple change in administration policy into a much harder legal obstacle requiring an act of Congress, or a narrowly defined legal pathway, to undo.

This legislative hardening is the single most important fact of this entire story, and it is the fact most absent from the celebratory headlines that followed Trump's Ankara statement. A promise from a president cannot, on its own, unwrite a law passed by Congress.

I think Turkey has a legitimate grievance about the scale of this exclusion, even as I understand the security logic behind it. But legitimate grievance and legal reality are two different things, and conflating them is exactly what much of the coverage of Trump's statement has done.

Section 1245: the specific legal lock explained

What the 2020 NDAA actually says

The legal obstacle at the center of this analysis has a name and a number: Section 1245 of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. According to analysis published by JINSA, this provision explicitly blocks the transfer of F-35 aircraft to Turkey for as long as Turkey "still possesses" the S-400 system on its territory.

The critical detail, one that received far less attention than Trump's Ankara sentence, is that Section 1245 contains no presidential waiver provision. Unlike many sanctions statutes that grant the president discretionary authority to waive restrictions under specific conditions, this particular provision leaves no such door open. The condition is binary: either Turkey no longer possesses the S-400, or the F-35 transfer remains legally blocked.

Why the absence of a waiver changes everything

This absence of a waiver mechanism is what separates the F-35 question from ordinary sanctions relief. A president can often lift or suspend broader sanctions programs, such as those under CAATSA, through executive authority or by working with Congress on targeted relief. Section 1245 was deliberately written to remove that flexibility specifically for the F-35 transfer question.

This distinction is the single most important technical fact this analysis has to offer: lifting CAATSA sanctions, something a president has real tools to attempt, is simply not the same legal action as authorizing an F-35 transfer under Section 1245, something Congress alone can meaningfully unlock, and only if Turkey first parts with its S-400 system.

I have rarely seen a piece of legislation this precisely engineered to prevent exactly the kind of presidential improvisation we just watched unfold in Ankara. Whoever wrote Section 1245 anticipated this exact scenario and closed the door in advance.

CAATSA versus Section 1245: the distinction nobody explained clearly

Two different legal instruments, one confused public conversation

Much of the confusion following Trump's statement stems from treating CAATSA sanctions and the F-35 exclusion as if they were the same legal mechanism, governed by the same rules and reversible through the same process. They are not. CAATSA, the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, is the broader sanctions framework under which Turkey was penalized for the S-400 purchase in the first place.

Section 1245, by contrast, is a narrower, F-35-specific provision embedded in defense authorization law, with its own separate conditions and, crucially, its own absence of presidential discretion. A president can announce the lifting of CAATSA sanctions and be entirely accurate about that specific action, while F-35 transfers remain completely unaffected by that same announcement.

What JINSA's analysis makes explicit

The think tank JINSA, in its analysis published after the Ankara summit, states this distinction in direct terms: lifting CAATSA sanctions "doesn't unlock the F-35" for Turkey. This single sentence, from an organization with deep expertise in this exact area of defense policy, cuts through most of the confusion generated by the initial headlines following Trump's statement.

This is precisely the kind of technical clarification that rarely makes it into a 24-hour news cycle built around a punchy presidential quote, but it is exactly the clarification a serious analysis of this story owes its readers.

I think this is where journalism sometimes fails its audience: repeating a dramatic quote is easy, explaining the two distinct legal mechanisms it actually touches is harder, and harder usually loses out to easier in a fast news cycle. This analysis is my attempt to not let that happen here.

The contradiction: Trump's own words, a day apart

From certainty to hesitation in 24 hours

What makes this story even more revealing is that President Trump himself appeared to walk back his own certainty within a single day. According to The Hill, the day after his Ankara statement, Trump described himself as undecided on the F-35 question, drawing an explicit comparison between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's loyalty and that of China, a comparison that raised its own separate concerns among observers of the U.S.-Turkey relationship.

This shift, from an emphatic "we're going to lift the sanctions" to a more hedged "undecided" framing within 24 hours, is itself a data point worth weighing carefully. It suggests the Ankara statement may have reflected a diplomatic mood in the room more than a settled, deliberated policy position ready for implementation.

What this contradiction says about the nature of the promise

A promise this quickly qualified by its own author does not inspire confidence that a fully worked-out legal and legislative strategy exists behind it. This does not mean the intention was insincere; it may simply reflect the gap between a president's stated wishes and the considerably more complicated process required to actually deliver on them within the American system.

This pattern, grand statement followed by walked-back nuance, is not unique to this specific issue in the current administration's foreign policy communication, and it deserves to be factored into how much weight any single Ankara-style statement should be given going forward.

I will say plainly that comparing a NATO ally's loyalty to that of China, even in passing, is a strange and troubling way to build confidence in a defense partnership. If anything, this comparison undercuts the very promise it was meant to accompany.

Congressional opposition: a bipartisan wall

Representative Titus and seventeen colleagues push back

Any hope that Congress might quietly clear a legislative path for Turkey's F-35 return runs directly into organized, bipartisan resistance. According to the Armenian Weekly, Representative Dina Titus, joined by seventeen other members of Congress, has publicly opposed Turkey's reintegration into the F-35 program, citing a combination of security concerns tied to the S-400 and broader concerns about Turkish regional conduct.

This is not a fringe objection from a handful of lawmakers with no influence on defense policy. It represents a documented, named bloc within Congress, the very body that alone holds the power to meaningfully alter Section 1245's conditions.

A parallel letter from Lawler and Sherman adds further weight

Beyond the Titus-led group, Representatives Mike Lawler and Brad Sherman have separately raised formal concerns in a joint letter regarding Turkey's potential return to the F-35 program, according to reporting on Congressional activity following the Ankara summit. The involvement of members from across the political spectrum on this specific issue underscores that opposition to a hasty reversal is not confined to a single party or ideological faction.

This bipartisan character of the opposition matters enormously for the analysis at hand: it means any legislative fix would require building a coalition wide enough to overcome resistance from multiple, independently motivated blocs within Congress, not simply securing the support of the president's own party.

Bipartisan opposition in today's Congress is rare enough on almost any subject that when it does appear, as it clearly has here, it deserves to be treated as a serious structural obstacle rather than a temporary inconvenience the White House can simply out-message.

Israel's shadow over the F-35 question

The Qualitative Military Edge concern

A dimension of this story that receives less attention in general coverage, but that JINSA's analysis addresses directly, concerns Israel's long-standing interest in preserving what is known as its Qualitative Military Edge in the region, a principle enshrined in U.S. policy that commits Washington to ensuring Israel maintains a technological and military advantage over regional actors, including, in certain readings, Turkey.

Turkey's potential return to the F-35 program, particularly if it occurred without Turkey giving up the S-400, would raise questions within this framework about whether the balance the United States has committed to preserving for Israel remains intact, an additional layer of complexity that a purely bilateral U.S.-Turkey framing of this story tends to overlook entirely.

A regional dimension that complicates any quick fix

This regional dimension means that even if Congress were somehow persuaded to revisit Section 1245 specifically regarding Turkey, the broader web of American commitments in the region, to Israel and to other partners, would still need to be navigated carefully. This is not a detail that disappears simply because a president wants to move quickly on a bilateral relationship with Ankara.

Serious defense policy analysts, including those at JINSA, have consistently flagged this regional web of commitments as a structural reason why F-35 policy toward Turkey cannot be treated as a purely bilateral question resolved by a single summit conversation.

I think this is the part of the story most Western audiences miss entirely: this is not just about Turkey and the United States, it's about an entire regional security architecture that a hasty reversal could unsettle in ways that go well beyond one fighter jet program.

Turkey's alternative: the KAAN fighter jet program

Building an indigenous option while waiting

While the F-35 question remains legally frozen, Turkey has not simply waited passively. Ankara has continued developing its own indigenous fighter jet, the KAAN, with an anticipated entry into service around 2028, according to defense industry coverage of the program's progress. This parallel effort gives Turkey a degree of strategic flexibility that reduces, though does not eliminate, its dependence on eventually resolving the F-35 impasse.

The existence of this domestic alternative also shapes the negotiating dynamic between Ankara and Washington: a Turkey with a credible indigenous fighter program approaching operational status has more leverage in any negotiation than a Turkey with no alternative path to modernizing its air force.

What the KAAN program signals about Turkish strategic thinking

The KAAN program signals that Turkish defense planning has, for years now, assumed the F-35 question might remain unresolved indefinitely, and has planned accordingly rather than betting the country's future air combat capability entirely on a reversal of American policy that has proven, to date, legally locked rather than merely politically inconvenient.

This strategic hedging by Ankara should inform how much urgency Washington actually faces in resolving this question. Turkey is not sitting helplessly waiting for an American reversal; it is building toward self-sufficiency regardless of how the F-35 question eventually resolves.

I have a certain respect for Turkey's decision to build its own alternative rather than simply waiting on Washington's goodwill. Whatever one thinks of Erdogan's broader foreign policy, this specific hedge reflects a clear-eyed reading of how unreliable a single presidential promise can be.

The Pentagon's quiet preparatory work

Certification requirements Vance and Hegseth have acknowledged

Beneath the headline-grabbing Ankara statement, there is evidence of more measured preparatory work underway within the American defense establishment. Officials including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have acknowledged that any eventual F-35 transfer to Turkey would require satisfying specific legal certification requirements, a far more sober framing than the president's own celebratory Ankara remarks.

This acknowledgment matters because it shows that at least part of the administration understands, and is willing to state publicly, that Section 1245's conditions cannot simply be waved away by presidential enthusiasm alone, and that the actual pathway forward, if one exists, runs through a more technical and legally bounded process.

A gap between political messaging and operational reality

This gap between the president's public framing and his own officials' more cautious acknowledgment of legal certification requirements is, in many ways, the clearest single illustration of this entire analysis: political promises made in the moment of a summit do not automatically translate into the operational reality that follows.

Recognizing this gap does not require assuming bad faith on anyone's part. It simply requires taking seriously the distinction between what a president says at a podium in Ankara and what his own Defense Department and Vice President acknowledge is actually required under existing law.

I find some reassurance, honestly, in seeing Vance and Hegseth speak more carefully about certification requirements than the president did in Ankara. It suggests that at least part of this administration understands the legal reality this analysis has tried to lay out.

What would actually need to change for Turkey to get the F-35

The S-400 question remains the central obstacle

For Section 1245's core condition to no longer apply, Turkey would need to no longer "possess" the S-400 system, whether through its removal, transfer to a third party, decommissioning, or some other arrangement satisfying the statute's language. To date, no credible reporting suggests Turkey has taken, or is preparing to take, this specific step.

Without this underlying change, any presidential statement about lifting sanctions, however sincere, addresses only the CAATSA layer of Turkey's punishment, not the Section 1245 layer that specifically governs F-35 transfers. The S-400 remains, as it has since 2019, the central and largely unaddressed obstacle.

A legislative amendment remains theoretically possible, but politically costly

Congress could, in theory, amend or repeal Section 1245 entirely, removing the legal obstacle regardless of Turkey's S-400 status. Given the documented bipartisan opposition already organized around Representative Titus and her colleagues, alongside the separate concerns raised by Lawler and Sherman, this path currently appears politically costly and far from guaranteed, even with sustained presidential pressure.

This is the honest, unglamorous conclusion any rigorous analysis of this story has to reach: the F-35 question for Turkey remains legally locked, and neither a presidential statement nor a change in rhetoric, on its own, has yet altered that underlying legal reality.

I don't think this story ends with Turkey flying F-35s anytime soon, and I would be doing readers a disservice to suggest otherwise simply because a president said something dramatic in Ankara. The law, as written today, says something different.

Why this matters for NATO cohesion more broadly

An ally caught between two major partners

Turkey's position in this story illustrates a broader challenge within NATO: an ally that has, over the past decade, maintained defense relationships with both the West and, through the S-400 purchase, with Russia, creating exactly the kind of ambiguity that complicates trust-based cooperation on advanced weapons systems like the F-35.

This ambiguity is not simply an American grievance against Turkey; it reflects a genuine strategic tension for an alliance trying to present a unified front against Russian aggression in Ukraine while one of its own members retains hardware from the very country the alliance is collectively working to contain.

A test case for how NATO manages internal contradictions

How this specific F-35 question eventually resolves, whether through Turkish divestment of the S-400, a negotiated legislative fix, or continued stalemate, will serve as a meaningful test case for how NATO manages internal contradictions among its members without fracturing the broader alliance cohesion the West needs, particularly while supporting Ukraine against continued Russian aggression.

This is why a story that might otherwise look like a narrow bilateral dispute over a fighter jet program carries weight for the broader Western security architecture, at a moment when unity within NATO matters more than it has in decades.

I think NATO's ability to manage a case this awkward, an ally with one foot still tied to Russian hardware, says something important about the alliance's maturity. Handling this badly could hand Moscow a propaganda win it has done nothing to earn.

The stakes for the broader U.S.-Turkey relationship

More than a single weapons program is riding on this

The F-35 question, however technical its legal underpinnings, has become a proxy for the broader health of the U.S.-Turkey relationship, a partnership that spans intelligence cooperation, Turkey's strategic position controlling access to the Black Sea, and Ankara's role as host and diplomatic broker for events including this very NATO summit in Ankara itself.

A prolonged, publicly visible failure to resolve this specific question, especially after a presidential promise as emphatic as the one made in Ankara, risks becoming a symbol of dysfunction in the relationship that extends well beyond the specific merits of the F-35 case itself.

Why both sides have an incentive to eventually find a path forward

Despite the legal obstacles detailed throughout this analysis, both Washington and Ankara have structural incentives to eventually resolve this question in some form, whether through Turkish concessions on the S-400, a negotiated legislative compromise, or simply a mutual, quieter acceptance that the F-35 question remains closed while cooperation continues on other fronts.

Predicting exactly which of these paths will prevail would require a level of certainty this analysis does not claim to possess. What can be stated with confidence is that the current legal architecture, as it stands today, does not support the optimistic timeline implied by Trump's Ankara statement.

I would rather end this analysis with an honest "we don't know exactly how this resolves" than manufacture a confident prediction the facts don't support. That restraint, I think, is what separates analysis from wishful narrative.

How Western media covered the Ankara statement

A headline-friendly quote versus a footnote-friendly law

Much of the initial coverage following Trump's Ankara statement led with the emphatic quote itself, "you don't sanction your friends," rather than with the underlying legal question of whether F-35 transfers to Turkey could actually proceed under existing law. This is not unusual for how breaking political statements get covered in a fast news cycle, but it created a public impression considerably more optimistic, for Ankara, than the legal record actually supports.

Outlets with deeper defense policy expertise, including JINSA's own published analysis, moved more quickly to correct this impression, but that kind of technical correction rarely travels as far or as fast as the original dramatic quote. This asymmetry in reach is itself worth noting as part of how this story has been publicly understood.

Why getting this distinction right matters for public understanding

When the public, and even some policymakers, come away believing a presidential statement has already resolved a legally locked question, it creates a false sense of closure that can complicate the more difficult, ongoing work of actually navigating Section 1245's requirements, Congressional opposition, and the broader regional considerations detailed throughout this analysis.

This is precisely why a slower, more deliberate analysis like this one has value even after the initial news cycle has moved on: the legal reality does not change because the headlines have already declared the matter settled.

I think this is one of those stories where the accurate version is simply less exciting than the inaccurate one, and that imbalance is exactly why so many readers still believe Turkey's F-35 return is closer to reality than the law currently allows.

What Ukraine has at stake in how this resolves

A distracted alliance is a weaker alliance

Although this story centers on Turkey and the United States, Ukraine has an indirect but real stake in how quickly and cleanly this question resolves. Every week NATO's internal bandwidth is consumed by a bilateral dispute over F-35 eligibility is a week partially diverted from the harder work of coordinating weapons deliveries, air defense commitments and financing packages that matter directly to Kyiv's survival on the battlefield.

This is not a claim that the F-35 dispute is somehow more important than Ukraine's own urgent needs. It is the more modest claim that alliance cohesion is a finite resource, and unresolved internal disputes, however narrow in scope, draw on that same resource that Ukraine depends on for continued Western support.

Why Kyiv should watch this precedent closely

There is also a precedent dimension worth naming: how NATO handles an ally that maintained a defense relationship with Russia, through the S-400 purchase, offers a signal about the alliance's tolerance for internal contradictions more broadly. Ukraine, seeking eventual NATO integration itself, has a direct interest in seeing the alliance handle this kind of contradiction with clarity rather than improvised, promise-driven exceptions.

A NATO that resolves internal disputes through rigorous process rather than presidential improvisation is, in the long run, a more reliable NATO for Ukraine to eventually join, or to continue depending on for support short of full membership.

I think Kyiv has every reason to want this Turkey-F-35 question resolved through actual process rather than another improvised presidential promise, because the precedent it sets shapes exactly the kind of alliance Ukraine hopes to eventually join.

Conclusion: a promise that outran the law that governs it

What this analysis has tried to establish clearly

At the end of this analysis, the central finding is straightforward and well documented: President Trump's promise in Ankara to lift sanctions on Turkey and reconsider F-35 sales addressed, at most, the CAATSA layer of Turkey's punishment. It did not, and legally could not on its own, unlock Section 1245 of the 2020 NDAA, the specific provision that blocks F-35 transfers as long as Turkey retains its S-400 system, and which contains no presidential waiver.

Bipartisan Congressional opposition, acknowledged certification requirements from within the administration's own defense officials, unresolved regional considerations tied to Israel's Qualitative Military Edge, and Turkey's own continued investment in its indigenous KAAN program all point toward the same conclusion: this is a legally locked question, not a politically resolved one.

What comes next, realistically

In the near term, expect continued rhetorical back-and-forth between Ankara and Washington, continued Congressional resistance from the bipartisan bloc already organized around this issue, and continued Turkish investment in the KAAN program as a hedge against permanent F-35 exclusion. None of these trends point toward a rapid resolution of the underlying legal question.

The most likely outcome, based purely on the legal and political facts assembled here, is prolonged stalemate rather than either a clean Turkish return to the F-35 program or a definitive, permanent closure of that possibility. Stalemate, unsatisfying as it is for a headline, happens to be the most accurate current description of this story.

A final word on the gap between promise and process

This story, beyond its specific technical details, offers a broader lesson about how to read presidential statements made in the heat of a summit: they express intent, sometimes sincerely, but intent is not the same as legal authority, and legal authority in this specific case rests with a Congress that has, so far, shown no sign of being ready to grant it.

Readers following this story in the months ahead would do well to measure progress not by future statements from Ankara or Washington, but by whether Section 1245's actual conditions, Turkey's continued possession of the S-400, have changed. Until they do, the F-35 for Turkey remains, as it has been since 2019, a promise without a legal path.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

What I know and what I don't

I know that President Trump stated in Ankara on July 7, 2026, that he intended to lift sanctions on Turkey and reconsider F-35 sales, according to Reuters. I know Section 1245 of the 2020 NDAA blocks F-35 transfers to Turkey as long as it possesses the S-400, with no presidential waiver provision, according to JINSA's published analysis. I know Representative Dina Titus and seventeen colleagues have publicly opposed Turkey's F-35 reintegration, according to the Armenian Weekly, and that Trump himself described his position as undecided the following day, according to The Hill.

I do not know whether Congress will eventually move to amend Section 1245, nor whether Turkey is engaged in any undisclosed negotiation over the S-400's status. I would rather state this uncertainty plainly than speculate about outcomes the current record does not support.

Method

This analysis draws on Reuters' reporting of Trump's Ankara statement, The Hill's coverage of his follow-up remarks, JINSA's published legal and policy analysis of the CAATSA/Section 1245 distinction, and reporting on Congressional opposition from the Armenian Weekly and related coverage. No dialogue or scene has been invented beyond what these named sources report.

My editorial angle is declared: I support continued NATO cohesion and a strong U.S.-Turkey defense relationship in service of Western unity against Russian aggression, while insisting that legal reality, not presidential enthusiasm, should govern how this specific question is reported and understood.

Sources

Primary sources

Trump says will lift Turkey sanctions, to decide on selling F-35s — Reuters, July 7, 2026

Trump undecided on Turkey F-35 sale — The Hill, July 8, 2026

After Ankara: lifting CAATSA doesn't unlock the F-35 for Turkey — JINSA

Secondary sources

Trump, Turkey and F-35 sanctions — Aerospace Global News

Congressional opposition against Turkey's return to F-35 program — Armenian Weekly, July 7, 2026

F-35: Trump reintegrates Turkey despite the S-400 — Meta-Defense, July 9, 2026