F110 engines for Turkey's Kaan, a winning bet for NATO

Introduction: Washington quietly revives the Turkish axis

A notification to Congress that changes the picture

The Trump administration formally notified the US Congress, on June 24, 2026, of its intention to sell Turkey dozens of General Electric F110 engines worth more than 700 million dollars. This announcement, first revealed by Reuters, comes just days before the NATO summit in Ankara, scheduled for July 7 and 8, 2026.

This is no minor administrative detail: these engines are destined for the Kaan, the fifth-generation fighter jet designed by Turkish Aerospace Industries, a flagship project of Turkey's defense industry born precisely out of Ankara's exclusion from the F-35 program.

Why this exact moment matters so much

The timing is obviously no accident. By tying this arms sale to the NATO summit held on Turkish soil, Washington is sending a clear signal: the relationship with Ankara, despite years of tension over the Russian S-400 system, remains strategically indispensable to the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance against threats from Russia, China and Iran.

This kind of decision, however contested at home in the United States, illustrates a simple truth that advocates of a firm Western posture need to accept: Turkey controls an irreplaceable geographic gateway to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and no prolonged boycott changes that strategic reality.

The Kaan program, an ambition born of the rupture with Washington

A jet designed for Turkish strategic independence

The Kaan was born directly out of the American refusal to deliver F-35s to Turkey after it acquired the Russian S-400 air defense system in 2019. Rather than remain dependent on a partner that had just excluded it from a program in which it had nonetheless invested roughly 11 billion dollars, Ankara chose to develop its own fifth-generation stealth fighter.

Costly and risky as this decision was on an industrial level, it illustrates a form of strategic resilience the West should take more seriously: a humiliated ally will always seek an alternative path, sometimes at the very expense of the cohesion of the alliance that sidelined it.

A persistent dependence on American engines

Despite this drive for independence, the Kaan today remains entirely dependent on American F110 engines to fly. Turkey does plan to develop a domestic engine, the TEI TF35000, but it is not expected to reach operational maturity until around 2032, according to several specialized defense-sector analyses.

This persistent technological dependence, ironically, reinforces the argument that it is better to keep Turkey close to the Western fold than to push it further toward Russian or Chinese alternatives for its military aircraft propulsion.

The weight of CAATSA sanctions on this file

A law that has blocked the relationship since 2020

Since 2020, Turkey has been under sanctions pursuant to the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, better known as CAATSA, imposed after its purchase of the S-400 system. These sanctions specifically target Turkey's defense procurement agency, the SSB, which happens to be the licensed end-user for the Kaan program.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reminded the House of Representatives in early June 2026 that current law bars any return of Turkey to the F-35 program as long as Ankara retains the S-400 systems, a position Congress wrote in black and white into the 2020 national defense law.

A shared desire to break this deadlock

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan confirmed on July 2, 2026, in a televised interview, that Trump and Turkish President Erdoğan share a strong desire to lift the CAATSA sanctions, an objective that will be among the topics discussed at the NATO summit in Ankara. This convergence of political will at the top, however, is not enough on its own to bypass a law passed by the US Congress.

Fidan also noted that lifting restrictions on the simple sale of F-35s would be a simpler administrative decision, whereas a full return of Turkey as a manufacturing partner in the program would require a new decision from the international consortium involved.

The Democratic opposition complicating the maneuver

Lawmakers denouncing a bypass of Congress

Democratic Representative Gregory Meeks, the top opposition member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sharply criticized the method used by the Trump administration, saying the State Department had "not even tried to justify" its decision to bypass congressional opposition to this engine sale. He accused the administration of invoking no emergency authority and providing no written justification.

Democratic Representative Dina Titus of Nevada went further, filing a joint resolution of disapproval explicitly aimed at blocking the transfer of these F110engines, calling the sale a "major gift" to President Erdoğan. This resolution has a statutory fifteen-day window to be reviewed by both chambers of Congress.

Resistance that crosses party lines

It would nonetheless be wrong to reduce this opposition to a simple partisan divide. Republican Senator Jim Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also among the influential voices opposed to a quick return of Turkey to the F-35 fold as long as the S-400 issue remains unresolved.

This bipartisan opposition, though a minority against the president's will, reflects a healthy institutional skepticism toward foreign-policy decisions made quickly under diplomatic calendar pressure, rather than on the basis of a long-term strategic assessment.

Why this deal benefits NATO above all

A better-armed Turkey stays a more firmly anchored Turkey

Despite all the legitimate reservations about the method, the underlying strategic argument still holds: a Turkey whose combat aviation depends on American components remains structurally tied to the Western industrial and diplomatic ecosystem. Depriving Ankara of these engines would only push the country further toward full technological autonomy, potentially built with the help of far less desirable partners such as Russia or China.

It is precisely this logic of mutually beneficial dependence that Washington is trying to preserve, agreeing to sell engines without giving ground on the more sensitive and legally locked question of a full return to the F-35 program.

A signal of cohesion ahead of a crucial summit

The NATO summit in Ankara, which will mark the first visit by a sitting American president to Turkey in more than a decade, needed a concrete goodwill gesture from the United States toward its host. This package of F110engines, even if limited compared to Turkey's ambitions on F-35s, effectively serves that diplomatic purpose.

For an Atlantic Alliance simultaneously facing the war in Ukraine, Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea and instability caused by Iran in the Middle East, maintaining cohesion with an ally as geographically strategic as Turkey is not a luxury — it is an existential necessity.

The limits and risks of this approach

The unresolved S-400 problem

This engine sale does nothing to resolve the fundamental problem of the S-400 systems still deployed on Turkish soil. Ankara has made clear it does not intend to part with them, these systems now being durably integrated into its national air defense architecture, which leaves the core CAATSA sanctions question fundamentally stuck on the legal level.

Until this fundamental contradiction is resolved, the US-Turkish defense relationship will keep moving forward through small transactional steps, like this engine sale, rather than through a full and lasting normalization of military cooperation between the two countries.

Legitimate concerns from Israel and Greece

Two regional US allies, Israel and Greece, are watching this rapprochement with understandable concern. Israel, which has already received 48 of the 75 F-35s it ordered, and Greece, which expects 20 similar aircraft by 2030, fear that a strengthened Turkish air force could shift the regional balance in the Eastern Mediterranean to their detriment.

These concerns deserve to be taken seriously by Washington, which must ensure that this rapprochement with Ankara does not come at the expense of equally essential partnerships with allied democracies facing their own regional tensions with Turkey, notably over Cyprus.

The broader context of Turkey's repositioning

A multi-vector foreign policy

Turkey has for years pursued a multi-vector foreign policy, maintaining relations with Russia, China and actors such as Hamas, while remaining a NATO member. This approach, often criticized in the West, mainly reflects the country's unique geographic position, at the crossroads of several major zones of strategic influence.

This recent rebalancing toward Washington, embodied by the engine sale and the F-35 discussions, could point to a partial reorientation by Erdoğan toward the West, at a moment when the regional situation, notably after the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, has reshuffled certain diplomatic cards in the Middle East.

A test for the Atlantic Alliance's credibility

How Washington handles this file in the coming months will send an important signal to all NATO allies about the Alliance's ability to absorb internal disagreements without fracturing its cohesion against the common threats posed by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

A failure to durably normalize the relationship with Turkey, beyond this one-off gesture on engines, would leave a strategic vacuum that rival powers would be all too happy to exploit in a region as sensitive as the Alliance's southeastern flank.

What this file reveals about the Trump defense doctrine

A preference for quick transactional gestures

This file illustrates a constant of the Trump administration's foreign policy doctrine: favoring quick, visible transactional gestures, like this engine sale announced just before a major diplomatic summit, over slower but potentially more durable structural reforms to the substance of relations with complex allies like Turkey.

This transactional approach, while it produces concrete short-term results such as this 700-million-dollar sale, nonetheless leaves the underlying structural questions unresolved, notably the status of the S-400 systems and the full future of the F-35 program for Turkey.

Institutional firmness that remains a necessary safeguard

On the purely military level, this move deserves credit: it strengthens NATO's collective defense posture against Russia without giving up the legal safeguards imposed by Congress. It is this combination, a bold diplomatic gesture on one side and legislative firmness on the other, that offers the best possible balance in this complex file.

This dynamic deserves to be praised as a rare example where the American executive and legislative branches, despite their obvious disagreements over method, end up together producing a more balanced foreign policy than either could have imposed alone.

Conclusion: a calculated bet worth watching closely

A cautious first step rather than a capitulation

This sale of F110 engines, despite the controversy it is stirring in the US Congress, represents a reasonable compromise between the strategic necessity of keeping Turkey within the Western fold and the legal requirements that rightly prevent any premature, unjustified return of Turkey to the F-35 program as long as S-400s remain in service on its territory.

This kind of transactional decision, cautious on the legal front but bold on the diplomatic one, illustrates the real complexity of managing alliances in a world where threats from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea demand unwavering Western cohesion, even with imperfect partners like Ankara.

What to watch after the Ankara summit

The coming weeks will tell whether this engine sale survives congressional scrutiny, and whether the NATO summit in Ankara leads to concrete progress toward a broader lifting of CAATSA sanctions. The outcome of this file will largely determine the future trajectory of the US-Turkish defense relationship.

For now, this calculated move by Washington sends a clear message to the entire Atlantic Alliance: even the most strained partnerships are worth preserving, as long as the ultimate goal remains strengthening the collective Western posture against authoritarian regimes that, for their part, watch every sign of division within NATO with close attention.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

On the method

This essay draws on reporting from Reuters, AeroTime, Meta-Defense, Al-Monitor and Türkiye Today regarding the official June 24, 2026 notification to the US Congress, as well as public statements from Turkish minister Hakan Fidan and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. All direct quotes come from the sources listed below.

On the limits of this exercise

I cannot guarantee the final outcome of this sale, which remains subject to review by the US Congress and to a possible resolution of disapproval at the time this essay is published. The opinions expressed in italics reflect my personal analysis, favorable to a unified Western posture against common threats, and do not replace the facts reported in the body of the text.

Sources

Primary sources

Forbes — What defense leaders will discuss at the 2026 NATO summit — July 1, 2026

Hürriyet Daily News — Fidan says Türkiye, US working to lift CAATSA sanctions — July 3, 2026

Wikipedia — 2026 Ankara NATO summit

Secondary sources

Izvestia — The United States again wanted to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey — July 1, 2026

Al-Monitor — Trump hints at F-35 breakthrough with Turkey ahead of NATO summit — June 25, 2026

Turkish Minute — US lawmakers prepare resolution to block Turkey's F-35 return — June 29, 2026