Earlier this week, President Donald Trump spoke with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump likes Erdoğan; he sees someone he believes he can deal with in Turkey’s president. Erdoğan is savvy. By offering to help mediate between Russia and Ukraine and perhaps even the United States and Iran, he believes he can become essential to Trump.
The price Erdoğan demands is high. He seeks to sever U.S. ties to its Syrian-Kurdish partners in the fight against the Islamic State. The arrest of Istanbul Mayor (and likely presidential challenger) Ekrem İmamoğlu is also part of the package. However, even if Trump did not give explicit permission, Erdoğan came away from the conversation with a sense of impunity. The biggest prize Erdoğan reportedly sought in his phone call with Trump, however, was resuming the sale of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
Trump’s acquiescence to that request would be the ultimate betrayal of the principles of Make America Great Again. Erdoğan does not want the F-35 for Turkey’s defense or NATO purposes. Instead, he wants the F-35 to reverse engineer as he bolsters Turkey’s indigenous arms industry run by his son-in-law.
More than a decade ago, the Obama administration offered drones to Turkey. Turkey took the weaponry and built its own drone capability, which it now exports around the world. That would be bad enough if American businesspeople were the only victims, but many of Turkey’s weapons sales clients — from Azerbaijan to Syria’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham to the Islamic State — use those weapons disproportionately to target Christian groups.
Turkey is quite open now about its desire to build a stealth airplane of its own, the so-called TF Kaan. So far, it has fared poorly. But with F-35 Joint Strike Fighters delivered to Ankara on a silver platter? Expect F-35 components to make their way into Turkish factories, allowing it to profit off the billions of dollars Lockheed Martin spent on developing the next-generation fighter aircraft.
The reason for Turkey’s expulsion from the F-35 program initially was its purchase of advanced Russian S-400 missiles that could track and exploit vulnerabilities in NATO systems. The 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act mandated sanctions on those who would enable Russian, Iranian, or North Korean aggression, something Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 would do. Selling the F-35 to Turkey despite its violations would signal CAASTA’s death or at least encourage other countries to seek profit from rogue regimes at America’s expense.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE PRO-TURKEY BUT NOT PRO-HAMAS?
When it comes to the F-35 and Turkey, Trump has a choice.
He can Make America Great Again or allow Erdoğan to jump-start his Ottoman ambitions and Turkey’s military industries at the expense of U.S. national security, industry, and religious freedom.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
