Trump Floats F-35s and F-110 Engines for Turkey — and the NATO Logic Quietly Bends

On 25 June 2026, President Donald Trump publicly indicated that he intends to approve the sale of F-35 fighter aircraft and F-110 jet engines to Turkey — a reversal of the 2019 expulsion that cost Ankara billions and pushed it toward Russian S-400s. The hint lands less than a month before Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "most likely" bilateral with Trump at NATO's Ankara summit, reported on the same day via Polymarket's news feed at 05:36 UTC. The two threads are not separate stories; they are the same negotiation, with the engine line as the price of admission.

The proposed package is unusual for what it concedes on the industrial side. Turkey does not just want airframes. It wants the F-110 engine for its domestic aerospace base — a transfer of propulsion know-how that Ankara's defence industry has spent a decade trying to acquire through licensed production, joint ventures and eventually indigenous development. Granting access would be a quiet vote of confidence in Turkish industry by a Pentagon that, until recently, treated Turkish localisation as a security risk.

What changed since 2019

The original rupture was procedural as much as strategic. Turkey's 2017 decision to buy the Russian S-400 air-defence system triggered a CAATSA-mandated removal from the F-35 programme, the cancellation of 100 aircraft on order, and the loss of more than $1.4 billion in Turkish payments — figures the US government published at the time and that have shaped Ankara's view of Washington ever since. The F-110 question is now the leverage that the 2019 rupture destroyed.

For the Trump administration, the calculus appears transactional. Ankara holds influence over Black Sea basing, over Syrian Kurdish policy, and over the corridor politics that connect the Caucasus to the Eastern Mediterranean. A F-110-equipped Turkish aerospace sector also creates a second source for an engine the United States currently buys almost exclusively from General Electric — useful in a supply environment that has, in recent years, exposed how thin the Western defence-industrial base really is.

The counter-narrative that won't go away

The dominant Western wire framing treats the S-400 episode as settled: Turkey violated alliance trust, paid the price, and now returns on Washington's terms. That framing flatters Washington and obscures what Ankara is actually negotiating for. From the Turkish side, the 2019 expulsion was not a sanction for a bad decision; it was a punishment for refusing to subordinate a sovereign procurement choice to a NATO ally's threat preferences. The ask now — F-110 transfer, indigenous industrial integration — is a request for the kind of partnership that should have been on offer before Ankara ever looked at Moscow.

There is also a quieter objection from inside the Western alliance. Congressional sceptics, Israeli planners, and parts of the Pentagon's European Command have long argued that an F-110-equipped Turkey, with Russian air-defence systems still in service and a track record of operational independence in Syria and Libya, represents a leakage risk. That case has not been answered by any of the public reporting available on 25 June 2026; it has merely been overridden.

What the deal really trades

Look past the airframes and the engine line sits a more interesting question: what is Turkey agreeing to do in return? The reporting available at publication names the bilateral summit as the venue, not the terms. No specifics on S-400 disposition, no public framework on indigenous engine IP protection, no confirmed schedule for delivery. That is the normal shape of a presidential hint — and it is also the normal shape of a deal where the price is still being set.

There are at least three readings of the structure on offer. The first is that Washington is buying Turkish cooperation on the Black Sea and in Syria with a symbolic restoration of the partnership. The second is that it is testing whether a NATO-tier industrial relationship can coexist with Turkish strategic autonomy — a contradiction in terms for some, a working compromise for others. The third is that the F-110 line is the real prize: a Western engine, partly built in Turkey, eventually re-exported to third-country buyers Ankara has cultivated across Africa and Central Asia. Each reading implies a different future for the alliance's industrial politics.

Stakes

For Ankara, the upside is concrete: a re-anchored aerospace sector, recovered access to the Western fighter ecosystem, and a vindication of the industrial-policy doctrine that Erdogan's government has run since the early 2010s. For Washington, the upside is leverage and supply-chain redundancy. For the alliance, the stakes are subtler — whether the rules set after S-400 still hold, or whether the precedent of a five-year penalty followed by full restoration tells future partners that strategic defiance is a discount, not a disqualification.

What remains uncertain on the available reporting is the engine's path to localisation. The sources do not specify which Turkish facilities would receive production tooling, which intellectual property the transfer would cover, or how the F-110 line would interact with Turkey's own TF-X programme and its Kaan prototype. Those details will determine whether this is a routine defence sale or the beginning of a new division of labour inside the alliance's industrial base.

Desk note: Monexus framed this as an industrial-politics story rather than a summit-politics one. The wire cycle led on the Erdogan bilateral; the structural question is what Ankara gets to build.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/englishabuali
• https://t.me/abualiexpress