Trump Floats F-35 Sale to Turkey: A New Lever in a NATO That Won't Sit Still

On 25 June 2026, at 05:44 UTC, channels aligned with the Washington–Ankara correspondence began carrying the same short line: President Donald Trump has hinted that he will shortly approve the sale of F-35 strike aircraft and the F-110 jet engine to Turkey. The post, relayed by the Telegram channel englishabuali and amplified within the hour by abualiexpress, is the first public indication from the US side that the six-year-old rupture over Ankara's acquisition of the Russian S-400 air-defence system is moving toward resolution. By 05:42 UTC, a separate Telegram channel, ClashReport, had already framed the moment in grander terms, quoting Trump as saying that the United States "won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism," and that "we're going to have to do that again."

The F-35 question has been a standing irritant in the transatlantic relationship since 2019, when Washington removed Turkey from the Joint Strike Fighter programme and imposed sanctions under CAATSA in response to the delivery of the S-400. What is being floated now is not merely a return to the supplier-customer relationship that existed before the rift; it is also a transfer of the F-110 engine core that would feed Turkish industry, not just Turkish air bases. According to abualiexpress, Turkey wants the F-110 not only as a powerplant for its own combat aircraft but as a building block for domestic engine development — the kind of indigenisation push that Ankara has been running for two decades and that the Trump administration appears ready, at last, to underwrite.

What changed in Washington

For most of 2024 and 2025, the US position on Turkey inside the F-35 programme was governed by a legal and political constraint that outlived two administrations. The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) does not require Turkey's exclusion by name, but successive Secretaries of State and Defense certified that the S-400 transaction was "not in the national interest" of NATO interoperability. That certification made Ankara's return to the F-35 line legally cumbersome and politically poisonous in Congress, where the Hellenic, Armenian and Kurdish-American constituencies that oppose the Turkish deal remain organised. The 25 June signal suggests the White House intends to engineer a workaround — most plausibly by leaning on a national-security waiver or by reframing the F-110 transfer as an industrial partnership that sits outside the fighter-programme perimeter.

The second variable is timing. The hint arrives in the same week that Turkey's defence ministry confirmed an export order for Bayraktar TB-3 unmanned combat aircraft to a Gulf customer and amid open discussion in Ankara of a TF Kaan national combat aircraft programme that has slipped repeatedly against its original 2028 service-entry target. The Trump administration knows that the F-110 is the bottleneck Turkish industry cannot yet bypass, and that the F-35 airframe gives Ankara something that no European alternative — the Eurofighter Tranche 4, the Rafale F4 — can offer in the same operational envelope.

The counter-narrative in Ankara and Athens

The Turkish read is straightforward. Official commentary carried by state-adjacent outlets and re-broadcast through englishabuali and abualiexpress frames the prospective sale as vindication of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's 2020 insistence that Turkey would defend its sovereign right to choose its own air-defence suppliers. From this view, the F-110 transfer in particular is the more consequential of the two lines on offer: it gives the Turkish Aerospace Industries engine facility at Eskişehir and the TUSAS Engine Industries joint venture a real Western reference design, ending years in which Ankara had to build around Russian and Ukrainian powerplants.

The counter-narrative comes from Athens, from Nicosia, and from a cluster of voices inside the US Congress who view the S-400 question as unresolved. None of the Telegram threads reviewed here carry the Greek Cypriot or Hellenic response in detail, but the structural objection is well established and the sources do not refute it: returning Turkey to the F-35 line while the S-400 batteries remain operational means the Russian system will continue to log NATO-platform radar signatures, a fact that the Pentagon's own December 2020 study on the F-35–S-400 interoperability risk treated as a hard constraint. The Trump signal does not address that point, and the absence is doing the work of the argument for those who oppose the move.

The structural frame: NATO as a market for permission

Read against the longer arc, the F-35 hint is the most visible piece of a quieter restructuring inside the Alliance. For two decades the United States sold its most advanced platforms to its closest allies on terms that read, in practice, as conditional: the recipient's defence-industrial choices, its procurement partners, its export behaviour and its diplomatic alignments were all subject to a permission layer that sat inside the Pentagon, the State Department and, increasingly, the Treasury. That permission layer has not been dismantled, but its price is being renegotiated in real time, and Ankara is the second NATO capital — after Warsaw — to find that a sufficiently transactional Washington will accept cash, restraint and political alignment as a substitute for prior ideological conformity.

The second-order effect is on the European defence-industrial base. A Turkish order book for the F-35 pulls demand away from the Eurofighter consortium at the precise moment the latter is being marketed, against French resistance, as the platform for a future European air sovereignty initiative. A Turkish stake in the F-110 production chain also has implications for the Kaan engine programme, the ITEC engine consortium, and the wider question of whether European sixth-generation work will be done with a Turkish seat at the table or with Ankara competing from an American supply line. The Telegram framing around indigenisation points, in this sense, to a debate the sources do not name but that the engineering pipeline implies: will the next European fighter carry a Turkish sub-component made under US licence?

The stakes, and what is still uncertain

The immediate winners, if the hint is followed by contract language, are the Turkish Air Force, which gets a fifth-generation air-to-air and strike platform it has been waiting on since 2019; the Turkish defence-industrial complex, which gets a Western reference engine design; and the Trump administration, which gets a deliverable it can frame as a peace-through-strength transaction in the same rhetorical register as the ClashReport-quoted line about defeating fascism and communism a third time. The losers are the F-35 opponents in Congress, the Cypriot and Greek diplomatic services, and — in a softer but real sense — the European defence firms whose pipeline just narrowed.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the White House can convert the hint into a signed programme letter. CAATSA has not been amended. The S-400 is still in Turkish service. Congress can, and historically has, attached conditions to major FMS cases that the executive cannot waive unilaterally. And a separate strand of the 25 June wire — a polymarket-flagged line at 01:45 UTC quoting Trump as saying that "grass has a life just like people have a life" — is a reminder that the principal in this transaction is also a political figure whose policy signals and rhetorical signals are not always distinguishable from each other. The next thirty days will tell whether the F-35 line is a deal or a headline. Until then, this publication treats the F-35 hint as a credible directional indicator, not a contract.

Desk note: Monexus framed this as a permission-economy story inside NATO, not as a bilateral US–Turkey item. The wire lead is the F-35; the structural lead is the F-110 engine transfer into Turkish industry, which is the part of the announcement with the longer industrial consequences and which the mainstream wires have not yet weighted.

Wire provenance

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

• https://t.me/englishabuali
• https://t.me/ClashReport
• https://t.me/abualiexpress
• https://t.me/abualiexpress
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Turkey%E2%80%93United_States_sanctions
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAATSA
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II