Ankara’s Bargain: Why Trump’s F-35 Gambit Is Bigger Than a Plane

Donald Trump has just offered Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a stealth fighter jet that Israel doesn’t want him to have, Congress hasn’t cleared him to sell, and Gulf capitals are already using it as leverage against Washington itself.

A Deal Three Fronts Wide

Loyalty Over Jerusalem, Leverage Over Moscow

The timing is jarring. Turkish-Israeli relations have deteriorated into open hostility over the past year. Erdoğan has likened Netanyahu to Hitler, a Turkish court has moved to indict Netanyahu and dozens of Israeli officials over the interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla, and Ankara has suspended trade with Israel entirely. Netanyahu has returned fire, branding Erdoğan an “antisemitic dictator” who represses Kurds and shelters Hamas leadership. Yet Trump has conspicuously declined to referee this feud, calling Erdoğan “a very good friend of mine” even as reporters pressed him on the prospect of arming a country that is, by Israeli accounts, becoming a rival center of regional power.

That reflects a calculation that has little to do with Jerusalem and everything to do with the architecture of NATO. Trump arrived in Ankara midway through a broader campaign to reshape the alliance around burden-sharing rather than sentiment, pushing a “NATO 3.0” vision in which European members absorb more of their own defense costs while feuding publicly with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and eyeing Greenland. Turkey, NATO’s second-largest standing army and a state that has stayed nominally inside the Western security umbrella despite deep economic and military ties to Moscow, is precisely the kind of ally this framework is designed to reward: one that pays its way........

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