Trump Plays the Long Game with Turkey and the F-35

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hopeful that his decade-long quest to obtain the F-35 joint strike fighter might finally succeed after an upbeat meeting with President Donald Trump at the NATO summit last week – but Trump does not seem to be in any hurry to give Erdogan his long-sought prize.

The F-35 saga began in 2001, when the U.S. military launched an ambitious – and very, very expensive – program to replace an inventory of venerable fighters like the Air Force F-16 and the Navy F/A-18. 

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program was conceived to develop a new fifth-generation fighter that could be jointly developed, funded, and deployed by America and her North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. Lockheed Martin won the bidding to become the primary contractor for the new jet.

One of those allies is Turkey, the most offbeat and troublesome of NATO members. Turkey joined the F-35 program in 2002, providing both funding and industrial services. Major Turkish aerospace companies were contracted to produce vital components of the new plane.

“We already have an excellent, long-term working relationship with both the Turkish government and the aerospace industries of Turkey, thanks to our mutual work on the F-16 program. We’re excited to be able to continue that association with the F-35. It’s very inspiring to have Turkey on the team,” Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Tom Burbage said when Turkey signed up.

Turkey ended up investing about $1.4 billion in developing the F-35 and hoped to procure at least a hundred of the stealthy jet fighters when they were ready for delivery. The U.S. military planned to buy a little under 2,500 of them, by comparison.

Both the total cost of the program and individual cost per jet increased massively during its two-decade development cycle. You can drive a base model off the lot for about $82.5 million these days, but the fully loaded deluxe carrier-takeoff version will set you back $102 million, and the top-of-the-line F-35B costs about $109 million. The original cost estimate for the entire program was about $200 billion, but it has ballooned to almost $2 trillion and is still ballooning.

Many tales of volcanic government spending end with the super-expensive product or program underperforming, but the F-35 has been seeing some action lately and it has performed very well. Israel has used its F-35s to deadly effect, most recently in Operation Rising Lion, the attack on Iran’s illicit nuclear program conducted by the Israelis in June. 

The F-35 has repeatedly demonstrated it can wipe out Iran’s extensive air defenses without losing any planes and Iran’s air defense network included some of the best surface-to-air weapons Russia could provide, possibly including the S-400 missile or Iran’s indigenously manufactured knockoff of it.

This is an awkward development because the S-400 is the reason Turkey does not have any F-35s.

The S-400 was once considered all but invincible, a deadly combination of radars and missile launchers that could target even stealthy aircraft from hundreds of miles away.

Erdogan, who has been in power for decades, sought to modernize Turkey’s air defense network in 2009 by obtaining U.S.-made Patriot missiles, which the U.S.-led coalition deployed to protect Turkey from Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missiles during the Gulf War.

The Turks tried to drive a hard bargain for their own Patriots and the Obama administration was a bit nervous about selling Patriot missile technology to Ankara, so the deal never came together. Turkey took this as something of an insult and began shopping elsewhere for missiles, eventually settling on the vaunted S-400.

Turkey’s acquisition of the S-400 was problematic because the F-35 is one of the major potential targets for S-400 missiles. NATO did not want one of its members to depend on Russia for important weapons systems.

Turkey promised to keep the S-400 and F-35 separate, but the specter of Russian missile technicians getting a chance to examine F-35s in Turkish hangers haunted U.S. and European officials. Turkey could do nothing to allay Western fears that Russia would gather information about NATO aircraft from the powerful radar sensors in the S-400 network.

This was an especially worrisome prospect for the F-35, whose stealth technology actively deceives enemy radar systems. Even if no Russian technician ever laid a hand on Turkey’s F-35s, the close proximity of S-400 radars to the prized NATO strike fighter was an intolerable threat.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) sternly warned Turkey not to purchase those Russian missiles, but Turkey plowed stubbornly ahead. American officials were puzzled by Turkey’s determination, even after the threat of ejection from the F-35 program was explicitly made. Some thought the volatile Erdogan was acting out of personal pique, while others assumed he was using the S-400 as a bargaining chip and would drop it when the right inducements were offered.

The most cynical theory was that Erodgan simply wanted a missile that could shoot down F-35s, if Turkey ever found itself fighting against U.S. or NATO forces, or he at least wanted to project the credible threat that he could take out F-35s. The simplest explanation was that Erdogan was building a closer relationship with Russia after the failed 2016 coup attempt in Turkey and the S-400 sale was important to Moscow.

Whatever Erdogan’s reasons, the S-400 purchase went forward. Turkey took delivery of the first Russian missiles in July 2019 and the first Trump administration expelled Turkey from the F-35 program in that same month.

Turkey actually owned four operational F-35s at the time but they were never delivered. Turkey lost billions of dollars invested in F-35 development, plus billions more in potential revenue from manufacturing components for the plane.

“Turkey has been a longstanding and trusted partner and NATO Ally for over 65 years, but accepting the S-400 undermines the commitments all NATO Allies made to each other to move away from Russian systems,” the White House said when announcing Turkey’s expulsion.

The first Trump administration carefully kept the door open for Turkey returning to the F-35 program someday, after getting rid of its S-400 missiles. The Turkish government has been talking up the possibility of a comeback ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House this year. Trump and Erdogan have a good personal relationship and the Turkish leader seems convinced that Trump wants Turkey back in the joint strike fighter program.

“We have not given up on the F-35s. We are discussing our intention to return to the program with our counterparts. We discussed the issue in our meeting with Mr. Trump, talks at a technical level have started. God willing, we will make progress,” Erdogan said after meeting with Trump at the NATO summit last week.

If that is true, Trump does not appear to be in any hurry to ship those stealth fighters to Ankara. The second Trump administration may want to keep Turkey from joining the China-Russia-Iran axis of authoritarianism, but it still has good reasons to doubt Turkey is reliable and pro-Western enough to be trusted with the F-35.

Erdogan loves to play NATO and Russia against each other in a perpetual bidding war for his affections, so the U.S. does not have to make major concessions to keep him from going all-in with Moscow and Beijing.

This is especially true in the current moment, when Axis ambitions for the Middle East are in shambles. Iran has been humiliated, its proxies weakened, its military exposed as a paper tiger, its dreams of a Shiite Crescent shattered. Russia’s huge investment in the Assad regime of Syria is utterly lost. Erdogan is not the kind of player who likes to jump on a losing horse.

Turkey has lately been touting plans for its own domestically produced, multi-layered air defense system, modeled on Israel’s famed Iron Dome. Ankara’s “Steel Dome” initiative does not include the S-400 missile. Some analysts see the plan as Turkey devising a way to get rid of its S-400 missiles, perhaps selling them as used goods to a third party like Pakistan, without seeming to buckle to American pressure.

Turkey has never fully activated its expensive S-400 systems, merely stating they are “ready to be deployed” if needed, which means they could be easily sold off. If they end up getting shipped to Pakistan, Trump can expect a testy phone call from India, which would not be happy to see its unhappy neighbors upgrading their air defenses. India also purchased S-400 missiles from Russia, but unlike Turkey, India is not a member of either NATO or the F-35 program.

Another unhappy party to that scenario would be Israel, which has made spectacular use of its F-35 fighters and does not want Turkey to have them – especially since Turkey has been shopping for real estate in post-Assad Syria to build an airbase, where either Turkish F-35s or S-400 missiles might be deployed.

Israel would be strongly opposed to Erdogan moving his S-400 missiles to Syria, which could be another path taken by the Turkish president to get the controversial Russian missiles and radars out of Turkey.

President Trump has decided to support the rebel junta in Damascus, which delighted Erdogan, so he might think Trump would be receptive to Turkey “donating” its S-400s to Syria to get back into the F-35 program.

The Israelis would probably make a very strong counter-argument in Trump’s other ear during that conversation, and several U.S. lawmakers have already asked the State Department to come out against any plan to transfer Turkey’s Russian missiles to Syria.

“If Turkish personnel retain operational control, the risk of direct confrontation with Israeli forces becomes real. If Syrian or proxy forces take over, the U.S. loses even more visibility and influence, introducing a new layer of strategic instability into an already combustible environment,” Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) and Brad Schneider (D-IL) warned the State Department in April.

Erdogan created a far more complicated mess than he might have realized by plowing ahead with S-400 acquisition during the first Trump administration, and he might have unrealistic expectations about the second Trump administration’s eagerness to help him clean up that mess. Those Russian missiles are not nuclear-capable, but in political and strategic terms, they are radioactive.