Turkey’s Recep Erdogan Cheers ‘My Friend Trump’ After NATO Meeting

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that his country’s chances of buying advanced F-35 fighter jets from the United States are looking up after his meeting with President Donald Trump at the NATO summit this week.

“We discussed the F-35 issue. We made payments of $1.3 to $1.4 billion for the jets, and we saw that Mr. Trump was well-intentioned about delivering them,” Erdogan said during a news conference from the summit at The Hague.

“Together with my friend Trump we are opening the door to a new chapter in Turkish-American relations,” he declared.

Erdogan said at the summit that NATO wants Turkey to do more, and Turkey is ready to step up, provided the alliance shows proper respect and understanding to Turkey’s position.

“Many allies are aligning with us in taking on greater responsibility in the face of threats and challenges. But boosting the alliance’s effectiveness requires more than defense spending alone. Mutual understanding and sincere cooperation among allies must also be strengthened,” he said.

F-35 fighters would be a very concrete demonstration of NATO’s sincerity. Erdogan made it clear his government has not given up on acquiring them.

“We have not given up on the F-35s. We are discussing our intention to return to the program with our counterparts,” Erdogan told reporters during his flight home.

“We discussed the issue in our meeting with Mr. Trump, talks at a technical level have started. God willing, we will make progress,” he said.

Erdogan met with Trump on the sidelines of the NATO summit on Tuesday, looking for a reset in Turkey-U.S. relations. It was the first meeting between the two leaders since Trump returned to office in 2025.

“President Erdogan stated during the meeting that the two countries have significant potential in various fields, particularly in energy and investment, and that advancing cooperation in the defense industry would facilitate achieving the goal of a $100 billion trade volume,” Erdogan’s office said after the meeting.

The Turkish president also “expressed his satisfaction with the ceasefire achieved between Israel and Iran through President Trump’s efforts, hoping it would be permanent,” and asked Trump to use his influence to help end the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.

Erdogan said on Thursday that he wants to host a meeting between Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He said Trump was receptive to the idea when the two spoke at the NATO summit.

Turkey has proven to be an often frustrating but occasionally indispensable member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Erdogan, who has been in power for two decades, wants to become an Islamic authority and Middle Eastern strongman, having worked hard to undo the secular Turkey established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk a century ago.

On the other hand, Turkey wants to establish closer economic and strategic ties with Europe. Turkey’s effort to join the European Union (EU) began in 1999 and stalled out in 2019, largely due to Erdogan’s authoritarian excesses — and his habit of referring to European leaders who displease him as “Nazis” — but both sides occasionally gesture at resuming the process of integrating Turkey with Europe.

Erdogan often uses Turkey’s NATO membership as a cudgel, threatening to leave the organization or take actions that run severely counter to its interests, confident that Europe and the United States will make concessions to keep him on board. He went too far in 2019, when he insisted on buying S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia.

Turkey was part of the F-35 program, which was intended to produce a highly advanced fighter jet that could be used by all NATO countries. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) told Erdogan that buying S-400 missiles would not be “compatible” with the F-35 program, since the F-35 is the very jet fighter that Russia designed the S-400 to shoot down. The risk of Turkey having F-35s in convenient nearby hangers for Russian missile technicians to inspect was too high.

The first Trump administration issued increasingly severe warnings to Turkey to back down from its missile purchase, but Erdogan plowed ahead, and Turkey was consequently ejected from the F-35 program. The U.S. State Department imposed sanctions against Turkey for buying Russian missiles in December 2020. Relations between Turkey and the United States have been frayed ever since.

President Trump consistently speaks of his solid personal relationship with Erdogan despite these diplomatic tensions. “President Erdogan is a friend of mine. He’s a guy I like, respect. I think he respects me also,” he said in January, shortly before his second inauguration.

Trump was congratulating Erdogan for playing his cards wisely in Syria. Turkey views Syrian Kurdish militias as a major security threat and was quick to declare support for the jihadi insurgents who overthrew dictator Bashar Assad in December, in part because Turkey wanted the new Syrian government to rein in the Kurds.

Turkey almost immediately urged Western governments to lift sanctions imposed against the Assad regime so Syrian reconstruction could begin in earnest. Trump did so in May after meeting with Syria’s new leader, former al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa, which delighted Ankara. Trump’s support for Sharaa’s government would pave the way for other Western leaders to overcome their misgivings about whether Sharaa could deliver the stable and inclusive government he promised.

The way seemed clear for relations between the U.S. and Turkey to heal, but the F-35 program remains a major sticking point. Turkey wants to be reinstated into the program, or fully reimbursed for the contributions it made before it was kicked out in 2019.

The performance of the F-35 during Trump’s astounding bombing operation against Iran’s nuclear program has probably made Turkey eager to get F-35s instead of a refund check. The F-35 is a curious beast, with many criticizing its cost, high maintenance needs, and aging technology, but the Israeli and American bombing campaigns against Iran proved beyond question that it works.

Trump discussed “Operation Midnight Hammer” with reporters at the NATO summit, praising the ability of F-35 and F-22 fighters to slip through Iranian airspace undetected alongside the fabled B-2 stealth bombers.

“The pilots flew about 36 hours — two ways, far distance — in those incredible B-2s,” the president recalled. “We then had the F-22s and we had the F-35s, and we had other planes. And we had, I think, a total of 52 tankers. That means the big tankers, because the refueling was a lot for all of the different planes that we sent. Incredible operation.”

The F-35 program went far over budget, so Trump will not be eager to issue Erdogan a rebate for the roughly $1.4 billion Turkey put into the program, much less the $9 billion the Turkish economy lost by getting locked out of F-35 production.

To put it bluntly, Turkish military planners will sleep much better at night if the plane that just humiliated the Iranian military is sleeping in their hangars. Iran has those vaunted Russian S-400 surface to air missiles, and they couldn’t so much as scratch the paint on a single Israeli or American F-35, F-22, or B-2.