Akar meets House Armed Services leaders as the F-35 file reopens

A week after NATO's summit left Ankara, Türkiye took the defense conversation to Capitol Hill.

Hulusi Akar, who chairs the Turkish parliament's National Defense Committee, met on Tuesday in Washington with the leadership of the US House Armed Services Committee. Akar, a former defense minister and before that the chief of the general staff, said he sat down with the committee's chairman, Mike Rogers, and one of its members, Representative Pat Harrigan, to work through defense cooperation and the state of ties between the two countries.

"We evaluated opportunities for cooperation in the fields of defense and security, clearly conveyed our country's views and expectations to our counterparts, and discussed regional and global developments," Akar said. He put weight on keeping the two legislatures in contact, the kind of channel that matters most when the relationship above it is thawing.

And it is thawing. After the Ankara summit, President Erdoğan said Trump had taken a "positive approach" to delivering F-35 fighter jets to Türkiye, and that US sanctions on Ankara had largely come off. Those two items, the jets and the sanctions, are the unfinished business of 2019, when the United States pushed Türkiye out of the F-35 program over its purchase of the Russian S-400 air-defense system, arguing the Russian system would compromise the jet.

That is the backdrop Akar carried into the room. He claimed no deal, and the American side put out no statement of its own, which is the usual shape of these visits: a foreign delegation makes its case, the hosts listen, and nothing is announced. What Akar described was Türkiye stating its expectations plainly to the committee that writes the defense-policy bill. No commitment came back, and none was expected.

The delegation also called on Sedat Önal, Türkiye's ambassador in Washington, at the embassy.

For Ankara, the value is in the venue. The Armed Services Committee shapes the US defense authorization each year, and F-35 access and sanctions language have lived in that text before. Taking the case there in person, days after the summit, is how Türkiye signals it means to hold Washington to the opening its leaders described.