Greek ex-PM Tsipras calls Türkiye's fighter-jet gains a 'national defeat'

A former Greek prime minister stood up in Athens this week and read Türkiye's shopping list back to his own country as a loss. F-35s, F-16s, Eurofighters, American jet engines. Alexis Tsipras named them one by one at the Economist's Government Roundtable and called the prospect of Ankara acquiring the F-35 "a national defeat" for Greece, warning that Greek national security "is in danger."

The words are his, and so is the alarm. The source is what gives them weight: a former Greek prime minister, once the man in the chair, telling a conference hall that the regional edge is tilting toward Ankara.

Tsipras aimed most of it at the government he wants to replace. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, he said, had traded a foreign policy with more than one direction for an "open check" written to Washington. He drew the contrast from his own record: during his premiership, he said, Greece leased the Souda Bay base to the United States for five years and asked for things in return, while Mitsotakis handed over indefinite use of six bases, Alexandroupoli among them, and got a shifting balance for it. Those figures are Tsipras's account of his own tenure, offered as a rebuke rather than a ledger.

Then the line built for the cameras. F-35s, F-16s, Eurofighters and US aircraft engines are going to Türkiye, he said, "and we cannot even lay a cable to Kaso." He folded in the 2019 maritime-boundary deal Ankara signed with Libya as one more entry on Türkiye's side of the column.

Strip out his framing and the developments underneath are real, and they are Türkiye's own to make. Ankara is modernizing its F-16 fleet toward the Viper standard and pursuing the Eurofighter Typhoon. Last week the American F110 engines that will power the KAAN fighter cleared their congressional review window without a vote, the General Electric F110, a different engine from the F135 that flies the F-35, and a distinction worth keeping straight. The F-35 itself is a separate file, and it has not moved. Standing beside Erdoğan at the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump said he would lift the CAATSA sanctions and "certainly consider" Türkiye's return to the program, a sentence at a podium rather than an export license.

That is the gap between what Tsipras described and what has actually happened. He spoke of jets given to Türkiye. What exists is a modernization program a sovereign country is running for itself, part of the defense-industry momentum that now has buyers lining up for Turkish arms, plus a warm American signal that still has to survive the paperwork.

He is not alone in his unease. Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias and Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis told visiting US members of Congress that a Turkish F-35 acquisition could carry "serious consequences" for regional stability, and Kathimerini reported Athens as uneasy at the trajectory, short on ways to press its case in Washington. Ta Nea quoted a veteran Greek diplomat describing "two allies growing closer," with Türkiye moving into Europe's security architecture and ready to send force where asked.

The Aegean backdrop has not changed under any of this. The eastern islands sit under the demilitarized status set by the treaties of Lausanne in 1923 and Paris in 1947, and Türkiye's continental-shelf and maritime rights, framed in the Blue Homeland doctrine, stand where they stood. What shifted this week is the tone from Athens. When a former Greek prime minister totes up Ankara's gains and reaches for the word "defeat," he is measuring how far the balance has moved, and saying so out loud.