The meeting Ankara has waited six years for produced a public promise. Beside Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the NATO summit on Tuesday, Donald Trump said he would remove the CAATSA sanctions Washington imposed on Türkiye's defense-procurement agency, and that he would "certainly consider" restoring Ankara's access to the F-35 fighter. "We're going to be taking the sanctions off," Trump told reporters. "We don't want to sanction friends."
Erdoğan, next to him, said he expected the summit to yield a "favorable decision" on the jets. "The F-35 issue is not a new one for us," he said, adding that Trump "always stands by his word." Trump went further on the relationship as a whole, dismissing US objections to Türkiye's Russian S-400 system and calling Ankara "much more loyal than other countries," with ties now "better, probably than it's ever been."
The rift he offered to close is his own. In 2019, during Trump's first term, Washington suspended Türkiye from the F-35 program after Ankara took delivery of the S-400, arguing the two could not share an air force. Türkiye had helped build the jet, ordered roughly 100, and paid some 1.4 billion dollars into the program, and it has recovered neither the aircraft made for it nor the money since. Ankara has always said it met its obligations and that the two systems can coexist, an argument it offered to test through a joint commission.
A promise at a podium is not a signed order. Trump said he was coordinating with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to finalize the sanctions decision, and would only "consider" the F-35. Congress has tied any sale to a finding that Türkiye no longer holds the S-400, a condition Ankara has not met and Trump waved away. Hours earlier the New York Times, citing four senior officials, had reported he was expected to signal his intent.
The engines were the other half of the conversation. The administration has informed Congress of plans to sell Türkiye dozens of F110 jet engines, made by General Electric, in a deal worth more than 700 million dollars. Those engines are meant for the KAAN, the fighter Türkiye began building in 2016 to escape the kind of cutoff it met over the F-35. Erdoğan said he expected Trump to reiterate "the good news" on them at the summit.
Türkiye is hosting the alliance for the first time in 22 years, its own industry at the center of NATO's push to rearm, the seat it paid for in Korea now carrying weight in the room. Whether the sanctions come off, and whether the F-35 door actually reopens, will be settled in paperwork rather than podium lines. For now, Tuesday in Ankara was the warmest signal the two capitals have exchanged in years.