The only lasting institutional wall between Türkiye and the United States is the CAATSA sanctions, and both governments want it gone. That was Hakan Fidan's message on CNN Türk, days before Donald Trump flies to Ankara for next week's NATO summit.

"There is a strong will from both our president and President Trump" to lift the sanctions, the foreign minister said. He traced it to the White House meeting last September, where Erdoğan and Trump declared their political will and told their cabinets to solve it. "The defense minister and I are working intensively on this."

So where is the holdup? In the US Congress, which has to authorize any lifting. The two governments are aligned, Fidan said; the legislature is the variable.

Fidan said progress could come soon, with one caveat: administrative decisions and congressional procedures do not always move together. "There is no problem in terms of political will within the administrations," he said. "The question is how the process in the US Congress will proceed."

He put CAATSA in a longer arc. Over the past three to four years, he said, many restrictions other countries placed on Türkiye have come off, most of them administrative rather than legal, with Canada as one of the latest. CAATSA is the one with a legal dimension that will not simply expire.

On the F-35, Fidan drew a line down the middle. Lifting the sales ban, taking delivery of jets Türkiye already paid for, and buying more later is one thing, an administrative call that he said "can happen after" CAATSA comes off. Returning as a manufacturing partner is another. That needs a fresh vote by the multinational consortium, whose members suspended Türkiye in 2019 over its purchase of the Russian S-400 system.

Ankara's line on 2019 has not moved. Türkiye says there is no real conflict between the S-400 and the F-35, that it proposed a commission to study the question, that it met its obligations, and that the suspension broke the program's own rules.

Then there is the KAAN, Türkiye's domestically built fighter. Trump told reporters last week he is likely to take a step that would make Türkiye "very happy" on jets and engines. Asked whether that pointed to US approval of engines for the KAAN, Fidan would not go there. "I do not want to speak on behalf of the US regarding what President Trump may announce," he said.

He pointed instead to results already on the board. The Halkbank case, he said, recently closed with no administrative or judicial sanctions, one fruit of a wider push to strip away restrictions on Türkiye across defense and other areas.

Fidan also named the friction that has eased. The US policy that began under Obama, shifting from fighting the Assad regime to fighting Daesh while backing the YPG terrorist group, "threatened Türkiye's national security," he said. Under Trump's second term it was "officially abandoned," removing one of the biggest sources of tension between the two capitals.

He argued the whole restriction regime never made sense. Washington sells enormous quantities of weapons to non-NATO states with fewer shared interests, he said, yet balked at selling to a NATO ally. He put the difference down to identity politics and old political attitudes toward Türkiye.

Fidan also looked beyond the US file. Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan are running a new four-country mechanism for regional stability, he said. It has met four times and could grow into a more strategic platform.

He framed all of it under what he calls a "360-degree" foreign policy. "We are mature enough to determine our own friends and enemies," he said. "Within NATO, we are an ally." Dialogue runs to Russia, Iran, Europe, and Asia-Pacific at the same time.

He met Putin recently on Erdoğan's behalf, covering Ukraine, the Caucasus, Palestine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Putin reaffirmed the position he agreed with Trump in Alaska on the Ukraine peace process.

On Europe, Fidan said both Türkiye and the EU want the Customs Union modernized. The block, he said, is the Greek Cypriot side.