US lawmakers call Türkiye's F-35 return 'very promising'

Jeanne Shaheen helped write the law that pushed Türkiye out of the F-35 program. This week the Democratic senator was counted among the lawmakers calling its return promising.

The public signal came from Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on CBS's "Face the Nation" on 12 July. He called Türkiye's potential return to the fighter-jet program "very promising" and "incredibly important," and said the lawmakers who had met Turkish officials agreed they could say so out loud. "We agreed together that we would be able to publicly say what we heard was very promising," Turner said. He would not repeat what the Turkish side told them. Shaheen, one of the original authors of the legislation that removed Türkiye, had reached the same read, he added.

The meetings happened at the NATO summit Türkiye hosted in Ankara on 7 and 8 July, where a bipartisan group of senators and House members sat down with Turkish officials. Türkiye has been working the other end of the same conversation too, sending its own defense-committee chair to Capitol Hill days later.

Turner made a point of how deep Türkiye already sat in the plane. Turkish factories turned out parts for the F-35 before the break, he said, and he backs "their return to both production and the program."

None of this is a decision. "Very promising" is a mood, and a mood does not deliver a fighter jet. The wall in the way went up in 2019: Türkiye bought the Russian S-400, Washington threw it out of the F-35, and a year later sanctioned its arms-procurement agency under CAATSA. The S-400 is still there, and no one in Washington will say in public what becomes of it. The friendlier words are bipartisan but not unanimous; Trump's opening has met as much resistance in Congress as agreement.

Ankara sounds more hopeful than it has in years. On 17 July, Deputy Foreign Minister Zeki Levent Gümrükçü said Türkiye and the United States were nearing a resolution of both the F-35 exclusion and the CAATSA sanctions. "This time we really feel closer," he said. "We feel that we might be able to resolve this issue." It fits a run of signals since the summit, Trump's pledge on 7 July to lift the sanctions and "consider" selling the jets, and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan's account of the two governments working to dismantle CAATSA.

A delivered jet is a long way off. It still needs the sanctions lifted, the S-400 dealt with, and a Congress that has not voted. None of that shifted this week. The senator who helped write the ban did.