Three capitals moved toward Turkish weapons in the same two weeks, and they moved in the same direction.
Paris eased its objection to selling Türkiye a top-tier air-defense system. Berlin said out loud that it was looking at Turkish missiles. Baku sat down with the makers of the drone that rewrote its last war. None of the three is a signed contract yet. All three point at the same place: an arms industry that Western governments spent decades keeping at arm's length is now the one they are calling.
Start with France, because it is the sharpest turn. Reuters, citing five sources, reported this month that Paris has softened its long-standing reservations about selling Türkiye the SAMP/T, the long-range air-defense system France builds with Italy, and that the two sides are discussing joint production. Four of the sources tied the shift to a meeting between President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on 25 June. The talks revive a program the three countries began around 2017 and then let stall as relations between Paris and Ankara soured over Syria, Libya, and the disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean. A French defense official, asked about it, said discussions on both the SAMP/T and the Meteor missile, the latter alongside British partners, were "going good." The sources cautioned that the new openness should not be read as approval for a sale, and Türkiye, which wants the system for the layered Steel Dome air defense it is building, has no deal in hand. But France saying yes even in principle is not a small thing. This is the country that was, for years, the loudest European voice for caution on arming Ankara.
Germany is a step behind France and moving the same way. In an interview with Anadolu Ajansı after the summit, Germany's deputy defense minister, Nils Schmid, said Berlin was exploring closer cooperation with Türkiye's defense industry, and pointed to two things it wanted: Turkish unmanned aircraft, and Turkish long-range, deep precision-strike systems. That interest has money behind it. Days earlier, at the Ankara summit, a dozen allies including Germany, France and Türkiye launched an initiative to invest together in exactly that capability, deep precision strike, weapons that reach from a few hundred to a few thousand kilometers, with a price tag reported at around $50 billion over ten years and Germany expected to carry close to half of it. The capability Europe is now paying to build is one Türkiye already makes.
Then Baku. Azerbaijan's defense minister, Zakir Hasanov, met a Baykar delegation led by the company's chairman, Selçuk Bayraktar, on 10 July, and the two sides discussed expanding joint production, along with unmanned aircraft, electronic warfare and unmanned systems more broadly. Hasanov called the two countries "fraternal," which in the Azerbaijani-Turkish relationship is close to a statement of fact. Baykar's drones did much of the work in Azerbaijan's 2020 victory in Karabakh. What is being built now is a supply chain, not a one-off sale.
Underneath the three headlines sits a steadier customer: NATO itself. The Turkish firm Aselsan has turned its alliance work into what it calls a strategic partnership, winning a tender for identification-friend-or-foe systems against a leading global supplier, taking a place as one of five companies on NATO's modular ground-based air-defense concept alongside Airbus, Lockheed Martin UK, Raytheon and Thales, and signing a contract worth around $410 million with Poland. At home, it just signed a roughly $1.68 billion deal to expand serial production for Türkiye's own layered air defense. The alliance is not exploring Aselsan. It is buying.
So why now? The answer is not really about Türkiye. It is about everyone around it.
Europe is rearming, and it is doing so under an American ally that keeps signaling it will carry less of the load. Germany is steering its defense budget toward roughly $125 billion by 2027. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has floated buying American Tomahawk cruise missiles. Macron has spent the summer pressing Europe to spend more on its own defense inside NATO rather than outside it. The Ankara summit put a name on the shift, "NATO 3.0," and a number on it, with the alliance's members agreeing to shoulder more. When a continent decides at once that it needs more weapons, faster, it discovers a short list of allies who can actually deliver them. Türkiye is on that list.
It is on it because it built itself onto it. Turkish defense firms make capable kit at prices that undercut the older Western names, and much of it has been used in real wars, in Syria, in Libya, in Karabakh, in Ukraine, which is the reference a defense ministry trusts more than a brochure. Ankara has spent a decade treating its arms industry as an instrument of foreign policy, the export catalog and the diplomacy pulling together, and the results now show up as other governments' shopping lists. Türkiye was the world's third-largest exporter of small arms between 2019 and 2024, behind only the United States and Italy, and the appetite for its heavier systems, the drones and the air defense, is what this fortnight is measuring.
The distance traveled is the part worth sitting with. Fifty years ago Türkiye could not reliably arm itself at all. In February 1975, angry at the 1974 Cyprus Peace Operation, the US Congress imposed an arms embargo on Türkiye, then a NATO ally that leaned on American weapons for much of its military, and held it until 1978. The lesson Ankara drew, that a country which buys its guns can have them taken away, is the reason it spent the following decades building at home what it used to import. The revolver Erdoğan handed every leader at the Ankara summit was a small, pointed advertisement for exactly that story. This fortnight is the same story told by the buyers instead of the seller.
A word of caution belongs here, because the direction is clearer than the destinations. France softening is not France selling. Germany exploring is not Germany ordering. A meeting in Baku is not a factory. Each of these can still stall on price, on politics, on the next election in a European capital. And Türkiye, which builds its own long-range air defense in the Siper system, is not looking at the SAMP/T out of need so much as out of the value of a second option and of tighter interoperability with the allies it serves alongside. Dependence is not the word.
But add the moves up and the shape is hard to miss. Over one fortnight, France, Germany, Azerbaijan and the NATO alliance all reached, in their different registers, for something Türkiye makes. The country that was cut off in 1975 is the one being courted in 2026. The catalog is open, and for the first time in a long time, the customers are the ones knocking.