Trump's NATO trip and the F-35 question: a transactional reset with Ankara

Donald Trump touched down in the second week of June 2026 for a NATO leaders' gathering that, on the published agenda, had little to do with Turkey. By the time Air Force One rolled to a stop, the loudest single item was a fighter aircraft Ankara has been waiting six years to recover: the F-35. The trip's headline was alliance unity; the substance, for Ankara at least, was a hangar in Fort Worth and a reactivation order that has not been signed.

The transactional logic is plain. The United States needs Turkey inside a working NATO for the Black Sea flank, for Incirlik, for the overflight and basing rights that make every eastern Mediterranean contingency plan operational. Turkey needs the F-35 to replace an F-16 fleet that is approaching end-of-life and to preserve a domestic defence industry, TUSAS, whose production line is calibrated to fifth-generation airframes. Both governments have reasons to deal. The question hanging over the visit was whether the deal-making has actually advanced, or whether the choreography is doing the work the paperwork has not.

What Ankara wants

The Turkish ask is specific, and it is not new. In 2019, Ankara took delivery of its first S-400 air defence system from Russia, a transaction that triggered removal from the F-35 programme, the imposition of Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) measures, and a multi-year freeze on roughly $1.4 billion in payments Turkey had already made toward aircraft it never received. Turkey's negotiating position since has been consistent: return us to the programme, refund or credit the payments, and resolve the CAATSA overhang through some form of waiver, delisting or suspension.

Inside Turkey, the political economy of the F-35 question has hardened over the past year. The S-400 batteries are still operational; Turkish officials have made clear they will not be handed back. But the air force is approaching a structural gap. The defence ministry has framed F-35 re-access, or failing that a clean path to Eurofighter or Rafale, as essential to its next decade of planning. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government has used the F-35 file as a measurable test of the United States' willingness to treat Turkey as an ally rather than a problem to be managed.

The Washington frame

The White House has an interest in presenting the visit as a deal. A working F-35 package would burnish a presidential brand for transactional statecraft and signal to other NATO capitals that cost-sharing and procurement grievances are solvable on Washington's terms. Officials in Ankara and in the alliance bureaucracy in Brussels have, in recent weeks, pointed to movement: working groups, technical exchanges, language about "co-production" and "sustainment" that the Turks have not heard from a US administration in some time.

What has not been confirmed, as of the NATO meeting, is the actual reactivation order. A senior administration official, in the standard on-background format US briefings tend to produce, told reporters the F-35 file was being handled "deliberately and with appropriate seriousness", which is the kind of sentence that signals a process is alive without telling anyone what it will produce. The American press coverage, where it has engaged, has been more interested in the optics of a Trump–Erdoğan handshake than in the contracting language.

The alliance story nobody is covering

This is where the wire's split is doing real damage to the public's understanding of the stakes. Two frames are competing for the story. The first treats it as a Turkey story: Ankara returns, the recalcitrant ally comes back into the tent, and the S-400 problem dissolves because nobody wants to mention it. The second treats it as a Washington story: a president brokers another deal, adds another notch, and demonstrates that NATO still works when the United States is in the room.

The third frame, the alliance frame, is the one that will define the consequences and the one that the wires have been least willing to write. NATO is a thirty-two-member organisation in which the central guarantee runs through a single airframe, the F-35, supplied by a single manufacturer under a single foreign-military-sales authority. Turkey's exclusion has been, until now, the most expensive single fracture inside that arrangement, a roughly $1.4 billion sunk cost on the Turkish side and an open capacity question on the US side, since the airframes earmarked for Turkey were absorbed into US inventory and forward-deployed to other allies. A reversal of that exclusion does not just restore a bilateral relationship. It rewrites the procurement risk the rest of the alliance has been quietly absorbing.

It also exposes the gap between two of Washington's other Turkey files. Congress, including the bipartisan grouping that authored the original CAATSA sanctions, has made clear in hearings and letters that any F-35 restoration is expected to come paired with S-400 resolution. The administration has an interest in not picking that fight in public. Ankara has an interest in not picking it at all. The result is a press cycle in which the headline says "deal" and the underlying contracting language, the S-400 disposition clause, the CAATSA waiver text, the sustainment schedule, stays out of the briefing materials.

The S-400 problem, still

No honest write-up of the F-35 file can elide the S-400. The Russian system is integrated into Turkish air defence, crewed, operational, and politically entangled with a defence relationship that extends into air defence cooperation, energy, and a bilateral track that has its own gravitational pull. A US administration that signs an F-35 reactivation order without an S-400 resolution is, in practice, accepting that an ally flying a fifth-generation US fighter is also flying a Russian early-warning and engagement system on its own soil. That is a structural problem, not a paperwork problem, and no working group will make it disappear.

The S-400 angle also explains why the European NATO members, who would normally be vocal about any F-35 redistribution, have been quiet. A Turkey back inside the F-35 programme is, for the eastern flank, a net positive. A Turkey operating both the F-35 and the S-400 is a different conversation, and one that several NATO capitals would prefer not to be the first to start.

Stakes and open questions

The transactional reset, if it is one, is being negotiated in public through handshake choreography and in private through contracting language nobody is on the record to confirm. The next inflection points are easy to name and hard to date: a formal US Defense Department announcement of a reactivation order; a CAATSA-related action from the Treasury Department; any movement on the S-400 file, including the possibility that the batteries are quietly relocated to a third country or relegated to a non-operational status; and a Turkish defence ministry order for the F-35's Block 4 update, which would itself require a fresh US contracting decision.

The NATO trip produced a photograph. It did not, as of the trip's conclusion, produce a signed order. Whether the picture is a receipt for a deal or a deposit on one is the question the wires have so far declined to press. It is also the question that will tell us, in the next quarter, whether the alliance's most expensive single bilateral fracture is being closed, or whether the alliance is being asked to celebrate the announcement while the contract language continues to do its slower work.

Sources: Telegram OSINT channels (osintlive, ClashReport); Monexus wire synthesis of US and Turkish government readouts, June 2026.

Desk note: Monexus has framed the F-35 question as a procurement and alliance-management problem, not a moral one. The wire line is currently split between treatment as a Turkey story (Ankara's return) and treatment as a Washington story (a president brokering). The alliance story, which is where the lasting consequences will be felt, is the one least covered.