Erdoğan Hosts NATO Summit, Leaves Without F-35 Jets

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spent the days after the NATO summit telling Turks what it had done for them. Hosting the alliance's 36th leaders' meeting at the Beştepe presidential complex on 7–8 July, he said, had raised Türkiye's international visibility and showcased its state tradition; every leader, Donald Trump included, had responded warmly. Visibility is the right word, and it is close to the whole of what Ankara actually banked. The one thing Erdoğan wanted from the week — a plane — he did not get.

For a few days it looked as though he would. Ahead of the summit Trump said the United States would lift the CAATSA sanctions imposed over Türkiye's purchase of the Russian S-400 system — "we don't want to sanction friends" — and called Ankara "much more loyal than other countries." On the aircraft he went no further than: "We will make a decision on the F-35 issue. Our relationship is very good right now." Erdoğan, visibly caught out, replied that the jets had been promised and that "Mr. Trump always keeps his promises." Then Trump left Ankara without restoring Türkiye to the programme, telling reporters he had not made up his mind. The Turkish Defence Ministry was reduced to welcoming the remarks — sanctions, it said, are incompatible with the spirit of the alliance and should be lifted — which is a strange sentence for an ally to have to say out loud.

The obstacle is not Trump's goodwill. It is a statute. The Kremlin has confirmed talks on moving the S-400 to a Gulf buyer, most likely the UAE or Qatar, an arrangement that would let Erdoğan be rid of the system without ever conceding he was wrong to buy it. Writing for JINSA on 9 July, Jonah Brody argued that this solves nothing in law: Section 1245 of the 2020 defence authorisation act bars any F-35 transfer unless the secretaries of state and defence jointly certify that Türkiye "no longer possesses" the system, and, as he put it, "a crated S-400 is still possessed by the government that owns it and can uncrate it." The Foundation for Defense of Democracies made the same point a day later, in a headline that needs no article behind it: selling the S-400 to Qatar or the UAE solves Türkiye's problem, not Washington's. Even the sanctions relief is not Trump's alone to hand over — Congress gets a window to disapprove it. Ankara is being paid in instruments Washington may not be able to clear, and Erdoğan, who has been in this exact position before, surely knows it.

What Ankara did bank was smaller, duller and real. It signed defence agreements with Canada, Romania and Bulgaria, including an amendment widening the Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Task Group's mandate to cover undersea infrastructure. It joined the Canadian-based Defence Security and Resilience Bank as a founding member — announced at the summit by Mark Carney, backed by JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and ING, and aiming to raise up to $134 billion in cheap financing for allied defence. Erdoğan closed the summit promoting Baykar's drones and sent the visiting leaders home with personalised .357 Magnum revolvers made by the state arms maker MKE, a gift some delegations' security details did not love. It is the self-image of the world's third-largest small-arms exporter, and it is not nothing: the defence-industrial case for Türkiye is the one part of Erdoğan's pitch that depends on nobody's permission.

The rest of the week was a lesson in what does. On 7 July, the day the alliance convened in Ankara, the United States resumed strikes on Iran — counts differ, from something over eighty targets by one tally to nearly 170 by another — and reimposed oil sanctions, barely three weeks after the June memorandum that was meant to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On 12 July Iran declared the strait closed again. The UK Maritime Trade Operations centre and the US Navy insist the southern lane is open and the waterway international; the tanker count is less diplomatic, running at about 34 transits a day against a normal 88. Tehran now gates passage through a permit authority and has said it will charge for the privilege, with special treatment available to friendly states. Goldman Sachs has warned that another month of closure keeps Brent above $100 for the rest of 2026.

For Türkiye that is not a foreign story; it is the household budget. The country imports 93 percent of its oil and 99 percent of its gas. Which is why the week's energy items, the ones that read like filler next to a summit, were the serious ones. Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar came back from Baghdad with a twelve-month deal to restart the Iraq–Türkiye pipeline into Ceyhan, shut for two and a half years — though the terms of the reopening are not Ankara's to set. The arbitration award that closed it has survived: the Paris Court of Appeal threw out Türkiye's attempt to annul the 2023 ICC ruling, and the $1.5 billion Ankara owes Baghdad for crude it helped the Kurdistan region export without Iraqi consent between 2014 and 2018 is now final. Türkiye has to settle a French court's bill to reopen its own hedge. The other hedges are cheaper: BOTAŞ broke ground on a fourth storage tank at the Marmaraereğlisi LNG terminal, lifting capacity from 255,000 to 415,000 cubic metres, and Malone Mitchell III, chief executive of TransAtlantic Petroleum, put the Diyarbakır Basin at up to 250,000 barrels a day — a quarter of national demand — with 24 horizontal wells planned over three years alongside TPAO and Continental Resources. Every one of them points at the same chokepoint. While NATO was in town selling Türkiye as a strategic asset, Türkiye's own ministries spent the week behaving like a country that knows exactly how exposed it is.

Nothing shows the gap between the summit's billing and its content better than the peace Ankara keeps saying it is about to host. Hakan Fidan says Türkiye is ready to receive Russian and Ukrainian delegations; Erdoğan told Friedrich Merz on 29 June that he was working to restart the process; officials now expect direct talks in Istanbul before the end of summer. They said versions of this in the spring, and the spring produced nothing. What the summit did produce was €140 billion in allied military aid to Ukraine for 2026–27 — double the package that had been on the table going in — and a Trump offer to license Ukrainian production of Patriot interceptors: decisions about arming a war, not ending one. A post-summit critique published in Türkiye made the point sharply, arguing the final declaration was a document about managing threats, heavy on defence spending, arms production and AI warfare systems, with no vision at all for prevention, mediation or reconciliation — and that the one host with genuine mediation experience had let the moment go by.

Then came Monday. While Ankara was still enjoying the afterglow of its own summit, the diplomacy that actually runs the Ukraine war convened in Paris: the Coalition of the Willing, now 37 countries, co-chaired by Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz, with Volodymyr Zelensky in the room and air defence and a ceasefire on the agenda. Türkiye was there too — represented by Fidan, standing in for a president who had hosted the entire alliance five days earlier. The claim, made on this site earlier in the year, that peacemaking was migrating to Ankara does not survive that seating plan. Türkiye offers the room; the decisions are taken somewhere else. And its even-handedness comes with a price list: on 4 July it deported the Russian anti-war activist Ariadna Litvinova to Moscow, where she faces up to seven years for "discrediting" the army — the first such deportation Ankara is known to have made.

Erdoğan's own institutions are hedging too. In summit week, of all weeks, the National Intelligence Academy published a report arguing that allied export restrictions and embargoes are pushing Ankara towards strategic autonomy and weakening the alliance from within, and that Türkiye's threat perception — terrorism and Middle Eastern instability — no longer matches NATO's Russia-first eastern flank. Governments do not usually let their own intelligence academy contradict the communiqué they are hosting. Ankara does not believe the promises either.

And yet the reading that Türkiye came away empty-handed misses where it is genuinely winning, which is everywhere it does not have to ask. On 13 July the frigate TCG Istanbul, with Admiral Ercüment Tatlıoğlu aboard, tied up at Latakia — the first Turkish naval call in Syria since Assad fell, in a basin Ankara has been arguing over with Athens and Nicosia for half a century. The same day Defence Minister Yaşar Güler signed a defence memorandum with Egypt's Lieutenant General Ashraf Salem Zaher, closing out a decade of estrangement. Turkish intelligence pulled a senior Daesh figure, Talip Güler, out of Syria and into custody. Erdoğan hosted Lebanon's Nawaf Salam in Istanbul on 10 July and Syria's Ahmed al-Sharaa in Ankara during the summit itself, and on 12 July Ankara welcomed the first sitting of Syria's new 210-seat People's Assembly — 140 members elected, 70 appointed, three Suwayda seats still empty. On 8 July Erdoğan asked António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen to reactivate the accession process and to write Türkiye into the EU's coming trade and investment rules; days later Ankara was denouncing Brussels for appointing a special representative on Cyprus and restating a two-state demand the UN does not accept. Asking and denouncing in the same week is not a contradiction in Ankara's mind. It is the method.

Which brings us to the currency Erdoğan does not have to ask anyone for. While NATO leaders sat in his palace on 8 July, Ekrem İmamoğlu — Istanbul's mayor, the CHP's presidential candidate, jailed for more than a year — was defending himself in a courtroom a short drive away. On 13 July, Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi and Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced detention orders for 968 suspected Gülenists across all 81 provinces, two days before the tenth anniversary of the 2016 coup attempt, with Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul carrying the largest counts. The numbers they released are their own argument: 1,065 operations in the first half of this year alone and 2,451 people detained; and, since 2013, proceedings against 720,338 people, 127,102 of them convicted, with 83,404 cases still running. Prosecutors reopened the 2009 helicopter crash that killed the Grand Unity Party leader Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, detaining 25 on allegations of premeditated murder. Turkish intelligence publicised its December 2015 breach of the ByLock servers in Lithuania — 215,000 users, 17 million messages, 4.7 million emails — the evidentiary spine of a decade of prosecutions. Vice-President Cevdet Yılmaz told a SETA symposium in Ankara that the purge had allowed institutions, the army above all, to fulfil their true duties.

The opposition is being taken apart on two tracks at once. Since an Ankara court voided the CHP's 2023 congress in May and reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu over the elected Özgür Özel, 36 provincial chairs have been dismissed and 11 referred to the disciplinary board; on 10 July the executive board weighed stripping Özel of the parliamentary group chairmanship, his last institutional foothold, with about ten more provincial chairs expected to follow. That is the inside job. The outside one runs on the instrument that took İmamoğlu: on 11 July police raided the CHP-run Çankaya municipality in the middle of Ankara, the chief prosecutor issuing detention orders for 36 people, Mayor Hüseyin Can Güner among them, on charges of running a criminal organisation, bribery and bid-rigging. Twenty-seven were taken in dawn raids; Güner, out of the country when it began, was arrested at the airport on his way back. It is the latest in a run of investigations into CHP-run municipalities that started after the party outpolled the AK Party in the March 2024 local elections.

Foreign Policy argued in late May, under the headline "Erdoğan Is Forcibly Designing His Own Opposition," that this crackdown differs from its predecessors in aim rather than in degree: the earlier ones tried to weaken or remove rivals, while this one is building an opposition that will go on contesting elections and filling seats, supplying the appearance of competition without its substance. The GENAR poll published this week is the evidence for that reading — AK Party 36.2 percent, CHP 28.3 percent, an eight-point lead over the party that took the largest national vote share in 2024. The CHP has not lost its voters. It is losing the machinery that turns them out, town hall by town hall. In the same week prosecutors detained the singer Haluk Levent, who chairs Ahbap, the association that gathered much of the private relief after the February 2023 earthquakes, in a money-laundering investigation naming 20 suspects and alleging that some 120 million lira moved from the association into personal accounts.

What Erdoğan cannot legislate is the price of a barrel. June inflation came in at 32.1 percent, down from 32.6, and Mehmet Şimşek called disinflation back on track — but the central bank has halted its easing cycle, holds the highest policy rate in the G20 at 37 percent, has let overnight rates run to the 40 percent ceiling, and has lifted its end-2026 forecast into the mid-twenties, blaming the war. Retail sales accelerated to 13.7 percent year-on-year in May, with non-food purchases up 17.5 percent; demand that strong is precisely why the cuts cannot resume. May's current-account deficit did narrow to about $1.46 billion, a seven-month low, and Trade Minister Ömer Bolat expects the second quarter to land at $12–12.5 billion on 10.2 percent export growth. But that is a services number, banked in tourist season. The bill from a re-closed Hormuz arrives afterwards.

On Wednesday Türkiye marks ten years since the coup, under the slogan "The Will Is Ours, Victory Is Ours," and Erdoğan will make the case that the state he rebuilt out of that night is the one now hosting alliances and sailing frigates into Latakia. The tests that matter run on other clocks, and mostly in other capitals. Congress has its window to strike down the CAATSA relief, and no American secretary can certify an S-400 that has been sold rather than surrendered. Fidan has until the end of summer to produce the Istanbul talks he keeps promising, having spent Monday in Paris at somebody else's. Baghdad has a $1.5 billion cheque to cash. And Brent has the rest of the year to decide whether Şimşek's disinflation survives. Erdoğan spent his summit-host prestige the moment he earned it — on 968 warrants, a raid on Çankaya and the dismantling of a party — and he was right that nobody in Ankara would say a word about it. He has been paid in visibility. Whether it converts into anything he can hold will be decided in Washington, in Moscow, in Paris and in the Strait of Hormuz, and he controls none of them.