ANKARA — The quiet optimism from July’s Washington meetings has not held. Reports now confirm that the effort to reinstate Turkey into the F-35 fighter jet program has stalled, with three obstacles proving more durable than the joint working group announced after those talks had suggested: the unresolved question of Turkey’s S-400 air defense systems, sustained Israeli lobby pressure on Capitol Hill, and a congressional calendar that is running out of room before year’s end.
The joint political and military working group established after July’s Washington meetings has met but has not produced a concrete arrangement. Turkey’s defense ministry has said work on the S-400 systems is “continuing in multiple dimensions” — language that has not translated into a disposal timeline, a named third-party destination, or certification language that American lawyers can use to begin the statutory process that leads to sanctions relief.
That legal sequence is the anchor of the whole dispute. Under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a presidential certification that Turkey no longer possesses the S-400 systems must precede any executive relief from the sanctions imposed on Ankara’s defense procurement agency in 2019. A separate congressional review of 90 days follows that certification. The National Defense Authorization Act carries independent restrictions requiring a separate congressional vote before Turkey can rejoin the production consortium it helped build before expulsion. As of this week, Turkey has not filed the documentation needed to start either clock.
The congressional dimension has been further complicated by an active campaign from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied groups, which have pressed lawmakers to resist any F-35 reinstatement for Turkey while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan remains in office. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has personally made representations to US officials and congressional allies, arguing that Turkey could compromise F-35 embedded technologies or erode Israel’s air superiority in a region where Tel Aviv currently operates as the dominant air force.
The lobby’s position is internally consistent. Israel’s effort to block Turkey’s F-35 access has been sustained for over a year, running through Netanyahu’s direct appeals to the White House and a coordinated congressional outreach that has translated Israeli security concerns into legislative language. What that calculation does not account for — and does not need to — is what Turkish exclusion costs NATO as a whole. American interest-group politics rarely require a domestic lobby to measure its interests against alliance consequences.
The legislative vehicle AIPAC has found most effective is the annual defense authorization bill. Restrictive language inserted into successive NDAA cycles — preventing Turkey from rejoining the program, blocking the certification process, adding supplementary conditions — can outlast changes in executive branch policy. A president willing to reinstate Turkey still needs Congress to amend or remove those restrictions. The NDAA cycle for the coming fiscal year is underway, and the window for advocates of Turkey’s reinstatement to prevent new restrictive language from being written in is closing.
Turkey purchased the S-400 from Russia in 2019 after Washington declined to offer Patriot missile systems on terms Ankara considered acceptable. Successive Turkish governments have characterized that acquisition as a defensive gap-fill rather than a strategic pivot toward Moscow, and that framing has found enough purchase in the executive branch that the Trump administration has signaled genuine interest in resolution. In July, Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Levent Gumrukcu said Ankara had “full confidence” the US would deliver on any deal — language that marked the most optimistic Turkish characterization of the negotiations in fifteen years. What the administration has not produced since then is a path through Congress that navigates the lobby opposition embedded in the legislative process.
Turkey’s strategic weight in the alliance is not disputed. It controls the Bosphorus Strait, hosted this year’s NATO summit in Ankara in July, and provides land connectivity between European theater operations and the Middle East that no other NATO member replicates. Alliance planners understand what Turkey’s geography means in the current security environment. That understanding has not yet translated into legislative relief.
If the deal fails to advance before year’s end, Turkey has alternatives it has been developing for years — partly as leverage, partly as genuine industrial policy. Turkish Aerospace Industries’ KAAN stealth fighter is in flight testing, with delivery timelines still years out. Erdoğan has preserved communication channels with Moscow and Beijing that NATO allies regard with concern, though Ankara has been careful to avoid formalizing any relationship that would constitute a hard departure from Western alliance structures. The F-35 dispute exists within that context: Turkey wants to remain inside Western defense technology, but it has demonstrated a willingness to operate outside it when the terms demanded are ones Ankara cannot accept.
What has not emerged publicly is any account of what the working group has actually put on the table. Both governments confirm discussions are ongoing. Neither has described the substance in terms that indicate where the S-400 systems would go, what timeline applies, or whether a third-party custodial arrangement — informally discussed in prior rounds — has received formal consideration. Hulusi Akar, who led the Turkish delegation to Washington in July as chairman of the Grand National Assembly’s defense committee, specifically denied in those meetings that Turkey planned to transfer the systems to the UAE. He named no alternative destination.
The deal is not formally dead. The joint working group still meets. Both sides continue to say they are closer than they have been in fifteen years. But the July confidence was confidence about the political moment, not about a concrete agreement in hand. Three months after that moment, the political window has met the practical obstacles — and the practical obstacles have not moved.
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