ISTANBUL
\nUS President Donald Trump\u2019s visit to Ankara for the NATO summit could help secure Turkiye\u2019s acquisition of dozens of fighter jet engines, but won\u2019t resolve the F-35 dispute that has soured ties, analysts say.The July 7-8 summit, which is being hosted by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will bring together leaders from the military alliance\u2019s 32 member states.
\nLast month, Trump promised to make Erdogan \u201cvery happy\u201d when asked about Turkiye looking to secure F110 jet engines and being readmitted to the F-35 fighter jet program. Analysts said it would likely mean freeing up fighter jet engines Turkiye wants to use in its flagship KAAN stealth fighter project.
\n\u201cTurkiye has produced a couple of prototypes which are flying with the F110 engine, but it has been waiting for the supply of additional engines to increase the number of KAAN platforms,\u201d he said. KAAN is a twin-engine stealth fighter being developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) to replace the Turkish Air Force\u2019s fleet of F-16s as Ankara seeks to join the exclusive club of nations producing fifth-generation combat aircraft, notably the US, China and Russia.
\nAlthough Turkiye will eventually fit the fighter with its own domestically-produced engine \u2014 the F110s lacking stealth capability \u2014 that project is still in the preliminary design phase, Defense Minister Yasar Guler said in September. Turkiye received a first batch of 10 F110s in September, and talks with the US government to acquire 80 more were \u201congoing,\u201d he said.
\nIndigenous defense systems But that\u2019s been held up by a lack of political clearance linked to Turkiye\u2019s 2017 acquisition of a Russian S-400 missile defense system, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in September. Infuriated, Washington expelled Turkiye from its F-35 fighter jet program in 2019 and imposed CAATSA sanctions a year later, hampering Turkish defense projects and souring ties.
\n\u201cThe CAATSA issue must be resolved. The US needs to take steps both regarding the F-35 and the engines for KAAN. KAAN\u2019s engines are currently awaiting approval in the US Congress,\u201d Fidan said, his remarks raising eyebrows back home as Turkiye had said the KAAN would be entirely domestically produced.
\nAnkara\u2019s F-35 exclusion has forced it to refocus on self-sufficiency. \u201cSome argue we should not buy F-35s and invest that money into our own fifth-generation fighter jet program. And that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening with President Trump\u2019s decision to export jet engines,\u201d Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, head of the German Marshall Fund in Ankara said.
\n\u201cWithout those engines, Turkiye cannot produce the KAAN jet.\u201dF-35 deadlock drags on With a KAAN delivery date many years away, only Indonesia has placed an order, signing a $10bn contract to buy 48 fighters, although the NATO summit could generate further interest, Ulgen said.
\n\u201cLooking at the failure of the German-French FCAS initiative, there may be some interest. Spain could potentially become a partner and there may be interest from the Gulf as well\u2026 But there are more obstacles to be overcome for it to become a credible offer on the international stage,\u201d he said.
\nExperts expected little progress on the lingering F-35 dispute: for Congress to lift the CAATSA sanctions, Ankara would have to get rid of the S-400 \u2014 but selling it to a third country would require Moscow\u2019s approval, and returning it to the Russians was not on the cards.
\n\u201cThe US administration might wish to\u2026 put this issue behind it and sell Turkiye some F-35, but that will go to Congress and changing the congressional decision won\u2019t be easy,\u201d said Professor Mustafa Aydin, an international relations expert at Istanbul\u2019s Kadir Has University.
\nBut Matthew Bryza, a retired US envoy and former senior White House and State Department official, said Trump could move to resolve the matter as the F-35 was an executive decision which he could easily reverse.
\n\u201cPresident Trump can certainly declare that the S-400\/F-35 dispute is finished. It\u2019s the CAATSA sanctions that require congressional action. Whether he can persuade Congress to do that, depends on how much political capital he\u2019s willing to expend,\u201d he told media of a move that could be \u201cpolitically costly in the lead up to the midterm elections\u201d due to Turkiye\u2019s opponents in the Greek and Armenian diaspora.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISTANBUL US President Donald Trump\u2019s visit to Ankara for the NATO summit could help secure Turkiye\u2019s acquisition of dozens of fighter jet engines, but won\u2019t resolve the F-35 dispute that has soured ties, analysts say.The July 7-8 summit, which is being hosted by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will bring together leaders from the military alliance\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":99890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99921,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99907\/revisions\/99921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}