Donald Trump said he will lift US sanctions on Turkiye and will soon decide whether to allow the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Ankara, speaking alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO leaders' summit in Ankara on July 7, 2026. "We're going to be taking the sanctions off," Trump told reporters, adding that a determination on the F-35 sale is "certainly something we will consider" Al Jazeera.

The sanctions in question date to the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), imposed after Turkiye acquired the Russian S-400 air defence system in 2019. Washington's response at the time was twofold: it expelled Turkiye from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme and, under CAATSA, sanctioned Turkiye's Presidency of Defence Industries with US export license bans and financial and banking restrictions Al Jazeera. A 2020 law adds a further threshold for reinstatement to the fighter programme: the sitting administration must formally determine that Ankara no longer possesses or operates the S-400 batteries.

That legal requirement is the crux of what Trump has yet to resolve. Lifting the CAATSA sanctions and clearing Turkiye for F-35 purchases are separate acts, governed by separate statutory tests, and Trump's remarks in Ankara addressed the sanctions relief more definitively than the jet sale, which he characterized as pending a forthcoming determination.

Erdogan, for his part, told reporters he hoped for a "favourable decision" on the F-35s and noted that Turkiye had previously been promised five of the jets — a reference to the pre-2019 arrangement in which Ankara had already made payments toward an initial batch before its removal from the programme Al Jazeera.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of the broader 2026 NATO Summit, hosted at the Presidential complex in Ankara. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte held a pre-summit press conference in the city on July 6, the day before the Trump-Erdogan meeting NATO. Hosting the summit itself signals Ankara's continued weight within the alliance despite years of friction with Washington over the S-400 purchase, its Syria policy, and disputes with fellow NATO member Greece.

Reaction has split along predictable but consequential lines. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to Fox News on July 6, said selling F-35s to Turkiye would "upset the power balance in the Middle East" and argued Israeli air superiority must be preserved Al Jazeera. Israel has operated F-35s since 2016 and has treated the platform's regional exclusivity as a pillar of its qualitative military edge doctrine, a standard written into US law governing arms sales in the Middle East.

On Capitol Hill, the reception was more equivocal than hostile. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, speaking to Turkiye Today on July 7, said he was open to F-35 sales to Ankara: "There might be some pushback in Congress, but a solution might be found" Al Jazeera. Graham's framing — acknowledging friction while signaling a path forward — suggests any formal notification to Congress would face scrutiny but not necessarily a blocking coalition.

The unresolved question is whether Trump's sanctions announcement and his F-35 posture are sequenced as a single package or treated as independent tracks. CAATSA relief does not, on its own, satisfy the 2020 statutory requirement tied to the S-400 systems; that determination would need to address the status of the Russian batteries specifically, a matter Turkiye has periodically signaled flexibility on without confirming decommissioning or removal. Trump's language in Ankara — firm on sanctions, conditional on the jets — is consistent with an administration keeping the more legally and diplomatically fraught decision open while delivering an immediate deliverable to Erdogan.

The regional stakes extend beyond the bilateral relationship. Turkiye operates one of NATO's largest air forces and has pursued its own indigenous fighter program, the KAAN, partly as a hedge against continued exclusion from the F-35 pipeline. A reversal would restore a NATO member's access to fifth-generation airpower at a moment when the alliance is recalibrating burden-sharing and force posture along its eastern and southern flanks. It would also test whether Washington's qualitative military edge commitments to Israel can accommodate a broader distribution of the F-35 among regional allies, a question likely to resurface in congressional hearings and in Israeli-American security consultations in the weeks ahead.

No timeline was given in Ankara for the formal S-400 determination or for lifting the CAATSA sanctions through the required legal channels. Both would presumably require action from the Treasury and State Departments, and any F-35 sale would need to clear congressional notification requirements under the Arms Export Control Act.