The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is alarmed by President Donald Trump's hints he'll give F-35 fighter jets to the Turkish government — which, despite being a NATO ally on paper, has disconcerting ties to Russia.
This comes after Trump recently said that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a notorious autocrat who has cracked down on freedom in his country, “is a strong member of NATO. I’m going to probably do something that’s going to make him very happy. He’s a respected man, a respected leader, and he’s been a friend of mine.”
"America’s premier fighter jet should be a nonstarter for Ankara as long as it owns an S-400 missile-defense system," wrote the editorial board. Trump initially kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program in his first term, the board noted, when it bought that Russian missile system in the first place in 2019, having "offered Patriot defenses to Turkey and warned Ankara multiple times."
That was the right idea in the first place, the board argued, and it makes no sense to reverse it now.
"Allowing the two systems to work together would amount to letting Vladimir Putin conduct target practice on the free world’s pilots," noted the board, because it would give Putin valuable intelligence about how the F-35 program works. Worse yet, "The stakes of cracking the F-35’s tech are especially acute given Russia is working with China and Iran in a larger competition with the U.S."
Moreover, the board wrote, there is the soft power issue to think about: caving to Turkey and letting them have American tech at the same time they use Russian tech will "fuel European cynicism that Mr. Trump cares less about European defense spending than he does about pleasing the illiberal strongmen he views as pals" — which comes at a moment Trump has already enraged Europe with his efforts to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland.
If Trump truly values "hard power and real deterrence," as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently said in a speech, a key part of that is "not handing the alliance’s prime adversary a potential cheat code on the West’s best military aircraft technology," the board concluded.