Congress targets Turkish engine deal

The argument in Washington began with a fairly technical notification: on 24 June, the US government told Congress it planned to sell General Electric F110 engines to Turkey for KAAN, Ankara's homegrown fighter jet. The deal is worth about $700 million, according to ProtoThema. Within days, Democratic Representative Dina Titus had introduced a resolution to stop it.

On paper, this is a dispute about engines. In practice, it is another test of how far Washington is willing to bring Turkey back into the Western defence system after Ankara bought Russia's S-400 air-defence system. That choice matters well beyond Turkey. For Greece, it is about preserving an airpower advantage. For Germany, it is about keeping a difficult but useful NATO ally close. For the United States, it is about whether sanctions still mean what they said they meant.

What Congress can actually do

The sale would go through Foreign Military Sales, the US government-to-government channel for selling weapons to allies. Once an administration notifies Congress, lawmakers can try to block the deal. Titus has used the formal route available to her: a joint resolution of disapproval, which forces a vote on whether a notified sale should proceed (ProtoThema, CRS).

The mechanism sounds stronger than it usually is. The resolution has to pass both the House and the Senate. The president can veto it. To override that veto, two-thirds of both chambers would have to vote against the administration (CRS). Congress almost never gets there. Its leverage is more political than legal: it can force the argument into the open, make the diplomatic cost higher, and influence what the administration dares to propose next.

The KAAN engine sale is not the same as letting Turkey back into the F-35 programme. KAAN is still a prototype. Without engines, supply-chain access and years of testing, it cannot become a credible fighter (El Confidencial). Restoring Turkey's F-35 access would be a much larger decision, because it would reverse Ankara's 2019 expulsion from the programme. No formal F-35 notification for Turkey appears in the public DSCA record.

The S-400 trap

The unresolved issue is still Turkey's purchase of Russia's S-400 missile system. Washington removed Turkey from the F-35 programme in 2019, arguing that Russian air-defence equipment operating near F-35s could expose the aircraft's stealth capabilities (White House). In December 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Turkey's defence-procurement authority under CAATSA, the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which penalises significant defence deals with Russia (State Department).

That created the trap Washington now has to manage. If advanced exports are approved without a verified settlement of the S-400 problem, the message is that sanctions can be renegotiated when the sanctioned ally is useful enough. Greek and Cypriot critics are pressing exactly that point. Their argument is not only about Turkey's capabilities, but about whether enforcement has any value while the S-400 issue remains unresolved (Capital, CNA).

Europe reads the same file from different starting points

European governments do not have a single Turkey policy because they do not live with the same risks.

Greece sees the issue through airpower. Athens has bought 18 Rafale fighters from France and secured US approval for up to 40 F-35 aircraft (Dassault Aviation, DSCA). While Turkey remains outside the F-35 programme, Greece has an advantage in the air. If Ankara is brought back in, that advantage narrows.

Germany starts somewhere else. For Berlin, Turkey remains a difficult but valuable NATO ally: it has the alliance's second-largest military, controls the Bosporus, and has supplied Ukraine with drones (FAZ). German reporting treats engines for KAAN as a more limited concession than F-35 access, which remains the harder question of trust (merkur.de).

Spain adds another layer. After the Franco-German-Spanish future combat aircraft project, FCAS, ran into serious trouble over design authority and industrial workshare, Madrid explored preliminary contacts about KAAN. Reporting still noted that the Turkish aircraft is too immature for Spain's carrier-aviation needs (El Confidencial). The point is not that KAAN has become a real alternative. It is that problems inside Europe's own fighter programmes make even an unfinished Turkish jet useful in political bargaining.

What hasn't happened yet

No verified plan for disposing of the S-400 has surfaced. No formal F-35 notification for Turkey exists. No detailed Turkish proposal for resolving the conditions behind the 2019 expulsion has appeared publicly (Haberler, Jerusalem Post).

That leaves the engine fight as the opening skirmish before a larger F-35 decision. The argument for the sale is not frivolous: US engines would keep Turkey tied to Western supply chains and give Washington continuing leverage. The case against it is equally clear: if CAATSA can be softened without resolving the S-400 problem, every ally learns that sanctions can be waited out. Whether Titus's resolution succeeds or fails, its purpose is to make any future move on the F-35 more expensive, and to force Washington to decide which signal matters more: the one heard in Athens, or the one heard in Ankara.