Donald Trump’s posture toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara has been striking even by Trump’s own standards. He has praised the Turkish leader as a “hell of a leader” and a good friend, floated reversing a seven-year-old ban on F-35 sales to Turkey, and pushed a $700 million-plus jet engine deal through over bipartisan objections on Capitol Hill. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reasons behind it say as much about Trump’s own instincts as they do about Erdogan’s skill in exploiting them.

The Trump administration notified Congress on June 24 that it intends to sell more than $700 million worth of GE Aerospace F-110 engines to Turkey, enough to power roughly 80 units for Ankara’s indigenous KAAN fighter program. Congress now has a narrow, fifteen-day statutory window to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval. That window is closing, and it should be used. The case against the sale is not abstract. Turkey still operates the Russian-made S-400 air defense system it purchased in 2019 — the same purchase that got Ankara expelled from the F-35 program in the first place and triggered CAATSA sanctions that remain in effect today.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered what may be the clearest articulation yet of the Trump administration’s transactional NATO doctrine — and its implicit breaking point. Speaking publicly, Rubio reframed the alliance’s foundational logic: the United States didn’t join NATO merely to serve as Europe’s security guarantor. It joined, in part, because a permanent military footprint on European soil advances American strategic interests — forward deterrence, power projection, logistical depth. The bases in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere are not charity.

The current state of European defense infrastructure is the result of a decades-long “peace dividend” that has effectively hollowed out the continent’s military capabilities. Following the Cold War, most European nations systematically dismantled their armed forces, reducing troop numbers, decommissioning heavy armor, and allowing domestic ammunition production to atrophy. Despite the clear warning of 2014, the response from European capitals was largely performative, characterized by a continued refusal to meet basic NATO spending targets or modernize aging stockpiles.