Despite all the challenges that NATO faces from outside the alliance, the controversy that may come to dominate the ongoing Atlantic Alliance summit in Turkey this week has come from within it.

“We’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” President Trump said of Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey on Tuesday. “It’s time to do that, okay? We don’t want to sanction friends.”

The sanctions Trump referred to are those that were imposed on Turkey under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). Trump himself signed that act into law in 2017 and applied it to Ankara in 2020 after Ankara agreed to purchase advanced Russian anti-aircraft batteries. Those sanctions ejected Turkey from a program that rendered it eligible to purchase America’s most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-35.

Ankara hasn’t abandoned the behaviors that resulted in its sanctioning in the first place. Nevertheless, Trump seems determined to sell F-35s to Turkey, and those sanctions are in his way. On Tuesday, the president said he intends to “consider” allowing Turkey back into the fold. But to hear his administration officials tell it, Trump has already made up his mind.

In advance of this week’s NATO summit, Trump lavished Erdoğan with praise. He’s a “friend” and a “respected leader,” the president insisted, neither of which, we hope, despite some evidence to the contrary, he actually believes. Moreover, according to administration officials, deepening America’s defense ties with Turkey is a geopolitical necessity given its proximity to the Russian menace. Trump “really likes Erdoğan,” onetime U.S. Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey told Fox News. But beyond their personal rapport, Trump recognizes that Turkey is “essential to maintaining the U.S. perimeter around Eurasia.”

The New York Times is hearing the same thing. “The past few years have led to a new appreciation of what Turkey brings to the alliance,” its reporters contended. Ankara has “broad diplomatic relations” with geopolitical actors, good and bad. It “leveraged” its relationship with Hamas to facilitate a cease-fire in Gaza. It has become a “conduit” through which NATO members communicate with Iranian and Russian officials. And Ankara is building up an intimidating indigenous defense industry that it has deployed via proxies to great effect in places like Syria.

All those conditions have convinced the Trump administration to keep Erdoğan’s Turkey close, but there is a limit to the extent to which we can rely on our “closeness” to a country or, more specifically, a leader, who has made it clear for years, in word and in deed, that he is no friend of the West. It’s not just that Erdoğan’s Turkey has developed a working relationship with America’s enemies as well as its allies. It is arguably in violation of its NATO commitments by having provided material support to terrorist organizations like Hamas.

Israeli security officials have produced evidence of the Turkish government’s efforts to fund Hamas’s activities as well as to give it the means to improve the accuracy of the rockets it fires on Israeli civilian targets. That support continued even after the October 7 massacre.

“In December 2023, as the war in Gaza escalated, Israeli authorities again seized illicit goods from a Turkish ship at the port of Ashdod. Inspectors found weapons and components hidden inside an industrial weaving machine destined for the West Bank,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Executive Director Jonathan Schanzer wrote last year. In March 2024, he added, Israeli security services broke up a Hamas terror plot planned by Hamas operatives inside Turkey.

In addition to its illicit support for Islamist terrorists, Turkey’s warm relationship with America’s near-peer competitors should bar it from accessing America’s most technologically advanced weapons platforms.

Turkey’s “partnership with Russia includes security and economic dimensions,” observed Isabelle Terranova, an analyst with the Canadian Macdonald–Laurier Institute. Ankara’s commercial relations with Moscow increased following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Turkey has refused to participate in the sanctions regime imposed on the Kremlin in response to its land grab. Erdoğan’s “partnership with China has also grown, particularly through its participation in the Belt and Road Initiative,” Terranova added.

All this should be enough to persuade the Trump administration that providing Turkey with F-35s would needlessly jeopardize American security and the lives of its service personnel. Granting Ankara access to that technology “would enable Moscow to potentially gain valuable intelligence helpful for shooting down F-35s flown by Americans or our allies,” Schanzer’s FDD colleagues observed. “If that were to happen, given growing security cooperation among the four Axis of Aggressors adversaries, we should not be surprised if Moscow shares sensitive technological details of the F-35 with Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. That would not only endanger American national security and pilots, but also U.S. partners who fly the aircraft.”

In other words, such a transfer would undermine not only U.S. security but also that of our allies. It would diminish the platform’s value. After all, what good is the F-35 if it cannot continue to beat Russian air defenses and Chinese stealth radar, as it has in the skies over Iran and Venezuela?

Trump may have some special affinity for his Turkish counterpart, but he should not place his faith in his own character judgment over the observable fact that Erdoğan is, at best, duplicitous and, at worst, hostile to American interests. Ensuring that Turkey does not gravitate further away from the West and into our enemies’ camp is certainly a strategic American interest. But there are other ways to reward a country that is, on its best days, a frenemy than by giving it access to our most sensitive military assets.