WASHINGTON — Days after Turkey’s parliament approved Sweden’s NATO bid, the Biden administration late Friday notified Congress that it is unfreezing a massive deal with Turkey to provide 40 new F-16 fighters and modernize another 79 of the aircraft already in service, an arrangement estimated to be worth a staggering $23 billion.
The approval was announced alongside another approval for Turkey’s regional rival Greece to join the F-35 club, with the potential purchase of 40 F-35 conventional take-off and landing variants for $8.6 billion.
Taken together, the two announcements serve as a conclusion of a major geopolitical tug of war involving all three countries, as well as the hopes of Sweden to join NATO in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The holdup of Turkey’s F-16s had been a major issue between Ankara and Washington. Turkey’s quest for new and upgraded F-16s goes back years, after it was booted in 2020 from the US-led international F-35 program over Turkey’s purchase of advanced Russian radars. The same year Defense News reported American lawmakers had quietly frozen all major arms sales to Turkey, including F-16 upgrades.
Turkey, some key US senators said at the time, “is not behaving like a responsible actor or working collaboratively with the West at the level we expect from a NATO ally.”
