Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump said during his attendance at the NATO summit in Turkey this week that he may remove sanctions on the nation and consider selling them F-35 fighter jets.
“I can tell you, we’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” President Trump told reporters. “…We’re working very closely with Marco Rubio…Scott Bessent, and with Pete and everybody else, we’re going to be taking the sanctions off. It’s time to do that.”
He continued, “We don’t want to sanction friends; it’s very simple.”
Turkey is currently sanctioned under the 2020-era CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act).
President Trump also addressed the possibility of selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey.
He said, “It’s a decision we’re going to make…Turkey has been, in many ways, much more loyal than other countries that we think would be loyal – so, yeah, it’s something, certainly, we would consider. It’s a great plane. Currently, the best plane by far.”
President Trump was highly complimentary toward Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdoğan, who joined him during remarks with reporters. He suggested, as he did in the above comment, that Turkey has been a better friend to the United States than some of its other allies.
The president remarked that Turkey “frankly, has been more helpful to the United States than many other more traditional countries.”
President Trump’s comments also came amid his very harsh criticism of NATO, which he believes left the U.S. essentially high and dry when it came to the war with Iran.
“I was very disappointed with NATO,” Trump told reporters. He said that it was “possible” he would have declined to attend the NATO summit this week if it hadn’t been hosted by Turkey.
“We’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others… You would think that they’d be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren’t,” President Trump said.
He added, “I’ve long said that we help them, but I’m not sure that they’d be there for us — and Italy turned us down, and Germany turned us down, and France turned us down. And that’s okay, but, you know, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars and they’re not there for us? We’ve always been there for them.”
