Immediately following the Turkish Parliament’s Tuesday approval of Sweden’s NATO membership bid after letting the issue languish in limbo for months, US President Joe Biden sent a letter to four senior members of the US Congress urging them to quickly approve a $20 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, The New York Times reported, citing US officials.
The White House sent the letter on Wednesday to the top Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which have oversight of arms transfers by the State Department to other nations. As of Wednesday night, the four senior lawmakers had not given their approval, and one or more of them might ask the Biden administration to give assurances about Turkey’s actions on some foreign policy issues before agreeing to the transfer, a congressional official said.
Turkish lawmakers voted 287-55 in favor of Sweden’s bid to become the 32nd member of the alliance after it won the public backing of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is expected to sign the relevant document and conclude Ankara’s role in the protracted saga in the coming days.
Erdoğan has linked his NATO member country’s approval of Sweden’s accession to the security organization to the F-16 sales, which had been pending.
Both Sweden and Finland had asked to join NATO after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the vast majority of the alliance’s members soon agreed. Turkey approved Finland’s bid but, along with Hungary, has withheld approval for Sweden.
US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with Erdoğan in İstanbul this month and pushed him to have Turkey approve Sweden’s accession. Blinken tried to assure him that the F-16 sale would happen, US officials said.
The US State Department gave the two congressional committees informal notification of the sale more than a year ago, starting the review process by lawmakers. However, congressional officials have gone back to the department repeatedly with questions about how Turkey might use the jets as well as some of Turkey’s foreign policy moves that seem to run counter to US interests.
One issue is the fact that the Turkish military has carried out a growing number of airstrikes on Kurdish militias in northeast Syria who have worked with the US military to fight the Islamic State. Turkish leaders consider the Kurdish fighters to be members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community. Members of US Congress and aides remain concerned about Turkey’s aggression, one official said.
The congressional officials also want to see assurances by Turkey of when the formal ratification of Sweden’s accession will move onward from Erdoğan’s office. And they are asking the US State Department to provide them with a document that Turkey has supposedly sent the department saying that the Turkish military intends to de-escalate any tensions with the Greek military in the Aegean Sea, the official said.
All that means Biden might not get approval from all four lawmakers as quickly as he would like, despite the letter he sent on Wednesday, which was reported earlier by Reuters.
Congressional officials expect that once those lawmakers give their consent, the State Department will move quickly to formally notify Congress of the sale, which means the arms transfer would go through.
Turkey’s aging air force has suffered from Ankara’s expulsion from the US-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in 2019 in response to Erdoğan’s decision to acquire an advanced Russian missile defense system that NATO viewed as an operational security threat.