Will Turkey Attack NATO with American Ships?

President Joe Biden pushed through his sale of F-16s and upgrade kits to Turkey on the logic that the deal was necessary to get Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to drop his objection to Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Many in Congress warned he was naïve. While diplomats might say Turkey committed to using its upgraded airpower only for NATO’s defense, this ignored decades of Turkish history, the country’s irredentist claims, and years of Erdogan’s deceit.

Analysts in Europe, however, argued against the F-16 transfer for another reason: Erdogan was much more likely to use Turkey’s weaponry against NATO allies (or Israel) than against Russia. In the years prior to the sale, Turkey regularly flew its existing F-16s over Greek islands and territory, leading Secretary of State Antony Blinken to solicit a promise that Turkey would stop such overflights as a condition of the sale. Such guarantees, however, are meaningless to Erdogan.

Biden may have believed he was strengthening NATO by bringing Sweden and Finland into the fold and appeasing Erdogan, but his decisions have endangered the alliance. Any intra-NATO war could hobble the alliance permanently. Such a scenario might seem farfetched in Washington. Still, then again, almost every outrage Erdogan commits has its roots in an idea that the State Department and pro-Turkey think tank community dismissed as unlikely. This is why, for example, Turkey never paid the price for Erdogan advisor Egemen Bagis’s 2011 threat to use the Turkish Navy, even against Americans working in offshore Cypriot gas fields. “We have trained our marines for this; we have equipped the navy for this. All options are on the table; anything can be done,” he explained.

Late last month, as Washington’s political soap opera distracted Americans and crisis in the Middle East exploded, Turkey began interfering with Italian vessel working on a European Union-funded program to lay an underwater cable to link the power grids of Crete and Cyprus. For 40 hours, Greek and Turkish ships faced off. Turkish papers suggested—falsely—that Greece had acquiesced to revisions about Greek territorial waters in Turkey’s favor.

What neither Turkish forces nor the Pentagon acknowledged was this: Of the five Turkish warships involved in the Kassos incident two were Gokova (F-496) and Goksu (F-497). Americans may know these ships better by their former names, the USS Samuel Eliot Morison and the USS Escotin, representing one-quarter of the Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigates that the United States has transferred to Turkey.

Turkey may be a NATO member, but it is time both Democrats and Republicans face reality: Turkey is more likely to use any American weaponry they acquire against Americans and NATO allies than in their defense. Military sales are not just about profit; they create a multi-decade relationship involving not only the sale itself but also the training and maintenance that accompany it. That diplomatic dividend only works when governments are stable and share common values. A good rule of thumb is that if Washington cannot predict the shape of a country or its governing system a decade into the future, it is wiser not to provide it with sophisticated weaponry.

Turkey is a case in point. It is time to acknowledge: By transferring weaponry to Turkey, every U.S. administration since George W. Bush has not been building stability or strengthening NATO; they have been enabling war and risking NATO’s cohesion if not existence.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Dr. Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.