Trump, sitting beside Erdogan on Tuesday, signaled he was already leaning the other way. He told reporters his administration would lift the CAATSA sanctions imposed after Turkey bought the Russian S-400 missile system in 2019, and that restoring Ankara’s access to the F-35 was “certainly something we will consider.” For a Turkish leader who has chased both outcomes since his air force was expelled from the program seven years ago, it was the closest thing to a green light he has received from Washington.

The drones were followed by troops, trainers, and a permanent footprint: a naval presence at Misrata and an airbase at Al-Watiya that still serve as maintenance depots and command nodes for Turkish-supplied platforms. In December, Turkey’s parliament voted to extend that deployment for another two years. Few Turkish military commitments outside its own borders have lasted this long.

What separates Libya from an ordinary arms relationship is what it reveals about Turkey’s underlying strategy. Ankara has spent the past decade building an indigenous defense base: Baykar’s drone families, Aselsan’s Koral electronic warfare suite, the TAI KAAN fighter program, the MILGEM corvette line. The point has always been to escape the political conditions that come attached to Western exports.

That is what makes this week’s F-35 discussion different from earlier rounds of the same fight. Turkey is no longer negotiating from a position of pure dependency on American hardware. An F-35 sale would not hand Ankara a new capability so much as validate and extend one it has already built, tested, and exported on someone else’s battlefield.

As of this spring, ratification still hadn’t happened. But the direction of travel is clear: Turkey is now willing to arm both sides of a Libyan civil war if doing so protects its maritime and energy claims.

For Israel, the concern was never really the hardware itself. It’s who ends up holding it. Turkey’s record in Libya shows a consistent pattern: favoring factions and personalities aligned with Erdogan’s own political networks, some with documented Muslim Brotherhood sympathies, over the development of a unified, professional Libyan military.

It sits uneasily next to the wider regional picture Israel has spent the past five years building. The Abraham Accords rest on a bet that Gulf states, Sunni governments wary of political Islam among them, will keep aligning with Israel against Iran and its proxies. A Turkey that arms Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks while also sitting inside NATO complicates that bet without ever declaring itself Israel’s enemy outright.

Congress isn’t united behind Trump’s decision either. Republican Senator John Cornyn said on Tuesday that he hoped the move would prove to be a mistake, even as other members of the bipartisan delegation in Ankara called lifting the sanctions good news for NATO cohesion. That split tracks a question Israeli officials have pressed for years: whether Turkey’s value as a NATO ally outweighs what Ankara has already done with the arsenal it built outside NATO’s framework, in places like Libya.