Trump, sitting beside Erdogan on Tuesday, signaled he used to be already leaning the opposite direction. He informed newshounds his management would elevate the CAATSA sanctions imposed after Turkey purchased the Russian S-400 missile device in 2019, and that restoring Ankara’s get right of entry to to the F-35 used to be “certainly something we will consider.” For a Turkish chief who has chased each results since his air power used to be expelled from this system seven years in the past, it used to be the nearest factor to a inexperienced mild he has won from Washington.
The F-35 tale will dominate protection out of Ankara this week. However for Israeli safety planners looking to gauge what Turkey would if truth be told do with expanded get right of entry to to complex Western generation, the extra helpful case find out about is not taking part in out on the summit. It is in Libya, the place Turkey has spent seven years turning a civil conflict right into a are living demonstration of precisely the type of regional energy projection Netanyahu used to be caution about.
Seven years in Libya’s skies
Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones entered the Libyan conflict in 2019, and inside months they broke the momentum of Khalifa Haftar’s attack on Tripoli. Precision moves on Haftar’s armored columns, mixed with Turkish digital conflict programs that jammed his Russian-supplied air defenses, grew to become a collapsing place for the UN-recognized executive right into a stalemate that has held, in more than a few paperwork, ever since.
The drones have been adopted through troops, running shoes, and an enduring footprint: a naval presence at Misrata and an airbase at Al-Watiya that also function upkeep depots and command nodes for Turkish-supplied platforms. In December, Turkey’s parliament voted to increase that deployment for any other two years. Few Turkish army commitments out of doors its personal borders have lasted this lengthy.
Libya’s military leader of team of workers Mohammed Ali Ahmed Al-Haddad attends a rite at a clinical coaching camp on an army base in Al-Khums, Libya, December 21, 2025 (credit score: Normal Team of workers of the Libyan Military by the use of Fb/Handout by the use of REUTERS )Independence as leverage
What separates Libya from an bizarre palms courting is what it finds about Turkey’s underlying technique. Ankara has spent the previous decade construction an indigenous protection base: Baykar’s drone households, Aselsan’s Koral digital conflict suite, the TAI KAAN fighter program, the MILGEM corvette line. The purpose has at all times been to flee the political stipulations that come hooked up to Western exports.
In Libya, that independence converts without delay into affect. Devices skilled on Turkish apparatus inherit Turkish upkeep contracts and Turkish doctrine, a dependency that outlasts any unmarried palms cargo and that rival powers have struggled to dislodge.
That’s what makes this week’s F-35 dialogue other from previous rounds of the similar struggle. Turkey is not negotiating from a place of natural dependency on American {hardware}. An F-35 sale would now not hand Ankara a brand new capacity such a lot as validate and lengthen one it has already constructed, examined, and exported on anyone else’s battlefield.
Hedging towards Haftar
Turkey’s place has additionally grown extra opportunistic. For many of the previous six years, Ankara subsidized simplest the Tripoli executive towards Haftar’s forces within the east. That started to shift in 2025. Ibrahim Kalin, head of Turkey’s intelligence carrier, met Haftar and his son Saddam in Benghazi ultimate August. By way of the next summer time, satellite tv for pc imagery reviewed through Reuters recommended Turkish TB2s had reached an airbase managed through Haftar’s forces for the primary time, a reversal that may were unthinkable all through the 2020 siege of Tripoli.
The obvious value of admission is ratification, through the eastern-based Space of Representatives, of the 2019 maritime boundary memorandum Ankara signed with Tripoli, an settlement that cuts throughout Greek and Cypriot claims within the Jap Mediterranean and that Israeli officers have watched warily given their very own offshore gasoline fields, mainly the Leviathan and Tamar reservoirs that anchor Israel’s power exports to Europe.
As of this spring, ratification nonetheless hadn’t took place. However the route of go back and forth is obvious: Turkey is now keen to arm all sides of a Libyan civil conflict if doing so protects its maritime and effort claims.
This can be a acquainted playbook. Turkey has hedged this manner prior to, promoting TB2s to Morocco after which armed Anka-S drones to Algeria to control the fallout, treating rival consumers as parallel income streams moderately than a strategic contradiction.
The true proliferation chance
For Israel, the fear used to be by no means in point of fact the {hardware} itself. It is who finally ends up keeping it. Turkey’s document in Libya displays a constant development: favoring factions and personalities aligned with Erdogan’s personal political networks, some with documented Muslim Brotherhood sympathies, over the improvement of a unified, skilled Libyan army.
Complex drones and digital conflict programs sitting with ideologically aligned militias, moderately than an responsible state, is exactly the proliferation chance Israeli officers have raised about Turkish exports in different places within the area.
It sits uneasily subsequent to the broader regional image Israel has spent the previous 5 years construction. The Abraham Accords leisure on a gamble that Gulf states, Sunni governments cautious of political Islam amongst them, will stay aligning with Israel towards Iran and its proxies. A Turkey that palms Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks whilst additionally sitting inside of NATO complicates that guess with out ever mentioning itself Israel’s enemy outright.
It is also why Netanyahu’s F-35 intervention this week wasn’t in point of fact a couple of unmarried airplane. Turkey’s Libya document suggests that when Ankara positive factors a technological edge, it makes use of that edge to advance a political and ideological venture, now not only a nationwide protection one.
Erdogan has had seven years and two Libyan factions to reveal what he does with subtle generation as soon as he has it. Jerusalem’s activity now’s convincing Washington that the F-35 query and the Libya query are, in substance, the similar query, requested in two other theaters. Ankara has already given its resolution. Washington remains to be deciding whether or not it used to be listening.
