The Fighter Jet Sale on the Table Is Blocked by a Law the President Signed

I read the headline, then I read the law

On Tuesday, July 7, at the NATO summit, President Trump stood beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and said the quiet part out loud. "We are going to make a decision on supplying Turkey with F-35 fighter jets," he said, and added that the United States would lift the sanctions it placed on Turkey over a Russian weapons purchase (Washington Post, July 7, 2026; Defense News, July 7, 2026).

I have spent thirty years building puzzles, and the habit that trade leaves you with is simple. When someone tells you the answer, you go check it against the grid. So I did not read the headline and stop. I read the statute. And the statute says the president cannot do the thing he says he will decide to do. Not because a critic wishes it so. Because the law says so, and he is the one who signed it.

The bar he signed himself

The law is Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020, Public Law 116 to 92. President Trump signed it on December 20, 2019. It prohibits the transfer of F-35 aircraft, along with related equipment, data, and support, to Turkey unless the Secretaries of Defense and State certify to Congress, in writing and at least 90 days in advance, that three things are true (Congressional Research Service, IN11557; NDAA FY2020, Section 1245).

Here are the three. Turkey no longer possesses the S-400 or any Russian air defense system that could compromise the F-35. Turkey has given credible assurances it will not acquire such a system again. And Turkey has removed all of the associated equipment and personnel (Congressional Research Service, IN11557). That is not guidance. It is a gate, and the key is a certification that does not exist. Congress wrote the gate, the president signed it into law, and the gate is still locked.

Why the gate is there

The history is short and documented. Turkey ordered more than 100 F-35A stealth fighters and was a manufacturing partner in the program, with Turkish firms building components (Defense News, July 17, 2019). Then Ankara bought the Russian S-400 air defense system, and deliveries began in July 2019. American defense officials concluded that operating the S-400 alongside the F-35 would let Russia study the jet's stealth from the inside. In July 2019 the United States removed Turkey from the F-35 program, a step that cost the Pentagon roughly half a billion dollars to restructure the supply chain (Defense News, July 17, 2019).

Turkey ordered more than 100 of the jets. Turkey has taken delivery of zero. On December 14, 2020, the United States imposed sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act on Turkey's defense procurement agency (Congressional Research Service, IN11557). None of that was an accident of politics. It was a policy, written down, with the president's name on the page.

A certification is a solution that has to check out

In my line of work a claimed answer is worthless until it checks against every crossing letter. One wrong square and the whole solution is wrong, no matter how confident the solver sounds. Section 1245 works the same way. It is a three part solution, and all three parts have to be true at once before a single jet can move.

Run the check. Does Turkey still possess the S-400? By every public account, yes, though Ankara has signaled it may sideline the system (Eurasian Times, July 2026). That is the first square, and it is already wrong. The certification cannot be made honestly today, and without the certification the sale is not merely unwise. It is unlawful. A president who wants to change that outcome has an honest path: go back to Congress and ask it to change the law. Lifting sanctions by announcement does not rewrite a statute. Only Congress can unwrite what Congress wrote.

The check has teeth, and it has limits

Congress is not staying quiet. In late June, ten members, six Republicans and four Democrats, wrote the White House to oppose selling F-35s to Turkey, and lawmakers have begun preparing a joint resolution to block the transfer (The Hill, July 2026; Turkish Minute, June 29, 2026). Note the party split. This is not one side scoring on the other. It is members of both parties reading the same statute and reaching the same place. On this site both parties are judged by the same ruler, and here they are standing on the same line.

Now the honest part, because the courage to state a fact plainly includes the inconvenient ones. The congressional check on arms sales has real limits. In 2019, Congress passed three joint resolutions to block roughly 8 billion dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The president vetoed all three. The Senate tried to override and fell short of the two thirds required (CNN, July 29, 2019). A resolution the president can veto is a strong signal, not a guaranteed stop. The firmer wall here is Section 1245, because it is already law, and a law does not need to pass again to keep working.

What to watch

Watch three things. First, whether the administration ever sends Congress the Section 1245 certification, because it cannot be made truthfully while the S-400 sits on Turkish soil, and a false one would be its own scandal. Second, whether the joint resolution gathers the bipartisan weight its ten signatories suggest. Third, do not confuse the headlines: reports of a separate engine sale for Turkey's homegrown Kaan fighter are a different transaction from the F-35, and the law I have described governs the stealth jet, not every deal with Ankara (National Security Journal, 2026).

The larger measure is how a presidency's foreign policy actually turns out, not how it is announced. We keep that scorecard at presidents by foreign policy outcomes. For now the record is plain. The sale on the table is barred by a law the president signed, and the only lawful way to move it is to persuade the Congress that wrote the bar. Announcements are not law. Only actions matter, and the action here is a signature from 2019 that still holds.