Greece: Sale of US Fighter Engines to Ankara Tests Athens's Sway in Washington

What happened: The Trump administration's recent moves to sell US fighter jets to Turkey and review its readmission into the F35 program are reviving Athens's worst fears about a US-Turkey reset.

Why it matters: Coming days before the NATO summit in Ankara, the timing reads in Athens as a signal that Greek influence in Washington has limits PM Mitsotakis cannot fully offset — just as the broader EU is also recalibrating toward Turkey.

What happens next: Expect Athens to lean on diaspora and congressional channels to keep CAATSA sanctions on Ankara in place while privately bracing for a more transactional Trump approach to Turkey arms sales.

The Trump administration recently moved to advance a $700mn sale of General Electric F110 engines to Turkey for its KAAN fighter. Greek officials have been keen to stress that the engine sale itself changes little militarily, given that KAAN is years from operational relevance.

What unsettles Athens is the mechanism: a Direct Commercial Sale structure that may allow Washington to circumvent CAATSA sanctions on Turkey's defense procurement agency without testing them directly, along with a parallel legal review of F-35 eligibility ordered by Trump himself.

US Vice President JD Vance has framed the review as a technical compliance exercise, not a political decision, but Athens reads political intent behind the legal language. Athens worries that Turkey's Middle East air-defense exposures this spring appear to have nudged Washington towards a more radical rethink of the regional arms balance.

US Congress to the Rescue

Greek officials are taking comfort, for now, in Capitol Hill. A months-long hold on the engine sale by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and the public opposition voiced this week by four Greek-American Republican members of Congress — Gus Bilirakis, Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Haridopolos and Jimmy Patronis — show CAATSA still has institutional defenders in the GOP. We expect Athens's diaspora-lobbying apparatus to lean harder on this channel ahead of any formal F-35 move.

The structural picture, however, favors Ankara. US President Donald Trump can veto any disapproval resolution, and override requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers — a bar lawmakers privately concede is unreachable. The engine sale's smooth passage despite Meeks's reservations is the warning sign for what a future F-35 fight would look like.

Brussels Adds to the Unease

Athens's discomfort is compounded by a parallel recalibration by the EU toward Ankara. A coordinated sequence of high-level visits — an economic dialogue in Istanbul followed by Kaja Kallas, Marta Kos and Magnus Brunner in Ankara, then António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen at the NATO summit — suggests that Brussels is placing the EU-Turkey relationship on a more pragmatic footing, prioritizing migration and energy cooperation even as it criticizes Turkey's exclusion of Cyprus from COP31 preparations. For Athens, Washington and Brussels appear to be moving in the same unfavorable direction at once.

A Summit Without Big Asks

Greece enters the 7–8 July NATO summit with deliberately modest expectations. No Mitsotakis-Erdogan meeting is scheduled; Greek officials see little incentive to manufacture one, preferring the established channel involving foreign ministers Giorgos Gerapetritis and Hakan Fidan to manage Aegean and Cyprus friction. The PM's team would also prefer to avoid a high-profile encounter that could be read as legitimizing Ankara's posture regarding its Blue Homeland maritime designs at a time when Turkey is pushing to codify those claims in domestic legislation.

That restraint reflects a broader recalibration: Athens has concluded it cannot out-lobby President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's direct line to Trump and is instead doubling down on tools it can control - congressional relationships, the French strategic partnership and EU-level pressure on Cyprus's exclusion from COP31 preparations.

Investors should be aware that any further movement on F-35 eligibility without explicit Greek security guarantees should be treated as a negative signal for offshore project risk pricing. This applies particularly to the South of Crete blocks and the GSI cable, which touch on overlapping territorial claims.