PHILADELPHIA: (MEF) Washington is financing its own containment on an installment plan, and calling the down payment an alliance. That is the central warning of “Ending the Subsidy,” a threat assessment released today by Middle East Forum executive director Gregg Roman, as the White House moves, over bipartisan objections of senior lawmakers, to ship Turkey roughly 80 General Electric F110 jet engines worth more than $700 million: the powerplants for Ankara’s “indigenous” KAAN fighter. The administration notified Congress of the sale on June 24. Two weeks later, on July 7–8, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosts NATO’s leaders in Ankara, and Vice President JD Vance has confirmed that Washington is reviewing Turkey’s eligibility to rejoin the F-35 program. The report’s central claim is that the apparent contradiction at the heart of U.S.-Turkey relations, a government that brands America an imperial threat while lobbying to buy its jets, is not confusion but doctrine. The engine sale, Roman argues, is the thesis made literal. “Washington is about to hand Ankara the engines for a fighter whose entire political purpose is to end Turkey’s dependence on Washington. That is not a contradiction Ankara has to explain away. It is the strategy we keep funding, and we keep mistaking the invoice for an alliance,” said Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum. Drawing on a Middle East Forum survey of 21 Turkish think tanks, foundations, and a state-owned defense house, “Ending the Subsidy” documents how anti-Americanism in Turkey has been engineered, manufactured inside state-aligned institutions, drafted into doctrine, and carried directly into the presidency, the foreign ministry, and the intelligence service by the same people who write it. Its clearest illustration: İbrahim Kalın, who founded Turkey’s flagship pro-government think tank, SETA, now runs the country’s national intelligence service, the MİT. Roman continued, “Anti-Americanism in Turkey is not a mood that flares at summits and fades. It is an industry, researched in state-aligned think tanks, drafted into doctrine, and walked into the presidency and the spy service by its own authors. The man who founded Erdoğan’s flagship think tank now runs his intelligence agency. That is not an ally drifting. That is an adversary carrying a NATO badge.” Among the report’s findings:A doctrine of “compartmentalized hostility.” Ankara separates the future it wants, a post-American order in which Turkey leads the Islamic and Turkic worlds, from the present it is stuck with: an air force that loses its Aegean edge by 2030 without American technology. The U.S. engine is a “rented ladder” across that gap.A personnel pipeline from the seminar room to the situation room. SETA alumni run Turkish intelligence and have held the presidential communications directorate. The radical ASSAM, founded by Erdoğan’s former chief military adviser, has drafted a model constitution for an Islamic confederation explicitly meant to replace NATO.A durable ideological operating system. A “Sèvres Syndrome 2.0” fused with the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and Eurasianism makes Turkish anti-Americanism bipartisan and likely to outlast Erdoğan. Opposition to the president does not equal friendship to America.Concrete costs across defense, intelligence, and diplomacy. A Russian S-400 inside NATO, U.S. B61 nuclear weapons still at Incirlik, intelligence cooperation with a service led by an anti-American ideologue, and NATO access used to assemble a post-American bloc with Russia, China, and the Turkic states.The engine notification has already drawn bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill. On June 28 a group of House members wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urging them to halt any F-35 transfer, warning that Turkey’s S-400 would let Russian intelligence probe sensitive U.S. technology and that the move would alarm Greece, Cyprus, and Israel. Rubio himself testified on June 3 that U.S. law bars Turkey’s return to the F-35 so long as it keeps the S-400. Asked about the jets on June 24, President Trump said only, “I’m going to probably do something that will make him very happy.” Roman concluded, “No one serious is calling for a rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts our nuclear weapons. We are calling for symmetry. Turkey insists hardware and politics are separate, fine. Then every engine, every jet, and every F-35 certification should be conditioned on conduct, not on a photo-op in Ankara. Sell the F-35 to a government whose intelligence service is run by the author of ‘America staged the coup,’ and you are not repairing an alliance. You are financing your own containment.” Rather than a breakup, the assessment calls for ending one-way compartmentalization: conditioning every advanced capability on verified behavior (no F-35 while the S-400 remains), relocating the B61 nuclear weapons from Incirlik, applying the Foreign Agents Registration Act to the Turkish influence apparatus in Washington, contesting Ankara’s convening power in the Turkic world and Africa, and, above all, resourcing the marginalized Turkish institutions that still argue for the transatlantic relationship. The full research package: “Ending the Subsidy” is the short title of the flagship report, Ending the American Subsidy to Turkish Grand Strategy. It anchors a Middle East Forum series, The Anatomy of Turkish Anti-Americanism, which also includes:The Intellectual Architecture of Turkey’s Foreign Policy, the underlying study mapping the 21 think tanks and foundations that supply the anti-American narratives driving Ankara’s shift away from the West.The Architecture of Turkey’s Anti-Americanism - Organization Dossiers, twenty-one dossiers on the institutions in the network.The Architecture of Turkey’s Anti-Americanism - Matrix, an interactive map of the think-tank network fueling Ankara’s rift with Washington.Related commentary already published: The Architecture of Turkey’s Anti-Americanism (Middle East Forum Observer), and “US No Longer Needs Turkey to Shape the Caucasus’ Future” (Ynetnews). 

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