Erdogan’s S-400 Trouble Was of His Own Making

It takes a special kind of leader to spend $2.5 billion on a weapons system, never use it, alienate his most important allies, get kicked out of the world’s most advanced fighter jet program, endure years of sanctions — and then ask the seller for a refund. Yet here we are. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised the possibility of returning Russia’s S-400 air defense system during his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Turkmenistan last week, according to Bloomberg. The Kremlin has denied any such request was made, which tells you something about how Moscow views the optics of this diplomatic volte-face. Even Putin, not known for sparing the blushes of supplicants, seems embarrassed on Erdogan’s behalf. The Turkish leader’s predicament is a case study in the perils of allowing domestic political considerations — and personal pique — to override foreign policy and national security. The S-400 saga has been, from start to finish, a monument to poor judgment. And now the bill is coming due. Cast your mind back to 2017, when Erdogan signed the deal with Moscow. Turkey was in the grip of post-coup paranoia, with the president accusing his NATO allies — the Americans especially — of supporting the plotters of the failed 2016 coup attempt to overthrow him. The accusations served his domestic purposes, stoking nationalist resentment and justifying his pivot toward Moscow. Relations with Washington had curdled during the Obama years, and Erdogan nursed a particular grievance over the failure to secure Patriot missiles on terms he found acceptable. The S-400 purchase was his riposte: a defiant middle finger to the Western alliance. Turkish pro-government media celebrated it as an assertion of sovereignty, proof that Ankara would not be dictated to by Washington. Nationalist constituencies, whose support Erdogan needed to maintain his grip on power, ate it up. Never mind that the Russian system was incompatible with NATO’s integrated air defenses. Never mind that it couldn’t actually cover Turkey’s air defense gaps. Never mind that it would cost Turkey its place in the F-35 program, for which Turkish companies were manufacturing more than 900 components and would have earned over $9 billion over the life of the project, according to estimates by the Pentagon. The symbolism was what mattered. And symbols, as any student of Turkish politics knows, are Erdogan’s stock in trade. The trouble with symbols is that they make for terrible strategic assets. The S-400 batteries arrived in 2019 and have sat largely idle ever since. Turkey conducted a single test firing near Sinop in 2020, then quietly mothballed the system. It has never been operationally deployed. The “sovereignty” that Erdogan purchased has manifested as several billion dollars worth of Russian hardware gathering dust. The costs have been devastatingly real. In 2019, Washington kicked Turkey out of the F-35 consortium, halting delivery of jets Ankara had already paid $1.4 billion toward. In Dec. 2020, the Trump Administration imposed sanctions on Turkey, cutting off its defense procurement agency from U.S. financial institutions, military hardware, and sensitive technology. Turkish defense companies that had been integral to the F-35 supply chain found themselves frozen out. For six years, Erdogan tried to have it both ways — keeping the Russian missiles while lobbying for a return to America’s good graces. As recently as September, Turkish officials were floating the idea of a “technical military mechanism” to supervise the S-400s in some controlled fashion, hoping Donald Trump might find a legislative loophole to let them keep the hardware while regaining F-35 access. Washington wasn’t buying. Ambassador Tom Barrack, a close Trump ally, made clear this month that Turkey must abandon the S-400 entirely if it wants back into the F-35 family. The message finally seems to have penetrated: there is no clever workaround, no face-saving half-measure. Erdogan must eat his words or forfeit any hope of acquiring the world’s most advanced stealth fighters. And so the man who once brandished the S-400 as proof of Turkish independence now finds himself pleading with Putin to take the missiles back — and, according to reporting by Bloomberg News, asking for his money back too, perhaps through offsets against Turkey’s Russian oil and gas bill. One can only imagine how that conversation went in Turkmenistan. Putin, whose own military is hemorrhaging equipment in Ukraine, has little use for the secondhand S-400s, which he already has in abundance. Why should he offer Erdogan a graceful exit from a mess of his own creation? The domestic political consequences could be severe. The same nationalist narrative that made it impossible for Erdogan to back down in 2017 now threatens to frame any reversal as capitulation. Opposition politicians will have a field day. Here is a president who sacrificed billions of dollars, Turkey’s place in the most important defense program in the Western alliance, and years of productive relations with NATO — all for a weapons system he never used, is now desperate to return, and may not even get a refund for. Erdogan will attempt to spin this, of course. The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Turkey’s positioning as a regional power broker may provide some nationalist cover. He can point to his relationships with both Trump and Putin as evidence of diplomatic dexterity. If anyone can sell a humiliating retreat as a strategic masterstroke, it’s Erdogan. The facts are stubborn. The S-400 purchase was driven by wounded pride and domestic political calculation, not strategic logic. It has cost Turkey dearly in treasure, in alliances, and in access to critical military technology. And if Erdogan now succeeds in returning the system, he will have demonstrated conclusively that the entire episode was a historic blunder — one that a wiser leader would never have made. The Turkish opposition will not let voters forget it. Neither should anyone else who watches a proud nation’s foreign policy held hostage to one man’s ego.