Erdogan seeks Biden meeting to discuss US warplane request

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to use an forthcoming global peak to lobbyU.S. President Joe Biden to allow Ankara to buy dozens of American warplanes, in a shot to overcome Washington’s resistance to major arms deals with his country following its purchase of Russian air defenses.

Turkey transferred a formal request to theU.S. onSept. 30 to buy 40 new F-16 Block 70 aircraft and nearly 80 accoutrements from Lockheed MartinCorp. to contemporize its being F-16 fighters, two Turkish officers familiar with the matter said. The deal is potentially worth$ 6 billion, they said, but blessing will be delicate to win, given Congress’s opposition to the Russian S-400 bullet purchase and Turkey’s own exacting station.
The Turkish officers said Erdogan expects to meet Biden during the Group of 20 nations peak in Rome at the end of this month, though no meeting has been blazoned and it’s unclear how willing Biden might be to entertain the munitions request. Turkey’s end is to secure spurts compatible with NATO, they said, speaking on condition of obscurity to bandy strategic matters.

A State Department prophet, who asked not to be linked, said the department does n’t comment on proposed defense deals. The White House did n’t incontinently respond to a request for comment, and the National Security Council appertained questions to the State Department.
The Turkish chairman so far has n’t gestured any progress toward resolving the clash with theU.S., which worries the S-400 could be used to collect intelligence on the covert capabilities of the American F-35 fighter spurt, which Turkish companies had helped to make and Ankara had planned to buy before the rift over the Russian dumdums.

Washington has demanded that Ankara scrap the S-400 in return for the lifting of affiliatedU.S. warrants, but Turkey has shown no inclination. The warrants cut off Turkey’s top defense procurement agency fromU.S. fiscal insti

“ Congress has said that we ’re not going to subscribe off on major arms agreements with Turkey until we get resolution on the S-400s,” Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Washington, said in a recent podcast. “ This letter or request that the Turks have put forward faces a veritably tricky task to get through to get blessing for the import of F-16s to Turkey.”
Ankara had spatted with Washington for times over access to its Patriot bullet system, with Washington beating at Turkish demands for a transfer of technology.

Turkey, formerly overdue in retiring its F-4 spurts, is planning to upgrade its F-16 line as a expedient result to its fighter capacity as it aspires to develop its own spurts, according to Arda Mevlutoglu, a Turkish aeronautics expert grounded in Ankara.

“ If Turkey can winU.S. blessing for the trade of the new F-16 Block 70 aircraft and upgrade accoutrements, that would come as a huge relief to the air force,” Mevlutoglu said on Monday. “ Those aeroplanes would presumably fulfill the capability until the 2030s, giving Turkey two critical decades to try and develop its own fighters.”