By Mümin Ahmedoğlu, a Research Fellow
Türkiye is the only country ever expelled from the largest armament program in NATO’s history — the F-35 fighter program, in 2019. It is also the same country at whose door Europe stood in 2025, buying its drones, negotiating over its munitions, with some European capitals pressuring others to bring it into their new armament fund.
Imagine a gatekeeper at a large company. For three decades he stands at the most dangerous point on the wall, opening and closing the gate on instructions from management, yet never invited to its meetings. And whenever he tried to act on a matter concerning his own house (not the company’s), a warning letter would arrive: the tools in your hands are company property, and they are not to be used without permission. So the man decided, reluctantly, to open a small workshop in his home. Everyone mocked it for years. Then came a day when the power went out across all the company’s factories — and his generator was the only one still running. Only then was he invited to the boardroom meeting: not out of affection for him, but out of need for his generator.
This, in the briefest of terms, is the story of Türkiye inside NATO. But the question that deserves a full article is not how Turkish defense industries developed — that story has been told many times. It is a sharper and more unsettling question: why does influence shift within alliances? And why could Türkiye not buy its seat at the table with the bases and soldiers it provided for sixty years, yet bought it with drones and shells in less than a decade?
An Alliance Is a Market Before It Is a Family
To answer, we need a single concept: a military alliance is not a club of friends, nor a family in which affection is distributed equally. From the perspective of political economy, it is a market for security inputs. Every member supplies something: geography, soldiers, bases, technology, production capacity. And a member’s weight at the table is measured not by the volume of what it supplies, but by its substitutability — can the alliance find what you offer elsewhere, and at what cost? This is where real-world practice intersects with Game Theory.
And here, too, lies the tragedy of the frontline trench. Geography is a precious asset, but a passive one. Türkiye has the second-largest army in NATO; it hosts Incirlik Air Base and the Kürecik early-warning radar; it locks the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles with the key of Montreux. And yet for decades it remained on the margins of decision-making. Why? Because geography cannot be withdrawn from the market — Ankara cannot threaten to relocate the Bosphorus Strait somewhere else. An asset you cannot withhold from your partner gives you no bargaining power; it earns you a thank-you in the closing communiqués. Production capacity, however, is an asset of an entirely different nature: it can be granted and withheld, priced and conditioned, and its value swells the more demand intensifies. That is why the moment Türkiye transformed from a country standing in an important place into a country making something scarce was the moment of its passage from the margins to the center of the table.
Nor is this a Turkish exception; it is a recurring pattern — from Israel, which built its industry in response to the French embargo after 1967, to South Korea, which remained shackled by American missile restrictions until 2021 and today aims for fourth place globally in arms exports, to Türkiye itself. The rule is one and the same: the punished ally builds, and the pampered ally buys — and twenty years later, the former sits at the table while the latter stands in the delivery queue.
The Ceiling of the Classical Role
Let us begin where the story actually began. Türkiye joined NATO in 1952 in a clearly defined capacity: a frontline trench on the southeastern flank, providing soldiers and bases and receiving American weaponry through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Ankara quickly discovered the true price of this arrangement. In 1964, when it threatened to intervene in Cyprus, US President Lyndon Johnson sent his famous letter to Prime Minister İsmet İnönü, warning that weapons supplied through the alliance could not be used without his approval. Then came the harsher lesson: after the Cyprus operation of 1974, the US Congress imposed a comprehensive arms embargo on Türkiye in 1975, and the alliance’s second-largest army found itself without spare parts or ammunition.
Conditional imported weaponry means, in plainer language, that the “remote control” sits in someone else’s pocket: the tank is your tank, but the decision to operate it passes through another capital. The Turkish military understood then that a tank without spare parts is nothing but a mass of iron. From the womb of that embargo (not from the alliance’s generosity) were born Aselsan for defense electronics (1975), then TAI, Roketsan, and Havelsan. For NATO, as the experience of all its members shows, grants four things — standards and interoperability, procurement channels, training, and easier market access — but it transfers sovereign technology to no one. That is built at home, or not at all.
The Silent Coup
The leap that had the world talking about Turkish drones after 2020 was not so much a story of technology as a story of governance. Turkish engineers have existed since the 1970s; what changed after 2004 was the state’s decision to cancel off-the-shelf import deals and redirect their budgets to domestic development projects, managing the portfolio through the Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB) with a civilian-technocratic mindset that buys results rather than promises, and funding it through a defense fund insulated from the fluctuations of the annual budget — a fund that reached the equivalent of roughly 22% of Turkish military spending in 2025. This certainty of demand — long-term government contracts on which a factory can build a production line — is the real engine of falling unit costs, and it is precisely what eludes countries that spend many times what Türkiye spends.
Then came the expulsion from the F-35 program in 2019, over the S-400 deal, performing the very same function as the 1975 embargo: confirmation that there was no road back. The result, in numbers, as of mid-2026: roughly three-quarters of the Turkish military’s needs are met domestically; record defense and aerospace exports of about $10.5 billion in 2025, up nearly 48% from 2024; and new contracts worth $17.8 billion awaiting execution. The paradox that gives this article its subject is that roughly 56% of these exports went to the European Union, NATO countries, and the United States — meaning the biggest customers of an industry built in response to Western sanctions are the Westerners themselves.
The Scarce Commodity Ankara Produces
But take note: possessing a good industry is not, by itself, enough to buy a seat at the table. What flipped the equation was a shift on the demand side, not the supply side — the war in Ukraine changed the definition of what is scarce within the alliance.
Before 2022, the scarce input in NATO was the ultra-advanced platform (fifth-generation fighters, missile defenses), all of it an American monopoly — so influence was American. After 2022, Europe discovered that modern war is stockpile against stockpile, not aircraft against aircraft, and that wars are decided before the first bullet, in the factories, in peacetime. The numbers here are damning: Russia produced some 3.4 million artillery shells in 2025, while Europe’s actual capacity does not exceed roughly 580,000 shells per year according to independent investigations, and the two-million-shell target announced by the European Union slipped from the end of 2025 into 2026. Even gunpowder itself became a bottleneck: Europe depends on China for more than 70% of the linter cotton needed for nitrocellulose. The scarce thing, then, became affordable mass — abundant munitions, cheap expendable drones, and hot production lines — exactly what Türkiye had built, because it had been denied the luxury tier in the first place.
And so exports turned into an instrument of political influence within the alliance, through three channels that can be traced by names and dates:
The first channel is entry into the arsenals of the members themselves. Poland bought the Bayraktar TB2 in 2021 as the first NATO member to do so, followed by Romania, Croatia, Albania, and Kosovo, and Aselsan signed a $410 million contract to equip Polish drones with electronic-warfare pods. At sea, the ULAQ (the unmanned armed surface vessel from Ares and Meteksan) signed its first export contract with Qatar in 2024, while Turkish “Marlin” vessels took part in NATO’s unmanned maritime systems exercises, and Türkiye commissioned in TCG Anadolu the first amphibious ship designed to carry drones. And in Ukraine (the alliance’s great testing ground) Baykar is building a full factory of its own near Kyiv, placing the Turkish company at the heart of the European front as a producer, not merely an exporter. Whoever enters an ally’s arsenal is not just selling it a product; it is selling it training, maintenance, and munitions contracts stretching twenty years, and binding the alliance’s armies to its own standards — a dependency relationship, this time running in the opposite direction.
The second channel is ammunition as diplomacy. When Washington itself needed to replenish stockpiles drained in Ukraine, it sat down to negotiate with Ankara over purchasing artillery shells and explosives — the largest buyer in history knocking on the door of what was once a depot for its own weapons. Turkish industry went further still: in April 2026, Estonia announced that a Turkish company would build on its soil an ammunition plant with a €300 million investment to produce 155mm shells, mortar rounds, and rockets; before that, Baykar acquired Italy’s Piaggio and entered a joint venture with Leonardo. In other words, Türkiye no longer merely exports weapons to Europe — it exports factories and produces inside Europe’s own regulatory wall. Europe needs someone who will sell it “off the shelf and in bulk,” in merchants’ parlance, and Türkiye is the only neighbor in the alliance that built its shop on that very foundation.
The third channel is converting the sale into a vote. Here influence appears stripped of all embellishment. When Sweden applied to join the alliance in 2022, Ankara suspended ratification for twenty months, publicly tying it to security demands from Stockholm and to the F-16 deal frozen since 2021 — and within hours of the Turkish parliament’s ratification in January 2024, the Biden administration formally notified Congress of the $23 billion deal. In October 2025, London signed with Ankara a deal for 20 Eurofighter jets worth about £8 billion. As for the battle underway now, it is the most telling of all: the European “SAFE” fund, worth €150 billion, stipulates that the non-European component of any procurement must not exceed 35%. Raising that ceiling for Türkiye requires a defense partnership agreement opposed by Greece and Cyprus — yet Berlin is pressuring Athens to drop its objection, and the Commission itself is searching for a formula to bring Ankara in. Pause on this scene for a moment: European states pressuring a European state to open a European fund to a non-European state. Why? Because excluding Türkiye from Europe’s rearmament — a plan approaching €800 billion — simply means less ammunition, more expensive and slower to arrive. This is influence when it is measured, not declaimed.
Naming the System
From all of this it becomes clear that what happened is not the success of a drone, nor the rise of a leader dictating his terms, but a change in the asset by which membership in the alliance is priced — an integrated system combining civilian-technocratic procurement governance, certainty of demand from a fund shielded from budget fluctuations, a clustered supplier base crowned by exporting (not merely assembling) companies, an export discipline imposed by the global market, and a European need for affordable mass that its own industrial complex failed to meet in time. Bases and soldiers bought Türkiye sixty years of thank-yous; production lines bought it terms in five.
Has the Seat at the Center of the Table Been Secured?
The answer: no. And saying so frankly is part of understanding the game, not a criticism of it. The very deal cited as proof of Türkiye’s strength (the Eurofighter) is itself proof of what it lacks: a country that sells the world drones was forced to buy 20 European fighters, and plans to acquire 24 more, second-hand, from Qatar and Oman — because its national fighter, the KAAN, will not mature before the end of the decade, and because its American GE-F110 engine remains hostage to re-export approvals from Washington. Jet engines, long-range air defense, and certain critical electronics: three gaps that mean the supplier’s veto has not yet been lifted from Ankara, and that its influence within the alliance is real but conditional on the tier of armament in question. In the affordable-mass tier, Türkiye sets the terms; in the high-end platform tier, it still receives them.
And there are constraints deeper than the hardware itself, documented even by researchers sympathetic to the Turkish experience: high inflation squeezing the defense budget and the cost of borrowing; a brain drain sapping the very engineers on whom the leap was built; and a lingering (if declining) dependence on imported subsystems at the heart of national products. Influence built in a decade can erode in another if the machine that produced it stops — for the seat at the table is not a title deed to be registered, but a subscription renewed by production every year.
The Lesson
Look around and you will find the same pattern at work elsewhere. South Korea turned its Poland deal (980 K2 tanks and 648 K9 howitzers under the 2022 framework) into a permanent industrial foothold inside NATO, with its tanks manufactured locally by its partners, and lifted its exports above $15 billion in 2025 — without any alliance membership at all. The lesson also runs in reverse: Egypt, NATO’s major non-member ally, kept buying ready-made platforms and so remained outside the equation of influence despite all its deals.
The truth the reader should take away is that seats in alliances are not granted as rewards for loyalty; they are bought with the scarcity of what you offer. A frontline trench remains a trench no matter how long its occupant stands in it. What moves its occupant to the center of the table is that those seated around it need what is in his hand more than he needs their company. And Türkiye — the non-European state that became a precondition of Europe’s security — understood this rule early, because the alliance itself taught it to her: through warning letters, through embargoes, through expulsion from programs. So she answered in the only language markets respect: she built what they cannot buy from anyone else.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Tessera Research Collective. You may read this piece, as well as his other work, on his Substack: Defense Economics Notes | Mümin Ahmedoğlu | Substack
