Erdoğan Walks Away From NATO Summit With $700 Million in Hand

Turkey's president converted a well-tended relationship with Donald Trump into sanctions relief, dropped court cases, and a major U.S. arms package — all before the NATO summit cameras rolled.

President Trump approved a $700 million military sales package to Turkey ahead of the NATO summit.
Ankara also received sanctions relief and had at least one pending U.S. court case dropped.
The moves are widely read as returns on Erdoğan's long-cultivated personal rapport with Trump.
Turkey has historically complicated NATO cohesion, making the timing of the package diplomatically notable.
No formal policy shift was announced — the deliverables arrived through executive action and quiet diplomacy.

The NATO summit had not yet opened its doors when the ledger for Turkey already looked considerably better than it had the week before. Sanctions softened. A court case gone. And somewhere in the fine print of U.S. arms transfer approvals, a $700 million military sales package with Ankara's name on it.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived at the summit having already collected. According to reporting by The Hill, the Turkish president had converted his long-running personal relationship with Donald Trump into a run of concrete diplomatic wins — the kind that do not require a joint press conference or a formal treaty, just the right channels and the right moment in the calendar.

Trump greenlighted the arms package, which covers military equipment for a NATO ally that has spent much of the past decade testing the alliance's patience — blocking membership bids, purchasing Russian air-defense systems, and periodically threatening to complicate consensus on issues from Ukraine to Scandinavia. None of that history appears to have weighed heavily on the arithmetic here.

The sanctions relief and the dropped court matter add texture to what is shaping up as a transactional bilateral reset. Erdoğan has made no secret of his preference for deal-making over institutional process, and the Trump White House has not discouraged that framing. The result, at least this week, is a $700 million line item and a cleaner legal slate — delivered, notably, before either leader had to sit across from the rest of the alliance.

The full terms of the military sales package had not been publicly itemized as of filing. A follow-on tranche or further diplomatic movement before the summit's close remained possible.