With American Thanksgiving approaching, it's time to talk Turkey again. Many Biblical scholars believe the war with Gog and Magog will be led by Turkey as opposed to Russia. Either way, Turkey will be a major player in such a war, especially if it can get its hands on a good-sized fleet of F35s. Will Trump sell them to Erdogan. He's just sold some to Saudi Arabia. Trump, remember, is a salesman first and a statesman second. He will sell them and put Israel in great danger.
Erdogan The Magnificent?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan poses a threat to Israel, and not to Israel only:
A war between Israel and Turkey?
by Joseph Puder, American Thinker, November 15, 2025:
Erdoğan’s Turkey poses a major threat to Israel, far more of a threat than the Islamic Republic of Iran. The existential threat to Israel from Iran is primarily from its nuclear potential and readiness to use a nuclear bomb against the Jewish state. During the 12 Days’ War of June 2025, Israel and the U.S. delivered a major blow to Iran’s nuclear facilities, although not a complete setback. With the weakening of Iran and the Shia crescent due to Israel’s devastating blows to Iran’s proxies — Hezb’allah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — and with Iran’s loss of a free hand in Bashar Assad’s Syria, Turkey is fast becoming the patron of Syria’s new jihadist president. The authoritarian and megalomaniacal Erdoğan is seeking to create a Sunni-Muslim crescent around Israel and resuscitate the glory of the Ottoman Empire….
I posed this as a probability more than 10 years ago and see no reason to change it now.
The Trump administration does not regard Ahmed al-Sharaa as a jihadist; Washington believes that he has genuinely been transformed from an Al Qaeda operative with a ten million-dollar bounty on his head, to a true moderate, ready to make peace with all of its neighbors, including Israel. In Israel, few are convinced. They saw how Ahmed al-Sharaa failed to stop the massacres of the Alawites in Latakia, and of the Druze in Sweida governorate.
Turkey is vying for America’s most advanced supersonic stealth fighter jets — the F-35 — designed as a multirole aircraft for air superiority….
By law, the United States is committed to guaranteeing Israel’s QME, or Qualitative Military Edge. If Turkey is allowed to buy the most advanced fighter jet now being produced, the F-35, this will deny Israel that QME it has enjoyed up till now, as the only country in the region with F-35s in its arsenal. But for Donald Trump, Erdogan is a “close friend.” How can the Turkish president be denied?
Turkey is expanding its military might overseas. It now has bases in Somalia, Libya (airbases at al-Watiya and Mitiga, and a naval base at Misrata) and in Syria. That is bad enough for the IDF; a Turkish base next door in Gaza would be intolerable. The Israelis must insist that Turkey be kept out of the Strip, even if this angers Trump.
Israeli-Turkish relations were not always adversarial. In fact, during the 1990s, there were excellent relations between the two countries, marked by military and intelligence cooperation, political and strategic alignment, and close economic ties. Turkey was also the first Muslim-majority state to recognize Israel, on March 28, 1949.
But those were very different times in the history of Turkey. Before Erdogan, the secularist heritage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the great reformer of modern Turkey, was still dominant. The Turkish generals were the keepers of the Kemalist flame; they made sure that the politicians hewed to Kemalism, and discharged any officers who showed too great an interest in Islam. Erdogan flipped the switch; ever since he came on the political stage, starting as mayor of Istanbul, then becoming prime minister, and now as president, he has been undoing the Kemalist legacy. He has built tens of thousands of mosques — 9,000 just in the period from 2003 to 2009, and close to 2,000 Imam Hatip schools, high schools, where religion is a major part of the curriculum. Erdogan used the attempted coup by the military in July 2016 by as an excuse to imprison generals, and to fire judges, university rectors, teachers at every level who were judged to be insufficiently Islamic.
Will Trump be willing to turn Erdogan down on his request for F-35s because such a sale would undermine Israel’s qualitative military edge? Will he realize that those F-35s, in Turkish hands, could be used to suppress the minorities in Syria, especially the Kurds in northern Syria, whom Erdogan wants to keep hemmed in so that they cannot link up with the Kurds inside Turkey? Will he come to recognize that Turkey may still be a member of NATO, but because of Erdogan can no longer be considered part of the West?
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