It should be common sense. The United States should not sell weaponry to countries that work against U.S. interests, that sponsor terrorism, or whose leaders fantasize about killing Americans.
Increasingly, however, the Biden administration seeks to do just that.
Take Turkey: After President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s turn toward Russia, Turkey lost access to America’s next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Turkey has since doubled down on its anti-American antagonism. On Sept. 1, for example, nationalist party leader Devlet Bahceli, Erdogan’s primary coalition partner, called the United States, not Russia, Turkey’s main strategic threat. Just days later, Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu declared, “We want to tear America apart.” Erdogan appears to be soliciting Russian cash to finance his reelection campaign. A bestselling Turkish novel, now with seven sequels, fantasized about a war between Turkey and the U.S. that culminated in the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Washington. This is all just the tip of the iceberg. The notion that selling F-16s to Turkey will convince Erdogan to become a responsible player on the world stage is naive at best. Still, that is now the absurd position that Biden takes.
Unfortunately, this has become the exception rather than the rule. In 2018, the Trump administration suspended military aid to Pakistan given Islamabad’s two-faced behavior in the fight against terrorism. Pakistan provided a lifeline not only to al Qaeda and a number of anti-India terrorist groups but also enabled the Taliban insurgency up to and during that movement’s march through Afghanistan.
In the wake of Afghanistan’s fall, Pakistan again pushed on the most anti-liberal elements of its foreign policy. It remains a satrapy of China and consistently votes against U.S. interests at the United Nations. Pakistan consistently polls as among the most anti-American countries on Earth. Against this backdrop, the Biden administration’s announcement last week that it sought an upgrade worth nearly half a billion dollars for Pakistan’s F-16 fleet is bizarre. Not only would this reward Pakistan for decades of conspiring to kill American service members in Afghanistan, but it also ignores geopolitical reality. Pakistan will not use F-16s against terrorists. After all, extremists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are clients of the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Nor does Pakistan need F-16s to counter China. The two countries are strategic allies — Pakistan has even allowed China to build a shadow naval base at Gwadar to give the People’s Liberation Army Navy an outlet to the Indian Ocean.
Sales to adversaries have greater consequences. As Turkey turns, it is far more likely to utilize F-16s to threaten Greece or Armenia than defend NATO against its Russian financial partners. Likewise, the only reason Pakistan wants F-16s is to use them to threaten India. While F-16s are no longer America’s top fighter, they are its workhorse, and the upgrade kits are substantial. Given the orientation of Turkey and Pakistan, to give Ankara or Islamabad access is to provide America’s top military tech indirectly to Moscow and Beijing.
Bureaucracy is insulating. Left unchecked, it can undermine national security for shortsighted reasons such as allowing an ambassador to have an easier tenure or assuaging an industry representative for whom the bottom line rather than national security is the primary metric. Against this backdrop, it is time for Biden to regain control over a State Department increasingly unhinged. Failing that, it is time for Senate leaders to voice a bipartisan national security doctrine: The U.S. shall not arm its enemies.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Insti
