Türkiye and France sign defense roadmap to turn leaders' thaw into cooperation

Türkiye and France have signed a defense cooperation roadmap, Türkiye's Ministry of National Defense said Saturday. The ministry presented the document as evidence that recent goodwill between the two countries' leaders is beginning to yield practical results in the military sphere.

The roadmap was signed as part of meetings between Lt. Gen. Ilkay Altindag, the ministry's director general for defense and security, and French officials including Alice Rufo, minister delegate to the minister of the armed forces; Gen. Vincent Giraud, the French president's military chief of staff; and Guillaume Ollagnier, director general for international relations and strategy. According to the ministry, the talks covered bilateral defense ties, strategic dialogue and opportunities to build on cooperation already in place.

"In this context, the Roadmap on Defense Cooperation was signed, marking an important step toward further developing defense cooperation between Türkiye and France and strengthening strategic dialogue," the ministry said. It added that the document shows how recent positive messages between the two countries' leaders are being turned into concrete cooperation on defense.

In the statement, posted on NSosyal, a Turkish social media platform, the ministry said the roadmap is meant to deepen strategic dialogue through regular contacts geared toward results and to push cooperation forward on the basis of mutual benefit. Neither the ministry's statement as carried by Report.az nor the TRT World report named specific weapons programs, purchases or a timetable, and both relied solely on the Turkish account. No statement from the French side was included.

Air defense backdrop

The ministry did not specify which leader-level exchanges it meant. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and French President Emmanuel Macron met in July on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara. Macron said he was "very satisfied" with talks covering defense, bilateral ties, Ukraine and the Middle East, Daily Sabah reported at the time. Erdogan said the two countries should raise their mutual trade targets and that Ankara would keep advancing cooperation "in every field."

Political friction has held back joint projects before. A Turkish-French-Italian air defense program launched in 2017-2018 stalled as Ankara and Paris fell out over Syria, Libya and the eastern Mediterranean, the newspaper reported. Turkish officials have long regarded France as the main political obstacle to the program, it said. The paper also cited reports that France, after years of opposition, was willing to consider selling Türkiye the SAMP/T system, built by the Franco-Italian Eurosam consortium. The shift followed Macron's June 25 summit with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. "We have work underway on a Franco-Italian basis, along with Turkey, which is technical work and which is continuing," Macron said in July. Under NATO defense planning, Italy sent Türkiye a SAMP/T system in mid-June, and Defense Minister Yasar Guler said Türkiye was "evaluating all options" to bolster its air defenses, according to Daily Sabah.

What it means

The roadmap is a framework rather than a contract, and its weight will depend on what follows. Regular, results-focused contact between defense establishments could help keep cooperation moving when political ties cool, as they did when the three-nation air defense program stalled. For Türkiye, whose defense minister said this summer that it was evaluating all options for air defense, a standing channel to Paris could help keep the SAMP/T question on a technical track. For France, the document offers a structured way to engage a NATO ally without committing to any sale. The real test is whether Paris describes the roadmap in similar terms and whether named programs emerge from it.