Wings of Empire: Why Britain’s Typhoon Deal with Türkiye Is About More Than Jets
By Shyam Bhatia
London, July 24, 2025. When the UK signed a memorandum of understanding with Türkiye (Turkey’s official name) this week for the potential export of 40 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, headlines focused on jobs, jets, and defence budgets. But look closer, and you’ll see something deeper—a tale of shifting alliances, strategic gaps, and the long shadow of empire in twenty-first-century skies.
At the IDEF arms fair in Istanbul—the International Defence Industry Fair, one of the world’s largest defence expos—British Defence Secretary John Healey stood alongside his Turkish counterpart Yaşar Güler and called it a “big step” forward. In practical terms, it was exactly that: a long-awaited breakthrough in clearing the German veto that had blocked this deal for months. With Berlin now dropping its objections to the transfer of key components, a multi-billion-pound export agreement—one that could sustain 20,000 British jobs and breathe new life into BAE’s Typhoon programme—is back on track.
But the jets are only half the story.
This is not just a defence transaction. It’s geopolitical theatre.
Türkiye, once a key customer for the US-led F-35 programme, was unceremoniously ejected after acquiring Russian S-400 missile systems. That decision—part punishment, part provocation—left Ankara scrambling to modernise its air force. Britain, ever the canny arms dealer, stepped in with a stopgap solution: the Typhoon, a four-nation fighter jet co-produced with Germany, Spain, and Italy, now repurposed as an instrument of post-NATO diplomacy.
And the timing couldn’t be more layered. At a moment when Türkiye’s regional ambitions stretch from the Caucasus to North Africa—and when relations with Washington remain brittle—this deal with London offers Ankara both firepower and validation. For the UK, it’s a timely win for its arms industry, a moment of post-Brexit swagger, and a useful reminder that power is still measured, in part, by who can sell whom what.
But it also raises uneasy echoes. The last time Britain and Türkiye struck such high-level military agreements was in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, when British officers advised the Sultan’s forces, often with imperial strings attached. Today’s deal, cast in the language of partnership and NATO interoperability, masks a similar equation: influence traded for access, leverage disguised as friendship.
That’s not to say the UK is wrong to pursue such exports—BAE Systems and its subcontractors need the work. But it does point to a deeper reality: that in the global arms trade, morality is often parked on the runway. Türkiye’s human rights record, its clampdown on dissent, its use of airpower in northern Syria—all take second place to the £10–12 billion this deal could eventually yield. In the real world of defence commerce, values come and go. Contracts, however, endure.
And then there’s the matter of Europe. For Berlin to quietly lift its block on the export of German-built components suggests that even pacifist instincts buckle under the weight of commercial opportunity and realpolitik. Germany, after all, helped design the Typhoon. But until now, it had refused to let its technology be used in support of what critics call Erdoğan’s militarised nationalism. This week, that line was erased.
All of which makes the Typhoon not just a jet, but a mirror—reflecting the compromises and contradictions of Western foreign policy.
So yes, the jets will fly. But behind them trails a vapour of older dilemmas: empire, leverage, and the transactional logic of statecraft. As India, Saudi Arabia, and now Türkiye reposition themselves not just as customers but as curators of conflict, it’s no longer the builders who shape the battlefield — it’s the buyers.
