President Donald Trump continued his strategy of intensive personal diplomacy, hosting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House on Thursday, after both leaders spoke before the U.N. General Assembly earlier this week. Trump sought to enlist Turkey in his pressure campaign against Russia, while Turkey sought to enhance its own power in the Middle East. Left apparently undiscussed, was Turkey’s disturbing support for Islamist extremists and burgeoning rivalry with Israel.

Trump’s primary objective in the meeting was to place economic pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. “I’d like to have him [Erdogan] stop buying any oil from Russia while Russia continues this rampage against Ukraine,” Trump said.

During his U.N. speech on Tuesday, Trump criticized European allies for funding Russia’s war machine through purchases of Russian oil. The top consumers of Russian oil among NATO’s membership are Turkey, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Although Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has increasingly charted for Turkey a foreign policy independent of the Western military alliance. This includes developing a friendly relationship with Russia, despite the historical animosity between the two countries, and despite Russia’s hostile stance towards NATO countries in general.

In 2020, Turkey purchased a number of S-400 air defense systems from Russia, leading President Trump to impose sanctions on the country near the end of his first term. (Incidentally, Russia also sold S-400s to Iran, and the air defenses failed to shoot down a single Israeli jet during their brief war this summer.)

Turkey’s foreign policy has also diverged from that of its NATO allies with respect to the Middle East. Erdogan dreams of recreating the glory of the Ottoman Empire, complete with a sectarian Islamism, turning Turkey away from decades of secular governance. As a result, Erdogan’s Turkey remains friendly with Islamist groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and it seeks to aggressively expand its influence throughout the region.

This policy leads Turkey to clash with non-Islamic governments, such as Armenia, the region’s only Christian-majority country, and Israel, the region’s only Jewish-majority country. In late 2024, several senior Hamas officials moved from Qatar to Turkey, a sign of the ongoing friendship between Erdogan’s government and the jihadist group that seeks Israel’s “annihilation.”

As recently as this week, Erdogan doubled down on vilifying Israel and exonerating Hamas. “I don’t see Hamas as a terrorist organization. On the contrary, I see it as a resistance group. … They are using what they have to try to defend themselves,” he insisted in a Monday interview in New York City. Meanwhile, he declared the war in Gaza was “completely a genocide … caused by Netanyahu.”

Turkey also has a troubling record of religious persecution, stretching all the way back to the Armenian genocide (1915-1916), which it still officially denies. From 2016 to 2018, Turkey illegitimately imprisoned American pastor Andrew Brunson, until the Trump administration successfully secured his release. In 1971, Turkey shuttered an Orthodox Christian seminary near Istanbul, but Erdogan recently suggested his government might allow it to reopen.

Surprisingly, a thawing in the relationship between Turkey and the U.S. came as an outworking of Erdogan’s Islamist regional aggression. Throughout the decade-long Syrian civil war, Turkey backed the Islamist rebels holed up in northwest Syria, against the Assad regime in Damascus. In December 2024, Assad’s regime collapsed, and these Islamist rebels marched southward, capturing Damascus without a fight and establishing themselves as a new central government. (In toppling Assad, Turkey wrested regional power away from its supporters, Russia and Iran.)

While Israel has understandable doubts about the character of this new government, the Trump administration has thus far given the new regime the benefit of the doubt, working to help it stabilize the country. This gives Trump and Erdogan a common objective in the Middle East, from which to build further working relations.

For its part, Turkey seeks an end to U.S. sanctions, so that it can purchase advanced F-35 fighter jets. Turkey already boasts the second-most powerful military in NATO, behind the U.S., and American fighters would make the military even stronger. Trump told reporters that sanctions on Turkey could be lifted “very soon,” and that he expected that Erdogan would “be successful in buying the things that he wants to buy.”