Beyond a Costly Exclusion: A SAFE-plus Arrangement for Türkiye and European Defence

Europe’s rearmament push has exposed a structural contradiction at the heart of EU defence policy: Türkiye holds one of the continent’s most capable militaries, supplies artillery, drones, and air defence systems to more than a dozen European states, and yet sits outside every major EU defence instrument, including SAFE, PESCO, and the European Defence Fund. The exclusion does not follow from the rules, which already allow the integration the Canada agreement proves possible; it follows from a political veto held by a small number of member states, principally Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration, over bounded bilateral disputes. European capitals that resist Türkiye’s institutional inclusion at the Brussels level are simultaneously signing major contracts with Turkish firms at the national level, a contradiction that grows harder to sustain as Turkish defence exports pass $10 billion and five Turkish firms enter the SIPRI Top 100. This analysis proposes a SAFE-plus arrangement: a defined associate status connecting non-EU NATO allies to the EU defence effort, reachable either by assembling existing legal instruments (EDA arrangement, PESCO entry, SAFE participation agreement on the Canada template) or by building an intergovernmental mechanism outside the treaty framework that bypasses unanimity. With Türkiye hosting the NATO Ankara Summit and set to command the Allied Reaction Force from 2028, the architecture of European security is still open to shaping, but the window is closing.