The Subsidized Retreat

The Closing Window

A novel by Gregg Roman

My debut novel lands tomorrow: a literary thriller set inside the exact U.S.–Iran deal now turning into a shooting war. A memorandum negotiated in Islamabad, a sixty-day clock, and the people the bargain leaves behind. “A high-stakes thriller with a conscience” (Jim Hanson).

Paperback and hardcover on launch day.

One thread runs through today’s news, and it is an invoice. Washington is about to hand Turkey ~80 jet engines worth more than $700 million for a fighter built to end its dependence on Washington, has drafted a $300 billion plan to rebuild Iran, and is paying for the privilege of negotiating while Tehran meters the Strait of Hormuz. We keep mistaking the invoice for an alliance.

Good afternoon. The Forum spent the last 48 hours documenting the pattern, and today it has a name. My colleagues and I published a full threat assessment, Ending the American Subsidy to Turkish Grand Strategy, alongside Michael Rubin’s congressional testimony on Turkey’s half-century occupation of Cyprus. Together they make one argument: the United States is financing its own containment on an installment plan, and calling the down payment an alliance.

Today’s brief leads with that Turkey deep dive, then follows the same logic across the Gulf, Lebanon, and Gaza. And it ends where the week ends for me: with a book that is, at bottom, about the people a subsidized retreat leaves behind.

Gregg Roman · June 30, 2026

In today’s brief:

• Special feature: Ending the Subsidy, the Turkey deep dive
• The Gulf: extortion and the Omani maneuver at Hormuz
• The Lebanon framework and Israel’s “not a millimeter” resolve
• Gaza and the post-war mirage
• The subsidized retreat, globally: $300 billion, all sanctions, and the dam others are buying
• Plus: The Closing Window lands tomorrow

Washington is financing its own containment, and calling the down payment an alliance.

For two decades Washington has treated Turkey as an ally that occasionally misbehaves. The Forum’s new assessment makes the opposite case: Turkey is an adversary that occasionally cooperates, and the United States is now preparing to subsidize the machine built to replace it. Two pieces we published over the last two days make the argument from opposite ends, the boardroom and the battlefield.

Pillar one: the engine, and the machine it powers. On June 24 the administration notified Congress of its intent to ship Ankara roughly eighty GE F110 jet engines worth more than $700 million, the powerplants for Turkey’s “indigenous” KAAN fighter (Reuters via AeroTime; The War Zone). Two weeks later, on July 7–8, Erdoğan hosts NATO’s leaders in Ankara (NATO), and Vice President Vance has confirmed Washington is reviewing Turkey’s eligibility to rejoin the F-35 program it was expelled from in 2019 over its Russian S-400 (Reuters via U.S. News). Asked about the jets, Trump said only that he would “probably do something that will make him very happy.”

My report argues the apparent contradiction, a government that brands America an imperial threat while lobbying to buy its jets, is not confusion but doctrine. Drawing on a survey of 21 Turkish think tanks, foundations, and a state-owned defense house, it documents how anti-Americanism in Turkey has been engineered: manufactured inside state-aligned institutions, drafted into doctrine, and carried into the presidency, the foreign ministry, and the intelligence service by the same people who write it. The clearest illustration: İbrahim Kalın, who founded Erdoğan’s flagship think tank SETA, now runs Turkey’s intelligence service, the MİT. The radical ASSAM has drafted a model constitution for an Islamic confederation explicitly meant to replace NATO. The KAAN’s engine, in the report’s phrase, is a “rented ladder” across the gap until Ankara no longer needs us at all (MEF / Roman).

The resistance is already bipartisan. On June 28 a group of House members urged Secretary Rubio and Secretary Hegseth to halt any F-35 transfer, warning the S-400 would let Russian intelligence probe U.S. stealth technology and citing Turkey’s harboring of Hamas and refusal to sanction Russia. Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on House Foreign Affairs, has tried to block the engine sale; the administration is overriding him (Fox News).

Pillar two: the occupation we will not name. Michael Rubin, the Forum’s director of policy analysis, told Congress today that Turkey’s other subsidy is moral. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and, after the Greek junta collapsed and its pretext vanished, invaded again “absent any casus belli,” seizing and ethnically cleansing a third of a sovereign country in what he calls a “blatant land grab” that continues today.

Rubin documents what followed: a settlement campaign that, by the occupation authority’s own count, has driven the zone’s population to just shy of 500,000, of whom documented pre-1974 Cypriot Muslims number only around 230,000. Settlers now likely outnumber native Turkish Cypriots, the same demographic engineering Turkey later ran in Afrin. And still the State Department refuses to call northern Cyprus “occupied,” for fear of offending Ankara and its envoy Tom Barrack, whose “cynical realism” Rubin likens to Kissinger’s (MEF / Rubin).

This is the Reciprocity Standard stated as plainly as it gets: advanced capability is earned by conduct, not by status or a photo-op in Ankara. No serious person wants a rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts U.S. nuclear weapons. We want symmetry. If Turkey insists hardware and politics are separate, then every engine, every jet, and every F-35 certification should be conditioned on behavior, with no F-35 while the S-400 remains. Pair that with the Daylight Doctrine, apply the Foreign Agents Registration Act to Ankara’s influence apparatus and move the B61 nuclear weapons out of Incirlik, and the No-Vacuum Doctrine, resource the Turkish institutions that still argue for the transatlantic relationship before Eurasia fills the space. Sell the F-35 to a government whose spy service is run by the founder of the think tank that engineers this anti-Americanism, and you are not repairing an alliance. You are financing your own containment.

The most important move at Hormuz this week was not Iranian. It was Omani.

Muscat, coordinating with the International Maritime Organization, opened temporary shipping lanes hugging the Omani coast, routing traffic around IRGC control and asserting its own sovereignty over the chokehold (The Guardian). Panicked by the bypass, Tehran announced a “Joint Hormuz Committee” with Muscat under the Islamabad memorandum, an attempt to rope the Sultanate into its extortion scheme (Iran International). Oman smiles for the cameras and keeps charting its own path.

The arsonist’s neighbors are refusing the insurance. Iran rejected a joint French-Omani initiative to clear the Strait’s mines, because Tehran views the mines not as a hazard to be cleared but as diplomatic capital to be traded (Reuters). Commercial traffic stayed far below pre-war norms as Washington and Tehran traded strikes; corporate risk models do not trust a political memorandum. And the bill lands furthest from the Gulf: UNCTAD’s June 30 analysis warns that even an immediate reopening leaves developing nations facing lasting food and fuel shocks (UNCTAD). The one clear beneficiary, the Asia Group concludes, is China, a relative winner leveraging stockpiles and subsidized renewables while the West bleeds capital and focus (New York Times).

Around the extortion sits a diplomatic theater with no script. Pezeshkian announced Qatar will release an initial $6 billion of frozen Iranian assets, though neither Doha nor Washington confirmed any transfer (The Hill). Trump claimed Iran agreed to talks in Doha, then dismissed them as “perhaps important, perhaps not” (Reuters). Within hours, spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Tehran will hold no direct negotiations with the U.S. in Qatar “at any level” (The Guardian). And to salvage the talks Tehran says it will not attend, a U.S. official said Washington “decided to stop all the kinetic activity,” handing the regime an unearned reprieve days after the IRGC fired on a commercial tanker.

The Hormuz Mandate is the line that holds the whole region: freedom of navigation through an international strait is not Iran’s to sell, and Oman just proved a coastal state can keep it open without Tehran’s permission. The danger is the Reciprocity Standard in reverse, a White House that halts its own strikes to chase a meeting the other side publicly denies, paying in leverage for the optics of diplomacy. Back Oman’s corridor, refuse the toll, and stop trading kinetic deterrence for a photo in Doha.

Three governments signed a disarmament framework. The only armed party in Lebanon signed nothing.

The trilateral framework among the U.S., Israel, and Lebanon conditions an Israeli withdrawal on Hezbollah’s complete, verified disarmament (Jerusalem Post). Its quiet achievement, Arab analysts note with alarm, is to redefine the conflict’s root cause, naming Hezbollah’s arms, not Israeli “occupation,” as the destabilizer.

Israel is hedging against the certainty that the Lebanese state cannot deliver. On June 29, marking 1,000 days of war, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir convened a multi-theater operational assessment; the posture is offensive, not a transition to peacetime (Jerusalem Post). On June 30, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz visited troops inside the southern Lebanon security zone, a message to Washington and Beirut that Israel holds the ground and will not withdraw so much as a meter until the Hezbollah threat is neutralized (Jerusalem Post).

The framework’s affirmation of the Lebanese government’s exclusive right to use force is a fiction when Hezbollah threatens civil war against any army unit that moves to disarm it. Israel’s one structural win was insisting on decoupling the Lebanese theater from the U.S.-Iran Islamabad track, preserving full freedom of action regardless of what Washington concedes to Tehran.

This is the Post-Aid Alliance problem weaponized: Washington again drafting the rules of Israel’s northern defense around a Lebanese army penetrated by the enemy it is supposed to disarm. The Carthage Doctrine is why Netanyahu is right to keep the high ground regardless of the framework’s promises, because presence, not paper, is the only enforcement. And the Reciprocity Standard indicts the design: a disarmament process with no force behind it is a permission slip, and Hezbollah has told you it intends to use it.

The post-war architecture is being drawn by people who do not hold the ground.

A U.S.-led “Board of Peace” convened in Cyprus to prepare a committee of Palestinian technocrats to govern Gaza, Western bureaucrats planning to administer a war zone they do not control, with administrators who lack local legitimacy (The Straits Times). The methodical work continues underneath the diplomacy: the IDF, with the Shin Bet, eliminated Hamas Rafah Brigade commander Ismail al-Masri (Jerusalem Post), and the army completed a three-month operation to seal the 16-kilometer Rafah tunnel where the remains of Lt. Hadar Goldin had been held (Jerusalem Post).

Hamas’s grip is loosening from within. Fatah-affiliated accounts are circulating calls for widespread anti-Hamas protests inside Gaza this Friday, internal Palestinian friction accelerating as the movement’s structural hold weakens (Jerusalem Post). Meanwhile the casualty theater grinds on, with Hamas-run ministries issuing figures that much of the international press broadcasts before anyone can verify them, a point even outlets that report the toll concede in their own disclaimers.

The No-Vacuum Doctrine is the warning over Cyprus: a committee of technocrats with no security spine does not fill the vacuum, it advertises it. Back the dismantling of the terror infrastructure to completion, and treat governance as something earned on the ground, not conferred in a conference room. The Daylight Doctrine applies to the numbers: report the casualty figures with the same scrutiny you would demand of any combatant who controls the count.

The Turkey engine is one line item in a much larger ledger.

Draft details of the final U.S.-Iran deal commit Washington, “with regional partners,” to a reconstruction program of at least $300 billion for Iran, ostensibly funded by the Gulf states, the arsonist expecting his victims to finance the rebuild (Reuters). The memorandum reportedly commits the U.S. to terminating “all types of sanctions,” primary and secondary, reaching beyond the nuclear file to terrorism and human-rights designations (Iran International). Sensing the step-back, the Gulf states are quietly accelerating talks on a self-reliant collective security architecture, while Russia backs Tehran diplomatically and the EU issues another round of generic appeals for restraint, marginalized from the hard-power board entirely. Sanctions enforcement is fraying ahead of the 60-day window, though much of the erosion is relief Washington itself authorized through August.

And while America underwrites its own retreat, others are buying the future outright. The Forum’s Siyad Madey shows the pattern on the Nile: at the G7 in Évian, Egypt’s Sisi traded Gaza credits and Iran congratulations for an American pledge to side with Cairo against Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and Trump obliged, calling it “tremendous problems for Egypt.” But Ethiopia just announced three more upstream dams, its prime minister won a supermajority on the project, and Kenya, not Egypt, is the dam’s largest customer. “Cairo went to the G7 to slow the infrastructure,” Madey writes, “while Nairobi went to the G7 to buy more of it” (MEF / Madey).

Every item here is the Reciprocity Standard betrayed, relief and reconstruction delivered up front for promises banked later, and the No-Vacuum Doctrine confirmed, because where Washington subsidizes its own withdrawal, Beijing, Moscow, and Ankara buy the ground it vacates. The Daylight Doctrine is the corrective: name the subsidy, price the retreat, and stop calling the invoice an alliance.

The value of the GE F110 engine package Washington is about to hand Ankara, the powerplants for a fighter built to end Turkey’s dependence on Washington. It is the subsidy made literal: we are financing the machine designed to render us irrelevant, and mistaking the receipt for a partnership. (Source: Reuters via AeroTime; MEF / Roman.)

I have spent this newsletter describing a deal that leaves a people behind. Tomorrow I publish the novel of it.

The Closing Window is out July 1. It is fiction, but the memorandum in its pages is negotiated in Islamabad, with sixty days between a ceasefire and the vote that makes it binding, the same shape as the real thing I have been tracking here since Issue 002. A deal that pledges non-interference in Iran’s “internal affairs” is a green light for the same Revolutionary Guard now firing on American bases to turn inward, on the Iranians who walked into the streets.

The novel puts you in a room with three of them: an air-defense colonel handed an order he cannot carry out, a labor organizer who will not stop, and a nurse who has seen what the regime does to those who do not stay afraid. A report can tell you what the regime does. A novel can make you feel what it costs.

Also new from the Forum in the last 48 hours: the full Turkey package (Ending the American Subsidy to Turkish Grand Strategy, The Intellectual Architecture of Turkey’s Foreign Policy, and the interactive Architecture of Turkey’s Anti-Americanism Matrix); Michael Rubin’s Cyprus testimony; and Siyad Madey on Egypt, Kenya, and Ethiopia’s dam.

One day out from launch, the math is simple: pre-orders and first-week reviews decide whether a book finds its readers. Two favors, if today’s brief sharpened the stakes. Pre-order the ebook, and forward this issue to one person who follows Turkey or Iran.

And if you value the reporting that carried this brief, the Turkey assessment, Rubin on Cyprus, the analysts who read an engine sale as a strategy rather than a headline, the Forum runs on readers, not the governments it tries to move.

That is the board for today. Reply and tell me where you sit: policy, press, government, or just paying attention. I read these. And if you pre-order, tell me that too.

Gregg

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