Ankara will retaliate against the United States if Washington blocks the supplies of weapons to Ankara, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Sunday.
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives released details on Friday of a $717 billion annual defence policy bill, including a measure to temporarily halt weapons sales to Turkey.
"Next week I will pay a visit to the United States and will say that cancelling the sale of the F-35 is unacceptable, and if this happens, they [the United States] will get a corresponding response from Turkey," Çavuşoğlu said in an interview with CNN Turk.
The proposed U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, which is several steps from becoming law, would ask the Defense Department to provide Congress with a report on the relationship between the United States and Turkey, and would block the sale of major defence equipment until the report was complete.
Turkey plans to buy more than 100 of Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, and is also in talks with Washington over the purchase of Patriot missiles.
In mid-April, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell said Ankara's purchase of the S-400 air defence missile systems from Russia could negatively affect the delivery of the fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets to Turkey.
