U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that he needed to speak with his Turkish counterpart to understand how serious Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was when he said he could shut down the İncirlik airbase, which hosts U.S. nuclear warheads.
Erdoğan’s warning that he could close İncirlik came in response to threats of U.S. sanctions and a separate U.S. Senate resolution that recognized the events of 1915 as a so-called “Armenian genocide”.
“It has not been brought up to me before. The first I heard of it was reading it in the papers as you just mentioned and so I need to talk to my defense counterpart to understand what they really mean and how serious they are”, - Esper told reporters.