Europe Buys Its Own Tomahawks as the US Gets Pulled Toward the Middle East

At the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8, Germany and the United States reached an agreement that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago: Washington agreed to let Germany procure and station US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles on German soil, under full German ownership and operational control. Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed the deal to the Bundestag on July 9, with a formal letter of intent signed at the summit itself. It's a significant marker of a broader shift now underway across European defense policy.

What Germany is actually buying

The agreement places Germany alongside the United Kingdom and the Netherlands as European operators of the Raytheon-built Tomahawk, a weapon capable of striking targets up to 2,500 kilometers away — far enough to reach deep into Russian territory from German soil. Unlike prior arrangements where US long-range systems in Europe remained under American control, these missiles will be German-owned and German-operated, giving Berlin an independent long-range strike capability it has not possessed in the postwar era. Germany has cited the buildup of Russian nuclear-capable Iskander missiles and hypersonic-armed fighter jets in the Kaliningrad exclave, bordering Lithuania and Poland, along with Russian plans to station nuclear weapons in Belarus, as the direct strategic rationale.

Part of a much larger European rearmament push

The Tomahawk deal isn't an isolated purchase — it's one piece of a coordinated European push toward long-range strike independence. Twelve European NATO members announced in July plans to spend roughly $50 billion over the next decade specifically on long-range precision-strike development. The UK has committed £1.4 billion to the Franco-British-Italian Stratus cruise missile program, while Germany is separately participating in the European Long-Range Strike Approach alongside France, Italy, and Poland. Merz has been explicit that the American Tomahawk purchase is an interim measure — a capability gap-filler while Europe builds toward genuinely sovereign long-range strike systems that don't depend on US manufacturing or approval.

Why the timing matters

This wave of European rearmament isn't happening in a vacuum. It's unfolding at the exact moment American military attention and resources are increasingly consumed by an escalating Iran war — a conflict that has already drained a meaningful share of global Patriot interceptor stockpiles and is now forcing hard allocation choices between Middle East and Ukraine air defense needs. European governments watching that dynamic play out have drawn a fairly direct conclusion: American strategic bandwidth is finite, currently stretched across at least two theaters, and not something European security can be built around indefinitely without a credible independent fallback.

The strategic logic, and its limits

Building sovereign long-range strike capability gives European NATO members leverage and deterrence options that don't require waiting on Washington's attention or approval during a crisis — a meaningful shift after decades of relying on US systems and, implicitly, US priorities. But the timeline is real: procurement, stationing, training, and doctrine integration for systems like Tomahawk take years, and the fully sovereign European systems like Stratus and ELSA are further out still. In the interim period this rearmament is meant to bridge, Europe remains dependent on the same American-controlled supply chains and production capacity currently being pulled toward Iran and Ukraine simultaneously — meaning the vulnerability this buildup is designed to eventually close is, for now, still very much open.