Germany Strikes Deal to Buy and Base US Tomahawks
Germany will buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles and station them on its own soil, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced, describing the move as a way to “close an important strategic gap” in the country’s defences. Agreed on the sidelines of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara, the deal makes Berlin the third European operator of the long-range weapon after Britain and the Netherlands. Washington is expected to clear the sale in August; the missiles, able to reach targets 1,550 miles away, will be German-owned and operated, with no US troops to run them.
The significance is less the hardware than the taboo it retires. Germany has spent the post-war decades wary of long-range strike weapons on its own territory, and a chancellor announcing their purchase to plug a “strategic gap” marks how far the calculus has shifted since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A Tomahawk with a 2,500-kilometre reach puts much of western Russia within range from German soil, which is precisely the deterrent signal Berlin intends and precisely what Moscow will read into it. That the missiles will be German-owned and operated, with no US personnel deployed, is the politically essential detail: this is European rearmament under national control, not an American base by another name. It lands in the same week Washington licensed Ukraine to build its own Patriots. Watch the size of the order when US approval comes in August, and Moscow’s response beyond the condemnation already issued.