Germany to Buy and Station US Tomahawk Missiles
Germany has struck a deal to buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles and base them on German soil, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced, calling it a move 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 will make Berlin the third European operator of the long-range weapon after Britain and the Netherlands. Washington is expected to approve the sale in August; the missiles, which can reach targets 1,550 miles away, will be German-owned and German-operated.
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 to run them, 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, part of a broader push to harden Europe’s defences against a Russia that shows no sign of relenting. Watch the size of the order when US approval comes in August, and Moscow’s response beyond the condemnation already issued.