US Poised to Cancel Tomahawk Missile Sale to Germany

The Pentagon is preparing to cancel a landmark deal to supply Germany with Tomahawk cruise missiles, according to US and European officials, as Washington recoils from the risk of Kremlin retaliation and grapples with a severe depletion of its own arsenals amid the conflict against Iran. The $425 million agreement, greenlit by the Biden administration in 2024, would have marked the first permanent deployment of the precision-strike weapons on German soil—a move framed as essential to bolstering NATO’s conventional deterrent on its eastern flank. Instead, the deal has been frozen, with the Pentagon conducting a formal assessment of Russia’s likely response.

View from Berlin is one of mounting alarm. German defence planners, racing to modernise a force hollowed out by decades of neglect, had seen the Tomahawk acquisition as a cornerstone of the country’s future deterrent role. The prospect of cancellation, reported by Politico, compounds anxiety that the United States is systematically reducing its security footprint in Europe. Former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen was quoted in related commentary warning of the alliance’s fragmentation—a sentiment echoed privately by German officials who fear Europe is being left to shoulder a burden it cannot yet bear.

Moscow, for its part, has greeted the news with unveiled sarcasm. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev posted on social media, “No Tomahawk missiles for Merz”—a barbed reference to likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz. Russian analysts have long threatened a symmetrical response, including the deployment of additional missile systems in the Kaliningrad exclave and across Belarus, should US cruise missiles appear in central Europe. The American decision to stand down, viewed from Moscow, is a victory for its escalatory brinkmanship and a validation of its warnings.

The war with Iran casts a long shadow over the calculus. US forces are reported to have expended thousands of Tomahawks and Patriot interceptor missiles in the opening weeks of the conflict, a drain that Pentagon planners concede will take years to replenish. The strain on stockpiles has collided with a political imperative to avoid provoking a direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia. The result is a de facto strategic triage: the US is hoarding its most advanced munitions for the ongoing Middle Eastern campaign, while recalculating the cost of its security guarantees to Europe. Wider drawdowns inside NATO—of which the Tomahawk cancellation is but one element—suggest a Washington increasingly bent on extracting greater burden-sharing, even as it reshapes the alliance’s deterrent posture for an era of competing great-power crises.