Europe already knew it had to develop its own long-range missiles. The Pentagon’s announcement on Friday that it will no longer send a battalion bringing the critical weapons as a stopgap has suddenly made that task even more urgent.
A spat between US president Donald Trump and German chancellor Friedrich Merz over the war in Iran led Washington to cancel the deployment of a US contingent armed with several types of long-range weapons.
Its abandonment, announced at the same time as a US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, has left the continent with a glaring security gap – one that analysts say will be welcomed in Moscow.
“The message it sends to the Kremlin is that the US is backtracking from its central role as Europe’s security guarantor,” said Carlo Masala, a professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr university in Munich. “We already knew that. But now it’s materialised in terms of capabilities.”
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Due to arrive in Germany some time this year, the Biden-era deployment plan had been aimed at strengthening Nato’s deterrence against Russia while six European nations worked on developing their own systems.
Trump’s abrupt decision to cancel that plan has deepened a major fear in European capitals: that the US will withdraw weapons faster than Europe can develop alternatives.
Long-range missiles, referred to as deep precision-strike (DPS) capabilities, are one of the critical weapons systems that European nations must produce themselves after decades of relying on the US for such platforms.
The Pentagon has also refused to provide Nato with a detailed timeline of planned withdrawals from Europe of other critical systems such as air and missile defence platforms, strategic airlift capabilities and satellite intelligence, spooking European capitals that need to know which investments to prioritise, according to defence officials.
If Trump were to withdraw other capabilities on an ad-hoc basis it could create large and dangerous gaps in Europe’s security for years while governments strive to develop, test and deploy domestic replacements, the officials said.
“The signalling of this is absolutely terrible ... it’s a nightmare,” said Ulrike Franke, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This was a military gap identified by Nato and Germany, a piece of a puzzle and it all made sense ... And now this is Trump using wrecking-ball policy to take it all down.”
“Doing this, ad hoc and without a plan ... it’s very Trump,” Franke added. “There is a capability gap that now isn’t going to be plugged anytime soon.”
The plan to temporarily deploy an American battalion armed with long-range missiles in Germany dates back to a carefully choreographed announcement at the Nato summit in Washington in 2024.
Then-president Joe Biden and his German counterpart Olaf Scholz said sending the troops – equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of more than 1,500km, SM-6 ballistic missiles and a new long-range hypersonic weapon called Dark Eagle – would “demonstrate the United States’ commitment to Nato and its contributions to European integrated deterrence”.
The following day, Germany, France, Poland, the UK and Italy announced their intent to work together on developing an array of mid- to long-range cruise and ballistic missiles under a programme called Elsa. Sweden also later joined.
The decision to station US long-range weapons on German soil for the first time since the end of the cold war was delicate for Scholz, who during his three years as chancellor was deeply cautious about anything that might have been seen in Moscow as an escalation by Berlin.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who last week spoke by phone with Trump, described the plan as a provocation that would trigger a cold war-style missile crisis.
But the US and Germany billed the move as a response to Putin’s own decision to station nuclear-capable Iskander missiles – and fighter jets equipped with Kinzhal hypersonic air-to-surface missiles – in the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, putting Berlin within reach.
Officials said the aim was to show a potential aggressor that, were they to attack western European cities, their own command facilities, airfields and missile launch sites would not be safe from a counterattack.
German officials sought to downplay Friday’s announcement that jeopardised that entire strategy, saying it had been clear for some time the deployment was at risk as the US has shown growing ambivalence towards Europe. The war in Iran has also put a heavy strain on US missile supplies. Nato leaders would discuss further how to avoid security gaps at the alliance’s annual summit in Ankara in July, they said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
