NATO's New Job: Buying Weapons Without America

At last week's Ankara summit, NATO chose a Swedish aircraft to replace its American one. The alliance's Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS fleet — the airborne radar planes that have served as NATO's eyes since the Cold War — will be retired in favor of Saab's GlobalEye, selected through NATO's own procurement agency ^[1]. This is not one ally buying a foreign plane. It is NATO itself choosing a non-US platform to replace a US platform for a core alliance capability. That decision is one tile in a pattern the Ankara summit made visible. The same gathering launched the "NATO Front Door," a single procurement portal to streamline multinational weapons purchases across the alliance ^[2]. A UK-led coalition of a dozen allies committed to developing European long-range strike missiles, building a capability that until now has depended on US systems ^[3].

$50B UK-led European missile initiative at Ankara — committed by a dozen NATO allies for 2,000-kilometer-range strike missiles, announced through the summit framework ^[3].

In April, 30 NATO ambassadors toured defense firms in Seoul and Tokyo, exploring procurement partnerships with Asian suppliers ^[4][5]. For 77 years, NATO's job was to make sure everyone's US-supplied weapons worked together. It is now becoming something different: a procurement body that decides what the alliance buys, and from whom. What makes this strategically significant is that the money exists because Washington demanded it. Trump pushed the 5% GDP defense-spending pledge at Ankara, framed as burden-sharing on American terms: allies spend more, buy American, grant US basing access ^[6]. But over the preceding months, the same administration systematically reduced its own NATO military commitment. The US cut its European fighter force from 150 to 100 aircraft, halved its MQ-4 and MQ-9 drone fleet, and withdrew eight refueling tankers, a carrier, a missile submarine, and a bomber group ^[7][8]. The general overseeing the shift described the old arrangement as something the US is deliberately ending.

There has been an unhealthy co-dependence in the Nato Force Model on US forces. — Alexus Gregory Grynkewich

Then the Iran war made the capability gap concrete. US forces depleted 45% of their Precision Strike Missiles and half of their THAAD and Patriot interceptors during the operation. The US suspended all arms deliveries to Estonia — HIMARS launchers, Javelin missiles — and notified Baltic and Scandinavian allies of delays under Foreign Military Sales ^[9][10]. Estonia's defense minister said Tallinn would look elsewhere.

We were already aware that the U.S. had put all outgoing ammunition shipments on hold. — Hanno Pevkur

Canada reached the same conclusion. Ottawa chose Saab GlobalEye over Boeing and L3Harris for Arctic surveillance, a decision Carney framed as "diversifying away from the United States," coming eight days after the Pentagon suspended the 1940 Permanent Joint Board on Defence ^[11]. The pattern is consistent across each case: Washington tells allies to buy American, then cannot deliver the weapons, and allies who were told to depend on US production start looking for alternatives. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is managing the resulting contradiction on two levels. Publicly, he keeps Trump invested.

This is your president, but also the leader of the free world, taking the leadership role, as is necessary. — Mark Rutte

Behind that flattery, he is building the institutional infrastructure for European autonomy: the Front Door, factory networks, non-US procurement channels. He has told allies the old alliance is finished.

I would argue that the NATO we had only three or four, five years ago was not sustainable. — Mark Rutte

The transformation is not a clean break from US weapons. At the same summit, NATO announced it will produce US-designed systems inside Europe — Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, AMRAAM air-to-air missiles — through joint ventures like the Lockheed-Rheinmetall missile deal ^[12][13]. Trump dangled F-35 access for Turkey ^[14]. So the alliance is simultaneously deepening some ties to US defense technology while building the capacity to operate without it. Both tracks serve the same hedge: keep the US invested, but be able to stand without it. The paradox at the center of all this is that Washington built the very gap it is now complaining about. Trump at Ankara demanded more spending and more support for US operations, asking why the US spends "hundreds of billions of dollars" when allies are not "there for us" ^[3]. But allies are spending more. The 5% pledge is real. They are just spending on European capability, not on backing US operations. Meanwhile, Rubio revealed how Washington actually views the alliance when Spain denied basing rights during the Iran war: he questioned whether NATO serves any purpose for the US without that access ^[15]. A Pentagon memo went further, suggesting Spain be suspended from the alliance over the refusal ^[16]. The US sees NATO as basing infrastructure for power projection into the Middle East and Africa. European allies see it as a mutual defense pact. Those two definitions are now in open conflict, and the 5% pledge is flowing toward the European one. The spending sold as burden-sharing is funding the infrastructure for an autonomy Washington forced into existence but never intended to sell. The next signal will come not from another summit communiqué but from a warehouse: whether the US restocks the missiles and launchers it pulled from Estonia, or lets the gap harden into the new normal.