In the span of eighteen months, the Trump administration has managed to alienate NATO’s most reliable defense customers, collapse a $6 billion aircraft deal, and trigger the single largest “Buy European” rearmament surge in modern history — all while insisting he was making America great again. The defense industry is now paying the price, and so are American workers.
When Donald Trump first ran for president, he made an irrefutable promise: he would be the president who made NATO allies pay their fair share, rebuild the American defense industrial base, and put American workers first. In the spring of 2026, all three of those promises lie in ruins — not because Europe refused to spend more on defense, but because Trump’s erratic, contemptuous, and strategically incoherent leadership has driven America’s oldest allies to do something that would have been unthinkable five years ago: they are rearming at a historic pace, and they are deliberately, explicitly, and with documented institutional intent buying everything except American.
The consequences are not abstract. A $6 billion aircraft contract — six Boeing E-7A Wedgetail surveillance jets that NATO had planned to purchase to replace its aging Cold War-era E-3 Sentry fleet — is gone. A consortium of seven European NATO nations formally canceled the acquisition in November 2025 after the Trump administration withdrew from the program, with the Dutch Defense Ministry stating plainly that “the strategic and financial foundations were lost” the moment Washington walked away. NATO is now expected to award the replacement contract to the Swedish-Canadian Saab GlobalEye — a direct competitor that Boeing lost to not because it built an inferior aircraft, but because the president of the United States made American reliability a geopolitical liability.
That single cancellation is merely the most dramatic data point in a far broader pattern of self-inflicted economic and strategic damage. Across Europe, in Ottawa, and in the halls of NATO headquarters, the calculus has fundamentally shifted. European defense budgets have surged to €343 billion in 2024 — a 19 percent increase in a single year — and the EU’s €800 billion rearmament roadmap explicitly requires that 55 percent of all weapons purchases originate from European or Ukrainian manufacturers by 2030. The irony is not lost on a single analyst in Brussels or Washington: Trump spent four years demanding NATO allies spend more on defense. They are finally doing it. They are just not buying American.
1. The Wedgetail Collapse: A Case Study in Self-Sabotage
The story of the E-7A Wedgetail is a parable about what happens when geopolitical reliability is treated as an afterthought by a White House more interested in ideological posturing than industrial statecraft. In November 2023, NATO awarded Boeing a non-competitive contract for six Wedgetail AWACS aircraft — a designation justified at the time on the grounds that the Boeing platform was, in the alliance’s words, “the only known system capable of fulfilling the strategic commands’ essential operational requirements within the timeframe required.” It was a $5–6 billion program. It was Boeing’s. It was certain.
Then the Trump administration arrived with its wrecking ball. In June 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the cancellation of the Air Force’s own plan to purchase 26 Wedgetails, declaring the aircraft “unsustainable on the modern battlefield” and pivoting instead toward a combination of space-based surveillance systems and E-2D Hawkeyes. The Pentagon removed all E-7 funding from its fiscal year 2026 budget request. By July 2025, the U.S. had formally withdrawn from the NATO consortium supporting the joint purchase. Without the Americans — the largest financial and industrial anchor of the program — the entire enterprise collapsed.
“The U.S. withdrawal also demonstrates the importance of investing as much as possible in European industry.”
— Gijs Tuinman, Dutch State Secretary for Defense, November 13, 2025
The Dutch Defense Ministry’s statement, delivered on behalf of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Romania, was not simply a procurement announcement. It was a strategic declaration. Dutch State Secretary Gijs Tuinman’s invocation of “European industry” as the path forward was pointed and deliberate — a signal to Washington that the era of reflexive American dependence in European defense procurement has ended, accelerated not by Europe’s ambitions but by America’s abdication.
NATO is now expected to award the AWACS replacement contract to the Saab GlobalEye, a next-generation surveillance platform built on the Bombardier Global 6500 airframe with an Erieye Extended Range radar capable of detecting air targets beyond 550 kilometers. France has already signed a contract for GlobalEye aircraft. Poland and Germany have expressed strong interest. Canada is considering up to six platforms. The program that Boeing was positioned to dominate — a multi-decade, multi-nation anchor contract that would have sustained thousands of American aerospace jobs — has been handed to Sweden and Canada, because this White House couldn’t be bothered to maintain a coherent industrial policy for more than 180 days.
2. A Chronology of Contract Losses & Broken Trust
The Wedgetail cancellation did not occur in isolation. It is the largest single transaction in a sustained, accelerating pattern of allied nations reconsidering, renegotiating, and in some cases outright refusing American defense contracts — a pattern that tracks directly with the Trump administration’s behavior toward its own allies.
3. The Scale of the Damage: Key Contracts at Risk
The Wedgetail cancellation represents only one dimension of the economic rupture. Across the alliance, programs that American defense contractors once considered guaranteed are now in jeopardy, actively under review, or already redirected to European competitors. The scope is staggering.
4. The Economic Reckoning: Jobs, Revenue, and Strategic Leverage
The numbers behind these contract losses are not just embarrassing — they represent a structural threat to the American defense industrial base and the communities it sustains. Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant, which produces the F-35, is a direct economic anchor for thousands of Texas families. A sustained loss of allied orders does not merely affect a company’s stock price; it affects the pricing of the aircraft the U.S. Air Force itself must buy. When foreign buyers disappear, per-unit costs for the Pentagon rise, and the spiral of underinvestment accelerates.
The Bruegel Institute’s March 2026 analysis of U.S. foreign military sales documented the severity of what is now at stake. Between 2022 and 2024, FMS notifications for NATO Europe represented 50.7 percent of European allies’ military equipment spending — up from 27.83 percent in the 2019–2021 period. That surge was driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and European allies scrambling to restock. American contractors were the primary beneficiary. Now, as Europe builds out its own industrial base, that window is closing — and it is closing faster than Washington anticipated because Trump’s behavior has given European officials the political cover and the moral justification to accelerate the decoupling.
“Your military needs to really have free hands. European weapons come without restrictions on use.”
— Kaja Kallas, EU Foreign Policy Chief, October 2025
Analysts warn that the cascading effects extend far beyond fighter jets and surveillance aircraft. The Patriot missile battery, the HIMARS rocket system, and the Javelin anti-tank missile — cornerstone programs of the American defense industrial base — all depend on foreign sales to sustain economies of scale. If allied nations systematically redirect procurement to European manufacturers, the unit economics of these American programs deteriorate, forcing either price increases or production cuts. In either case, American workers lose.
The broader industrial picture is equally grim. Lockheed Martin began the F-35 program with a goal of producing 2,866 aircraft over 40 years. That target has since dropped to 2,470, while costs have increased by more than 50 percent. The Government Accountability Office reported that the Block 4 upgrade — the version Canada and other allies planned to buy — is $6 billion over budget and five years behind schedule. F-35 availability rates have remained below 50 percent for at least the past five years, meaning most of the aircraft sitting in allied hangars are, at any given moment, non-operational. The product itself is struggling. The salesmanship is catastrophic. And the combination is giving European defense ministers the argument they need to redirect hundreds of billions of dollars away from American industry.
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5. What This Says About Leadership — and What the Constitution Demands
There is a word for what has happened to American defense diplomacy under Donald Trump: negligence. Not the negligence of a president who tried and failed, but the negligence of a president whose erratic, contemptuous, and self-defeating behavior has systematically destroyed the relationships that underpin American economic and strategic power. When Denmark’s defense committee chair publicly declares he “regrets” buying American fighter jets because the president of the United States might cut off their software updates to extract territorial concessions, something has gone profoundly wrong — not with Denmark, but with Washington.
The question that now confronts Congress, the Cabinet, and the American people is not simply whether Trump’s NATO policy is strategically incoherent. It is whether the man executing it retains the cognitive stability, the institutional judgment, and the strategic coherence required of a wartime commander in chief.
The Mechanism of Last Resort — and Why Defense Policy Meets the Threshold
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may transmit to Congress a written declaration that the President “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Congress then has 21 days to determine, by a two-thirds vote of both chambers, whether removal is warranted. This is not a political mechanism. It is a constitutional safeguard designed precisely for moments when a president’s behavior — whether from physical illness, cognitive decline, or acute instability — poses a direct threat to the national interest.
Who has called for it: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation on April 14, 2026 with 50 Democratic co-sponsors to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated publicly that if he were a Cabinet member, he would spend Easter consulting constitutional lawyers about Section 4. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has called Trump’s conduct “an authoritarian threat” requiring 25th Amendment action. More than 70 Democratic lawmakers have formally demanded removal proceedings. Even Tucker Carlson, a Trump campaign supporter, called a recent presidential social media post “vile on every level” and urged Cabinet members to act.
The defense-policy case: The collapse of the NATO Wedgetail consortium is not merely a procurement failure. It is a symptom of what happens when the president of the United States cannot sustain a coherent industrial or alliance strategy across a 24-month period. The U.S. joined a seven-nation consortium to purchase six aircraft. It then unilaterally withdrew — not after consultation with allies, not as part of a negotiated strategic pivot, but because the Office of the Secretary of Defense decided, without Air Force concurrence, to cancel the program. “This was an OSD proposal,” one Air Force official noted. “The Air Force had a full plan to acquire the E-7 Wedgetail.” The institutional damage that followed — a collapsed contract, an ally bloc explicitly turning to European industry, a $5–6 billion Boeing program evaporated — reflects exactly the kind of impulsive, uncoordinated, and consequence-blind decision-making that the 25th Amendment’s framers had in mind.
The practical barriers: Section 4 has never been successfully invoked. It requires the Vice President and a Cabinet majority — figures who owe their positions to the president and who face enormous political pressure to remain loyal. Congressional Republicans have been quick to dismiss calls for the commission, with Rep. Marlin Stutzman calling Trump “one of the greatest presidents our nation has ever seen.” The two-thirds congressional threshold for sustained removal is an additional near-impossibility in the current political environment.
Why the barriers don’t negate the case: A commander in chief who has unilaterally initiated a war without a congressional declaration, collapsed a $6 billion allied defense contract through strategic incoherence, threatened to withdraw from the founding collective defense alliance of the Western world, and is now delaying weapons deliveries to European allies in the middle of an active conflict — has demonstrated precisely the pattern of erratic, impulsive, institutionally damaging conduct the amendment was designed to address. The fact that the political system has not yet acted does not mean the constitutional case is weak. It means the political system is failing the test the Constitution set for it.
6. The Alliance That Built American Dominance — Now Building Without Us
There is a profound historical irony embedded in this moment. The United States built its post-war economic and strategic dominance in part through the defense relationships it cultivated with NATO allies. American contractors dominated European procurement not merely because their products were superior, but because buying American was a statement of alliance solidarity, of shared values, and of integrated security architecture. That trust, built over 75 years, is not something that can be rebuilt with a tweet or a campaign rally.
What the Trump administration has done — in the span of barely 18 months — is validate every European skeptic who ever argued that American defense partnerships were transactional rather than principled. When Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, tells allies that “European weapons come without restrictions on use” and that buying American means surrendering strategic autonomy to a White House that might cut off your aircraft’s software to extort territorial concessions, she is not making a European nationalist argument. She is making a rational security argument. And the data is proving her right.
Even Congress has pushed back against the administration’s strategic disengagement from Europe. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act — passed with bipartisan support — explicitly prohibits the reduction of U.S. forces in Europe below 76,000 troops without congressional consultation, and repeatedly identifies Russia as a threat to regional stability. The NDAA is a direct rebuke of the White House’s posture. Congress remains, in the German Marshall Fund’s assessment, “a strongly pro-NATO legislative body.” The president is not.
The Trump administration has told European allies in classified discussions that Washington will no longer serve as NATO’s primary conventional defense provider after 2027. A senior European defense adviser described the tone of those conversations as “firm, definitive, and clearly strategic.” This is not a negotiating posture. It is an abdication of the foundational commitment that has kept peace on the European continent for eight decades. And it is driving $860 billion in allied defense spending directly into the hands of European manufacturers who will use it to build the industrial capacity to ensure they never have to rely on Washington again.
Editorial Conclusion
Donald Trump promised to make America’s allies pay more for their defense. They are paying more — just not to America. Through a combination of strategic negligence, alliance contempt, and decision-making so erratic that longtime allies are publicly calling the purchase of American weapons a “security risk,” this administration has handed Europe the political justification it needed to build an independent defense industrial base that will permanently diminish American influence, American contracts, and American jobs. A $6 billion Boeing program is gone. A $19 billion Canadian F-35 deal hangs by a thread. Germany’s 92 cents of every defense dollar is going to European manufacturers. And the president now threatens to abandon the alliance entirely unless allies join wars he started without Congress. This is not policy. This is ruin. Congress possesses both the constitutional tools and the institutional obligation to act — and the defense workers of Fort Worth, the aerospace engineers of California, and the alliances that kept the world’s democracies safe for three generations deserve nothing less than that action, now, before the damage becomes permanent.
Sources & References
- FlightGlobal — NATO ditches Boeing E-7 acquisition to seek European alternatives (Nov. 2025)
- Air & Space Forces Magazine — NATO Cancels Plan to Buy E-7 Wedgetails (Nov. 2025)
- Breaking Defense — NATO Allies Cancel E-7A Wedgetail Order (Nov. 2025)
- The War Zone — E-7 Wedgetail Radar Jet Plans Axed by NATO Nations (Nov. 2025)
- The Aviationist — NATO Shelves Plans to Buy E-7 Wedgetail (Nov. 2025)
- Defense News — NATO Eyes Swedish-Canadian Jet for AWACS Role (Apr. 2026)
- FL360Aero — NATO Moves Away From US-Made Assets, Eyes Saab GlobalEye (Apr. 2026)
- Defence Security Asia — NATO SHOCK EXIT: Multi-Billion Euro Wedgetail Deal Collapses (Nov. 2025)
- Courthouse News — Europe’s $860 Billion Defense Plan Freezes Out US Contractors (Oct. 2025)
- Breaking Defense — Canada Reconsidering F-35 Buy Amid Trade War (Mar. 2025)
- AeroTime — Canada Faces US Pressure as F-35 Order Review Nears End (Sep. 2025)
- Eurasian Times — F-35: After Canada & Portugal, Another Country “Regrets” F-35 Deal (Mar. 2025)
- Bruegel Institute — Europe’s Dependence on US Foreign Military Sales (Mar. 2026)
- Carnegie Endowment — Rebalancing the Transatlantic Defense-Industrial Relationship (Dec. 2025)
- Milwaukee Independent — Trump’s Foreign Policy Could Cost U.S. Companies Billions (Mar. 2025)
- TIME — Trump Weighs Pulling U.S. Out of NATO Amid Iran War Fallout (Apr. 2026)
- German Marshall Fund — The 2026 NDAA: What Europeans Need to Know (2026)
- News Now — Raskin Offers Bill Setting Up 25th Amendment Process to Remove Trump (Apr. 2026)
- House Judiciary Committee Democrats — Raskin Demands Cognitive Evaluation of Trump (Apr. 10, 2026)
- Kyiv Post — White House Delays Weapons Deliveries to Europe as Iran War Drains Stockpiles (Apr. 2026)
- Northeastern University News — What Would Happen If the U.S. Pulled Out of NATO? (Apr. 2026)
