Killswitch Disengage: Why America's Allies Are Abandoning U.S. Weapons

Imagine it is 2027, and the worst-case scenario has finally arrived. A divided Ukraine, about half the size it once was, is staring down the barrel of another Russian invasion—thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of troops marching across the border toward Kyiv. This time, however, Ukraine is not alone. From bases in Poland, Romania, and within Ukraine itself, Europe’s coalition of the willing surges into action.

British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and German pilots sprint to their fighters, moments from getting airborne and hours from resolving the crisis through sheer, crushing air power.

At the tip of the spear sit hundreds of copies of the American-made F-35—a weapon so potent it can devastate Russian air defenses, take out Russia’s military jets, and clear the way for total air supremacy. The first pilots heave themselves into the cockpit, engage the startup sequence, and nothing happens. Back in Washington, the Americans have revealed that they are on Vladimir Putin’s side.

They have hit the kill switch they secretly installed in the West’s most potent war machines, and without the support of those who built them, the aircraft are worth nothing. Kyiv falls, and there is nothing Europe can do to stop it.

For now, that tale is a fantasy. But from Europe to East Asia to the military headquarters of U.S. allies across the globe, some of the world’s brightest strategic minds fear that it could one day become reality. The idea of a kill switch—a remote trigger the Pentagon could use to disable equipment America sold to its allies—remains a myth, a betrayal the United States insists it would never commit. Yet as those allies grow increasingly skeptical of the man in the Oval Office, they have begun to agree that their collective dependence on American weapons is a problem that must be addressed.

The world is beginning to abandon America’s military industry. Here is what is happening, and why it matters.

Buyer’s Remorse: The Three Pillars of American Power

Since the peak years of World War II, America’s status as a military superpower has rested on three unshakeable pillars at once. The first is sheer military might—a commitment to having either the most weapons, the best weapons, or both, in any given area of warfighting. The second is the ability to project power across the globe, through logistics and carrier strike groups, but also through military alliances that extend American power through dozens of other nations simultaneously. The third is America’s military-industrial complex: the sheer capacity to design, develop, and produce an incredible volume of quality weapons that it can then export across the world, strengthening both itself and its allies for the long term.

The first pillar remains rock-solid. In the very week the underlying analysis was prepared, the United States announced not one but two ultra-advanced sixth-generation fighter jets, each with the potential to become the most sophisticated aircraft in human history. From naval vessels to vehicle-building capacity to newly rebuilt assembly lines churning out ammunition, America’s ability to win a head-to-head war against another nation is not in doubt.

But the other two pillars are not what they once were. The United States still has ample foreign military bases and ample formal foreign partners—yet confidence in America, and especially in its weapons, is slipping rapidly.

Consider Canada, where newly elevated Prime Minister Mark Carney has kicked off a broad and unprecedented shift away from the United States. According to Canada’s foreign affairs minister, speaking to foreign press in mid-March 2025, Canada is negotiating with European officials toward a deal that would establish a joint defense alliance, military procurement arrangements, and more—leaving the United States behind. Ottawa has ordered a full review, and probably an outright reconsideration, of a $13.2 billion deal, in U.S. dollars, for the very same F-35 fighter jet. Canada had expected to procure 88 of the jets, replacing the American-made F/A-18 Hornet it currently relies on for its own defense.

Now, though, Canada is not simply looking to walk away from that deal and accept other, less-advanced but non-American-made aircraft. The nation is looking to build up its own military-industrial capacity—both eliminating its reliance on the military-industrial might that its southern neighbor has long used to cultivate alliances, and potentially making other U.S. allies more able to distance themselves from Washington too. Canada recently signed a deal with Australia to develop an over-the-horizon radar system worth another $4.2 billion. For the first time in a very long time, the nation is giving real thought to strengthening a military that has long been neglected precisely because of Canada’s trust in its southern neighbor.

And it is not just Canada having second thoughts. Portugal had intended to pick up a batch of F-35s from America, replacing its twenty-eight American-made F-16s, but the unpredictability of the current administration in Washington has led Lisbon to reconsider. Said the nation’s defense minister, Nuno Melo, to Portuguese news: “The recent U.S. stance in the context of NATO and the international geostrategic dimension makes us think about what are the best options, because the predictability of our allies is a factor to be reckoned with.” Portugal has turned its attention toward picking up European jets of various models.

Denmark has been even more explicit. Parliamentarian Rasmus Jarlov, former head of the government’s defense committee, said in late March 2025: “As one of the decision-makers behind Denmark’s purchase of F-35s, I regret it. Buying American weapons is a security risk that we cannot run. We will make enormous investments in air defense, fighter jets, artillery, and other weapons in the coming years, and we must avoid American weapons if at all possible.

I encourage our friends and allies to do the same.” Denmark currently possesses seventeen F-35s out of a total order of twenty-seven.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called on European Union nations to stop purchasing U.S. equipment wherever possible, instead shifting toward European-made weapons and eliminating NATO’s dependency on its most powerful member. Macron oversees France’s own considerable military-industrial complex, and has worked to break down procedural barriers that would slow France from rapidly stepping up its own production. German officials, meanwhile, have told national press that they suspect the U.S. really does have a kill switch inside its F-35 fighters, and a growing number of defense voices in the country are advocating that Germany rethink its use of the jet.

Even without a kill switch, American export controls make it so that nations operating the F-35 are all but unable to modify or maintain the jets without U.S. support—a system also applied to other American weapons. There has been some pushback within Europe, most prominently from Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who said in mid-March 2025 that he did not consider it a risk to buy U.S. weapons, and from Germany’s decision a few weeks later to buy F-35s to replace its aging strike aircraft. But even Sweden’s Kristersson advocated shifting away from dependence on the United States anyway, and Germany intends to use the F-35 as only one part of a much larger combat air wing.

Slipping Confidence Beyond Europe and Canada

It is not just Europe and Canada watching confidence in Washington slip. Taiwan is almost entirely reliant on the United States for its arms procurement needs—a situation unlikely to change—but according to a recent War on the Rocks analysis, Taiwan has been crippled by frequent delays in delivering American hardware that the island badly needs. Taiwan is under intense pressure from the United States to boost its defense spending, yet the same analysis argues that Taiwan is not able to grow its defense budget until U.S. arms suppliers get themselves together. The dependence has become a liability the island cannot easily escape.

Longtime U.S. ally South Korea has spent the last several years growing into a defense-industrial powerhouse, and has actually started jumping into the gap America has left in other nations—most recently making overtures to Canada and offering weapons from a non-American source. At the same time, the country’s government appears to be seriously considering the idea that South Korea would develop its own nuclear deterrent. Even the Philippines is in the process of moving away from U.S. hardware within its arsenal, and is not expected to purchase much in the way of American weaponry in the future.

Indeed, the concerns shared among an increasing proportion of America’s allies go far beyond the simple idea of a kill switch. Could Washington, in some hypothetical world, press a magic button and immobilize some of its most advanced tech abroad? Maybe, maybe not. But while the answer does matter, it is not the most important motivator for the shift happening across the globe.

America’s allies are losing their confidence in America itself, and its entire military-industrial complex—not just a certain piece of hardware.

In fact, they are so eager to distance themselves from the U.S. that in cases like the F-35, they would let go of the only fifth-generation stealth aircraft they have any hope of purchasing, in favor of European-made or other options that—while formidable—are a major and indisputable step down in capability. They would give up reliance on America’s industrial might in favor of countries and regional defense economies that are very obviously unable to fill the gap anytime soon. For so many nations, all at once, to be willing to take a step down in their capabilities at a time of rising tensions across the globe, is stunning.

Why So Serious? The Roots of Allied Distrust

So, what is actually happening here? Why are America’s allies losing faith in Washington—and is this all a panic about nothing? Go case by case, and one can certainly pinpoint reasons that individual U.S. allies would be a little bit upset with Uncle Sam. In Canada, Prime Minister Carney’s remarks to government leaders on the twenty-seventh of March 2025 say it plainly: “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operations, is over.”

The United States, and particularly the administration of President Donald Trump, has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada as a fifty-first state over the preceding months—something that has led to a reinvigoration of Canadian nationalism, in opposition to the idea, on a level not seen in generations. Not only that, but America has hit Canada—one of its closest allies and trading partners—with major tariffs against Canada’s oil and manufacturing industries, the two cornerstones of its export economy. Those tariffs followed a much longer, will-he, won’t-he series of threats by Trump against both Canada and Mexico. Canadian skepticism of the U.S. is now growing far beyond the defense-industrial realm; to trust the U.S. as a defender of Canada, in this moment, appears to simply be a bridge too far.

In Europe, rising distrust of Washington is tied closely to Trump’s approach to Ukraine, derided across much of the continent as both a betrayal of Kyiv and a naïve, utterly foolish decision to place any level of trust in Vladimir Putin. When, in late February 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was berated in what appeared to be a planned rhetorical ambush by both Trump and U.S. Vice President J.D.

Vance, American leaders’ conduct was widely seen as a betrayal of Ukraine by European NATO members. A few weeks later, a survey across NATO nations showed that just half of all Poles, forty-five percent of Germans, and barely a third of Brits believed that the U.S. would actually honor its commitment to collective defense under the alliance, and come to defend a fellow member if it were attacked. Only one in three Canadians, in the same survey, believed American Article 5 commitments to be credible.

American demands that European nations hike their defense spending have been taken quite poorly, owing to the fact that most European nations are already stepping up spending—suggesting that Washington’s new demands either show the U.S. is not paying attention, or is looking for pretext not to defend Europe when the time comes. Trump’s coziness with unsavory figures and autocrats—from Putin to Xi to Erdogan to Vucic and more—has hardly endeared him to European leadership, nor have his outright threats to take the Danish territory of Greenland by force. America’s diminishing credibility extends even beyond NATO: on the campaign trail in 2024, Trump refused to firmly commit to America’s longstanding vow to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion.

The Signaling Problem: When Threats Cannot Be Dismissed

A common counter-argument runs that this is all overblown—that Trump is just forcing European leaders to step it up, that he’s only joking about annexing Canada or invading Greenland, and that it’s not America’s job to pay for the defense of other nations. These are very common arguments in the United States, in support of the Trump administration’s approach to world politics. To put it politely, however, each of those arguments is seriously lacking—and the elements they fail to consider are the same ones pushing America’s allies away.

On the first point, the difference between encouraging and forcing allies to step up their own defense really does matter. Nations allied with each other, in anything resembling the usual status quo, have a reasonable expectation that their ally is not going to start leveraging them all of a sudden, when options for level-headed communication still exist. That is not just a matter of pride.

Nations and national leaders have budgets, obligations to their own people, predetermined priorities, and more. Forcing a sovereign nation to compromise its own interests in order to serve some other country is, by definition, what enemies do.

Telling the nations of NATO that they have to spend five percent of GDP on defense might sound like Trump laying down the law, but in practice it means wrestling many tens of billions away from other important priorities, against the will of not just a nation’s leaders, but the people who elected those leaders to manage the nation. It is really important for a country, no matter which country, to ensure that it is not subject to that sort of leveraging—no matter who is doing the leveraging. Historically, the United States’ most potent instrument of leverage other than nuclear weapons has been its military-industrial complex.

Through its Article 5 and other mutual-defense guarantees, its provision of advanced weapons, and the reliance of other nations on its defense capabilities, the U.S. has exercised leverage—or soft power—on its allies for decades. That is a system those allies have tolerated, but cannot tolerate if it is going to be outright abused. There is a pretty massive difference between taking your dog for a walk, and picking it up by the leash.

Then there is the idea that Trump’s threats are not serious—to which the response is, how are these other nations supposed to know that? The reply tends to be some version of “it’s obvious when he’s telling a joke.” But that is not good enough.

The international order is built on the idea of signaling: that a given nation, through words or actions, can send clear, reliable signals to other countries, so that those countries can make their own decisions about how to act. Within that system, there is no room for nations to decide that a signal some other country is sending can be taken as un-serious because that is what the vibes suggest.

It is not so simple as saying a world leader just isn’t allowed to joke; if a leader says “this is a joke,” then they have effectively signaled that they are telling a joke. The trouble is ambiguity. If a nation has the option to either assume that the thing that sounds like a threat really is one, or to dismiss it as inconsequential, consider the potential costs of getting that assessment wrong. If Canada takes Trump’s fifty-first-state joke too seriously and it turns out to be nothing, then Canada gets a bit of egg on its face.

If Canada does not take it seriously enough, then Canada gets invaded and annexed.

It is the same dilemma for European nations worried that America will not show up to defend them if they are behind on spending, or for Taiwan and South Korea worrying that Trump might decline to honor pledges of defense their modern sovereignty is based around. It is the same dilemma when you consider a kill switch embedded into top-of-the-line U.S. equipment. Maybe America does build one in, maybe it does not, but it might—and it does not seem like Washington would tell anybody straight if it did.

So, are you, as a foreign country, really going to take that risk? In each case, the response is the same: if America is going to be unpredictable and might not come through when it matters, then don’t trust America as a defense partner, and don’t trust its weapons either.

The Stakes for Washington Itself

Finally, there is the idea that it is not the United States’ job to fund the defense of other nations. WarFronts has made no secret of its own desire to see U.S. allies stand on their own two feet when it comes to defense—Britain and the whole of Europe included. Yet for these nations to manage their own national defense, as Trump and his allies are urging, it is not enough for them to simply train more soldiers and hold more military parades. They have to build and refine their own defense-industrial capacity too—and that is something that runs contrary to U.S. interests, in several ways at once.

The U.S. has made such a point of providing weapons to its allies because that grants America leverage and power it can use later. It also fuels a booming defense export industry in America, worth a record $318 billion in 2024 and constituting one of the few industries where American manufacturing has not been outsourced. It also collaborates with many of these same nations to build its best military technologies, including the F-35, where the UK, Italy, and Japan contributed essential components.

And finally, if the U.S. has enemies abroad, then one would think the U.S. makes itself safer by ensuring that a whole bunch of friends, who share American interests and have their own high-quality American arms, can stand up to those adversaries before they reach American soil. If those nations move away from American weapons, they might or might not be stronger in the long run—but they will lose a valuable incentive to ally with America.

Of course, the decisions made in Washington are Washington’s own. But in the meantime, and in response to those decisions, the rest of the world has to act. China is increasingly showing signs that it is ready to close in on Taiwan; Russia appears neither interested in a true peace in Ukraine, nor ready to sacrifice its ambitions; and the United States, so long the linchpin of the entire Western world order, no longer appears committed to its allies. Faced with this writing on the wall, every one of these nations has only two options: hope for the best and risk getting shafted, or expect the worst and use the resulting wake-up call to guide their approach to the future.

This is something that American defense contractors already understand. Said one unnamed defense executive to the Financial Times in late March 2025: “I am concerned that pure politics could damage our prospects in future competitions.” Yet it appears that is exactly what is going to happen, if the U.S. remains on its current course.

A New Way Forward: Rebuilding Dormant Industries

The difficult reality underlying all this is that neither Canada, nor Europe, nor East Asia has the facilities to readily replace American military equipment with their own, or to readily address the manufacturing shortfalls that would result. The thing about having relied on the U.S. for defense-industrial support for all this time is that these nations have watched their own defense-industrial bases collect cobwebs—on the expectation that their relationship with America was secure. Apparently, it is not. That new reality does present some problems, but it also forces these nations to seek out new and innovative solutions.

Start with defense production, where Canada in particular has given an interesting indicator of where things might go. Recall Canada’s overtures to European nations—not just to create defense alliances, but to consider relying on Canadian production capacity. Canada is a major global manufacturing center, where reduced demand in the United States due to tariffs, especially on cars, suggests that new assembly lines may soon be going vacant.

Canada does not really have much in the way of its own weapons designs, but it has the capacity to build weapons and warfighting equipment, if it is properly shown how. Europe has the opposite problem: lots of bright defense-industrial minds and some pretty cool designs, but a very sluggish defense-industrial sector.

Stick with the example of fighter aircraft, since it was the F-35 that introduced this whole problem. The nations of Europe do not have a comparable fifth-generation fighter that can match the capabilities of the F-35. They have multiple sixth-generation fighter programs, but those have yet to produce known, flyable prototypes.

What Europe does have are a series of combat aircraft that are quite possibly the best in the world, aside from stealth fighters. Those include France’s Rafale, particularly the F4 upgrade series about to roll out; Sweden’s Saab Gripen, particularly the highly advanced E/F variant; and the Eurofighter Typhoon, particularly the highly modernized Tranche 4 version, which is expected to serve well past 2060.

But France can only produce three Rafales per month in 2025, the Typhoon assembly line only churns out about ten aircraft per year, and between Sweden and a secondary assembly location in Brazil, only about thirty Gripens come off the line annually. Now imagine a world in which, even if by necessity rather than choice, France, Sweden, and the Eurofighter consortium provided their schematics to Mark Carney and kindly asked Ottawa to go crazy. It would take time to get everything ready, but once that happened, Canadian manufacturing would likely add major production capacity, on top of what Europe already builds. And if these nations have to choose between that difficult task and the even less appealing choice of simply not being able to defend themselves, they will choose the hard task.

So, too, would a military-industrial pivot away from the United States bring the potential to rejuvenate the European arms industry. European leaders and parliamentarians have been calling for increased production for years, but as a range of European defense companies have tried to explain, those calls do not actually mean anything if new production contracts and cash infusions are not coming in. For a while now, Europe has procrastinated and dithered on taking that final leap, but already it appears that more decisive action is imminent. Start putting their money where their mouths are, and Europe’s assorted governments can kickstart a rebirth of their defense industries—again, not painlessly, but with a hell of a lot more benefit in the end than they would get by doing nothing.

And just like Canada, other nations that would be deeply disadvantaged by a U.S. that reneges on its commitments could find ways to turn negatives into positives over time. South Korea is the most obvious example, hard at work building a booming defense industry that it hopes to grow into one of the world’s largest arms exporters. In the short term, American disengagement means vulnerability in the face of threats posed by North Korea and China. In the long term, however, with a range of nations from Europe to South Asia to Latin America pouring money into the country, South Korea might even be able to expedite its rise as the world’s new arms dealer.

The Bargain That Held—And Why It Broke

Whether we’re talking about tanks, ships, planes, or artillery shells, the math works basically the same. In the short term, breaking away from American military equipment comes with costs, risks, shortfalls, and an urgent, unwelcome need to change these nations’ economic priorities and meet the moment. That is not something any of those nations want to do; after all, if they did want to, they would have done it long ago.

Instead, they could keep up a balance with the United States that served everybody well enough. Allied nations accepted a position under the influence of American soft power, and in exchange, they got to outsource much of their approach to defense in order to focus on other matters.

But now, it appears the United States is intent on disrupting that relationship—almost for the sake of disruption itself. It is not that the idea of production shortfalls, or the risk of attack by a foreign power, somehow got more appealing to Canada or Germany or South Korea. Instead, the problem is that there is no longer a way to ensure the United States will remain a reliable, trustworthy partner in the future. In fact, when these nations have tried to explain that they are attempting to do what America asks, America’s current administration has not really seemed to care.

It is worth turning to the argument, surely observed by a portion of Washington’s defenders, that this is exactly what the Trump administration seems to want. If America’s many allies can finally get their act together and figure out how to stand firm on their own two feet militarily, then all the bluster and bullying got Washington exactly what it was hoping for—right? In a way, yes, that is exactly right. The U.S. is looking for these nations to increase their spending, build their militaries, and become more capable without U.S. assistance—and that would certainly have happened.

The trouble is that by taking this particular approach to get to that set of results, the United States writes itself out of the international order. Granted, the United States’ trade relationships, its military power, and its broader role in geopolitics ensure that it will not become irrelevant during our lifetimes, or even come close. But for the better part of a century, the U.S. used its military-industrial leverage to become the captain at the helm of the ship, steering its entire network of alliances on a course through history that America chose.

The U.S. only secured and kept its role as a dominant world power because it went out of its way to make itself indispensable. It spent a bit of the incredible wealth it had to burn, suffered the occasional petty indignity, and accepted the feeling of doing more than everybody else, because of the profound benefits of positioning itself at the center of the world.

And it is here where we find the deeper significance of America’s allies shifting away. The path forward for these nations is not for Canada, or France, or South Korea to simply go it alone, but instead to band together into alliances that all of them are still interested in keeping. The only difference now is that they are not incentivized to put America at the center—but to make America irrelevant. That is not simply because it might feel good to insult Washington, but because an alliance that incorporates this version of America is inherently unstable.

Today, the nations of the global West are starting to figure out ways to maintain an international defense architecture without U.S. involvement. If that works out, they will move on to diplomacy; if that works, they will move on to trade—never choosing to simply disassociate from the U.S. or become its enemy, but always working to make sure the whims of an American leader do not suddenly become everybody else’s problem. Perhaps, after a decade or two, those new alliances and international bonds still will not be as strong, or as militarily capable, as they would be if America were at their center. But perhaps these nations’ judgment will hold true—that being in an alliance safe from American meddling is worth the price they pay in somewhat diminished military power.

It is cute to believe that an era of great-power competition ended at the conclusion of the Cold War. But great-power competition did not start with the Cold War, and it did not end there either. All throughout human history, some nations or alliances have grown their power while others have diminished, and that is no different today. If the Cold War was, let’s say, book number fifty in a series of stories, then we are reading book fifty-one right now, and we are coming up on a major inflection point.

To be clear, none of this had to happen. The United States could have chosen to strengthen its position as a world power and raise up its allies along with it. Instead, the U.S. appears committed to a course in which its longtime partners have every incentive to ensure that their relationship with the U.S. is one where the U.S. has far less leverage than it used to. That process is starting in the defense world as we speak.

If this is where the world has moved already, not yet three months into a four-year American presidency, then it is safe to assume that what we are seeing now is only the start.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the “kill switch” that allied nations fear is inside the F-35?

It is the idea of a remote trigger the Pentagon could use to disable military equipment it sold to allies—rendering F-35 fighters inert at a critical moment. The United States insists no such mechanism exists and would never be used. The claim remains unproven, but German officials have said they suspect it is real, and the fear alone is now shaping real procurement decisions. Even setting the kill switch aside, U.S. export controls leave F-35 operators all but unable to modify or maintain the jets without American support.

Which allies have spoken out most forcefully against buying American weapons?

Denmark’s Rasmus Jarlov, who helped approve his country’s F-35 purchase, now says he regrets it and calls buying American weapons “a security risk that we cannot run,” urging friends and allies to do the same. France’s Emmanuel Macron has called on EU nations to stop purchasing U.S. equipment and shift to European-made arms. Portugal’s defense minister Nuno Melo cited Washington’s unpredictability in reconsidering his country’s own F-35 buy. Sweden’s Ulf Kristersson was a notable exception, saying he did not view U.S. purchases as a risk—though he still advocated reducing dependence on Washington.

What is driving allied distrust beyond the kill switch itself?

The deeper cause is collapsing confidence in America as a whole. In Canada, it is repeated threats to annex the country as a fifty-first state and punishing tariffs on oil and manufacturing exports. In Europe, it is the Trump administration’s handling of Ukraine—including the televised berating of President Zelenskyy—plus threats to seize Greenland and demands to raise defense spending that most European allies feel they are already meeting. Surveys show only about half of Poles, 45 percent of Germans, and roughly a third of Britons believe the U.S. would honor its Article 5 collective-defense commitments.

Can Europe and Canada realistically replace American weapons?

Not quickly. France produces only about three Rafales per month, the Eurofighter Typhoon line builds roughly ten aircraft per year, and only about thirty Gripens come off the line annually across Sweden and Brazil. Europe has capable designers but a sluggish defense-industrial sector; Canada has significant manufacturing capacity but few weapons designs of its own. One scenario the article explores is European nations sharing schematics with Canada so its idle auto-sector assembly lines could be retooled, while South Korea’s fast-growing arms industry adds further capacity over time.

Why does allied disengagement from U.S. weapons hurt Washington itself?

American defense exports hit a record $318 billion in 2024 and remain one of the few major industries never outsourced. Selling weapons also gave Washington diplomatic leverage over allies, funded joint development of systems like the F-35—built with UK, Italian, and Japanese components—and positioned capable armed partners between America and its adversaries. If allies move away, the U.S. loses export revenue, its principal instrument of soft-power leverage, and the built-in incentive for other nations to remain aligned with Washington.

Sources

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