Grounded: The Franco-German Fighter Fiasco

NATO allies have pledged to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035.

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Leaders from Berlin to Warsaw talk about a continent no longer reliant on Washington. But when it came to the single biggest test of that ambition—a Franco-German sixth-generation fighter jet—the project collapsed after nine years of arguments. Dassault Aviation and Airbus couldn't agree on who builds what, or who owns the technology.

Russia is at war on NATO's border. The Iran conflict has disrupted global energy flows. And several allied nations face a decade-long fighter capability gap with no replacement in sight.

Jacob Ross, a research fellow on the Program on Franco-German Relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told