{"id":10369,"date":"2026-05-05T02:44:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T02:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/10369\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T02:44:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T02:44:14","slug":"how-germany-may-have-misjudged-trumps-anger-on-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/10369\/","title":{"rendered":"How Germany May Have Misjudged Trump\u2019s Anger on Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

As President Trump fired off a series of social media posts criticizing Germany this past week, including a threat to pull some American troops from the country, German leaders showed no public signs that they believed the president was serious.<\/p>\n

That now appears to have been a miscalculation \u2014 one of several that German leaders have made in the course of Mr. Trump\u2019s war against Iran \u2014 but most likely not a catastrophic one for German security.<\/p>\n

Pentagon officials said on Friday<\/a> that they planned to relocate 5,000 troops from Germany to the United States and around the world within the next year.<\/p>\n

Officials in the United States and Germany suggested that the decision had been in the works at the political level for months, as part of a broader Pentagon review of its troop levels worldwide, but the announcement had been significantly accelerated to appease a president angered by German criticism of American strategy in Iran.<\/p>\n

Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, called the move \u201cforeseeable\u201d in a statement on Saturday morning that was otherwise unyielding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe presence of American troops in Europe, and especially in Germany, is in our interest and in the interest of the United States,\u201d Mr. Pistorius said. He also said that Europeans must continue taking more responsibility for their own security.<\/p>\n

On Saturday evening, however, Mr. Trump appeared to double down on the step back from Europe. Asked by reporters about the troop withdrawal from Germany, he said, \u201cWe are going to cut way down, and we\u2019re cutting a lot further than 5,000.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump has lashed out at Germany and other European countries for not helping more with the Iran war effort, as he has demanded. And the president has chafed at criticism of his handling of the war and suggestions that the American effort had not succeeded.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told German high school students that the United States had \u201cno strategy\u201d to end the war and that Iran\u2019s negotiators had \u201chumiliated\u201d the entire American nation.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon is preparing to withdraw a combat brigade that was stationed in Germany after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and that was never guaranteed to remain there. It will also no longer follow through on a Biden administration plan to station a medium-range missile battalion in Germany. The net result, if those plans are followed, will be a return to the level of U.S. troops based in Germany before the war in Ukraine began.<\/p>\n

In Washington on Saturday, the decision to remove troops drew unusual pushback from Republican leaders in Congress. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the heads of the Armed Services Committees in their respective chambers, issued a statement saying that they were \u201cvery concerned by the decision to withdraw a U.S. brigade from Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

They defended Germany, asserting that it had stepped up its military investment \u201cin response to President Trump\u2019s call for greater burden sharing,\u201d and said that \u201cprematurely reducing America\u2019s forward presence in Europe\u201d would send the wrong signal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.<\/p>\n

German officials privately made clear that the proposed withdrawals could have been significantly worse, from their point of view, and that their response to the announcement would be measured. The famously mercurial Mr. Trump could always change his mind.<\/p>\n

Before Friday\u2019s announcement, the Pentagon had not warned German leaders that a troop announcement was imminent. The consensus view in German politics appeared to be that Mr. Trump was most likely bluffing. He had tried, and failed, to remove some of America\u2019s roughly 35,000 troops from Germany at the end of his first term in office. He would need congressional approval to move troops from Europe now.<\/p>\n

In March, when Mr. Merz visited Mr. Trump in Washington, the chancellor told reporters in a German-language news conference that the president \u201chas also assured me not just today, but once again, that the United States will maintain its military presence in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

German leaders were also confident that the Trump administration needed that German military presence<\/a>. Unlike some other European allies, Germany had allowed America to help launch attacks on Iran from bases inside Germany\u2019s borders. It has continued to allow injured Americans to be treated in a major American hospital on German soil that has for decades hosted Americans injured in wars including in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s quiet nonchalance about the possibility of a troop withdrawal was reflected again this past week.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Mr. Merz, who invested heavily in building a rapport with Mr. Trump over the past year, told German soldiers in the city of Munster that \u201cwe maintain close and trusting contact with our partners, including and especially in Washington.\u201d He stressed the relationship with Washington was one of mutual respect and fair sharing of security burdens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis trans-Atlantic partnership is especially important to us, and to me personally,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Merz\u2019s vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, raised tensions further on Friday.<\/p>\n

In a May Day speech, Mr. Klingbeil defended Mr. Merz from the president\u2019s broadsides. \u201cWe really don\u2019t need any advice from Donald Trump right now,\u201d Mr. Klingbeil said. \u201cHe should see the mess he\u2019s made\u201d with the war, he added.<\/p>\n

Mr. Klingbeil leads the center-left Social Democrats, the junior partner in a governing coalition led by Mr. Merz\u2019s center-right Christian Democrats. He has been more critical of Mr. Trump in the past than Mr. Merz has. He had also been traveling with Mr. Merz in Munster, and has been in close consultation with him over a host of domestic issues recently.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump has consistently surprised German leaders with his conduct in the war. After Mr. Merz met with the president in March, some officials came away convinced that the conflict would not last long because Mr. Trump was already expressing concerns over the economic effects of war-related energy price spikes.<\/p>\n

Instead, Mr. Trump persisted with attacks even after gasoline and natural gas prices rose sharply from Iran\u2019s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

German officials also believed they had found a sort of compromise with the president over his demands that Europe send military assets to secure the strait and make it safe for shipping again.<\/p>\n

Mr. Merz said repeatedly that Germany would join such a security effort, including by sending minesweepers, but only on two conditions: Germans wanted a permanent cease-fire, as opposed to the temporary one currently in place. And to comply with the German Constitution, they wanted the effort to have the blessing of an international body, like the United Nations or the European Union.<\/p>\n

That appears not to have been enough for Mr. Trump. On Friday, a Pentagon official did not cite only Mr. Merz\u2019s comments as a reason to pull back troops. The official also cited Germany\u2019s failure to contribute to the Iran war effort itself.<\/p>\n

Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin, and Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper from Washington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As President Trump fired off a series of social media posts criticizing Germany this past week, including a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3901,4448,5,4206,255,8510,3902],"class_list":{"0":"post-10369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-donald-j","9":"tag-friedrich","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-merz","12":"tag-trump","13":"tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","14":"tag-united-states-international-relations"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}