{"id":12443,"date":"2026-05-12T06:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/12443\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T06:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:37:10","slug":"is-trump-breaking-up-with-germany-or-resetting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/12443\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Trump breaking up with Germany, or resetting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is in the doghouse with President Donald Trump. On April 27 he told\u00a0German high school students<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0the Trump administration had \u201cno strategy\u201d in its negotiations to end the war with Iran, asserting that Iran\u2019s team had \u201chumiliated\u201d\u00a0the\u00a0Americans.\u00a0At the end\u00a0of the week,\u00a0Pentagon officials\u00a0suddenly announced plans to pull\u00a05,000 troops from Germany<\/a>. Coincidence or another case of retaliation against a European ally?<\/p>\n

The following day Trump raised the ante, telling reporters that the cuts would go \u201ca lot further than 5,000.\u201d Trump claimed,\u00a0\u201cMerz doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about.\u201d\u00a0Reports suggest that European officials privately\u00a0indicated\u00a0that they were blindsided by the cuts and were payback for Merz\u2019s criticism, as well as European failure to support the attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n

Merz and his colleagues promptly went into damage control mode.\u00a0German\u00a0Defense Minister Boris Pistorius<\/a>\u00a0asserted that the move was \u201cforeseeable,\u201d\u00a0and both German and\u00a0U.S.\u00a0officials claimed that the troop withdrawal had been in the works for months as part of a worldwide review of troop levels. Yet the timing was accelerated to placate an irate Trump.<\/p>\n

Despite this exercise in the diplomacy of petulance,\u00a0the facts bear out the notion that there has been a plan to withdraw a combat brigade stationed in Germany in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.\u00a0But relations between allies normally would have involved a warning that a troop announcement was imminent. Indeed, when Merz visited Trump in March, he told reporters that Trump \u201chas also assured me not just today, but once again, that the United States will maintain its military presence in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

The loss of 5,000 troops alone is not\u00a0catastrophic. The\u00a0United States\u00a0currently deploys around\u00a036,000 troops\u00a0in Germany, more than any foreign country other than Japan. These forces are not stationed in Germany merely as a favor to Germany. They are stationed there\u00a0pursuant to\u00a0U.S.\u00a0military needs to serve\u00a0U.S.\u00a0policy goals. They include the\u00a0headquarters of\u00a0European\u00a0Command and Africa Command, along with training sites.\u00a0Landstuhl\u00a0Regional Medical Center is the largest American military medical center outside the\u00a0United States, serving both European and Central Command, as does the Air Force transportation hub at Ramstein.<\/p>\n

Eric Edelman and Franklin Miller,\u00a0former senior defense officials in the George W. Bush administration<\/a>, have written that \u201cour forces stationed on allied soil are in fact critical U.S. military enablers, not trading cards or transactional toys, with host nations to be rewarded for good behavior or threatened with base closure as punishment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In response to Trump\u2019s threats, the heads of the congressional House and Senate Armed Services committees \u2014 Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala.\u2014 said in a statement that they were \u201cvery concerned by the decision to withdraw a U.S. brigade from Germany.\u201d They warned that such withdrawal risks \u201cundermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to [Russian President] Vladimir\u00a0Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n

These\u00a0congressional\u00a0committee chairs\u00a0clearly are aware that the\u00a02026 National Defense Authorization Act prohibits the Defense Department from reducing the number of U.S. troops stationed in Europe below 76,000 without congressional approval. While a 5,000-troop reduction would not trigger this oversight, the\u00a0\u201cfurther cuts\u201d threatened by the president could hit the floor.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s pique with Germany has a deeper dimension.\u00a0Germany faces a gap in its missile defense systems, experiencing a delay of seven to\u00a010\u00a0years in developing its planned long-range strike system.\u00a0In 2024,\u00a0the Biden administration\u00a0reportedly promised\u00a0U.S. long-range missiles for delivery in 2027, including Tomahawk\u00a0cruise\u00a0missiles\u00a0and SM-6\u00a0missiles that can be fired from mobile launchers. This bridge system, called \u201cTyphon,\u201d was again requested of the Trump administration\u00a0ten\u00a0months ago. The Pentagon still has not cleared the order.<\/p>\n

Has the order been canceled? The rapid depletion of Tomahawks due to the Iran war suggests a stress on stockpiles. The Pentagon has not confirmed cancellation but is using the\u00a0\u00a0euphemism \u201creassigned.\u201d Analysts describe the situation as \u201cconfused,\u201d perhaps reflecting disagreement between a White House desire to further punish Germany and a Pentagon and congressional preference for deploying the system.<\/p>\n

In addition to the challenges facing Germany, Trump has revealed grudges\u00a0against other European allies\u00a0lingering in the wake of their\u00a0failure to join the bandwagon in taking military action against Iran, even though they were not consulted prior to the\u00a0attacks by the U.S. and Israel and did not favor the war. Spain and Italy may be on the troop reduction menu before long. By contrast, Germany at least allowed its bases to be used to launch attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n

As the saga of withdrawing troops from Germany percolated, Washington received a visit from Britain\u2019s King Charles III. In his address to a joint session of Congress, Charles\u00a0recalled the founding of NATO, and its invocation of Article 5 to come to the aid of the United States in the wake of the attacks of 9\/11, when its members \u201canswered the call together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The king\u2019s\u00a0strong support\u00a0for NATO, as well as for the defense of Ukraine, was met with raucous applause.\u00a0Let\u2019s\u00a0hope that applause continues to ring in the ears of our leaders who can insist on protecting our national interests and not chasing vendettas inconsistent with those interests.<\/p>\n

Have\u00a0thoughts\u00a0about this?\u00a0Send a letter to the editor\u00a0using our letters form<\/a>\u00a0or email\u00a0letters@dallasnews.com<\/a>. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is in the doghouse with President Donald Trump. On April 27 he told\u00a0German high…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8915,5,13038],"class_list":{"0":"post-12443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-commentary","9":"tag-germany","10":"tag-tp-contributing-columnists"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12443","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=12443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}