{"id":9629,"date":"2026-05-02T10:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T10:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/9629\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T10:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T10:16:09","slug":"us-withdrawing-5000-troops-from-germany-officials-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/9629\/","title":{"rendered":"US withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, officials say"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from NATO ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as a rift \u200bover the Iran war widens between President Donald Trump and Europe.<\/p>\n

Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said on Monday the Iranians were humiliating the U.S. in \u200ctalks to end the 2-month-old war and that he did not see what exit strategy Washington was pursuing.<\/p>\n

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said recent German \u2060rhetoric had been “inappropriate and unhelpful.”<\/p>\n

“The president is rightly reacting to \u200bthese counterproductive remarks,” the official said.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon said the withdrawal was \u2060expected to be completed over the next six to 12 months. Germany is home to some 35,000 active-duty U.S. military personnel, more \u200cthan anywhere else in Europe.<\/p>\n

The \u200cofficial said the drawdown would bring troop levels in Europe back to roughly pre-2022 levels, before Russia’s \u2060invasion of Ukraine<\/a> triggered a buildup by then-President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

The official also cast the \u2060decision in terms of the Trump administration’s push for Europe to become the main security provider on the continent. But it is nonetheless another potent reminder of Trump’s willingness to respond to perceived disloyalty by allies.<\/p>\n

Reuters exclusively reported last week an internal Pentagon email that outlined options to punish NATO allies that Washington believes failed to support U.S. operations in the war with Iran<\/a>, including suspending Spain from NATO and reviewing the U.S. position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands.<\/p>\n

German ties fray<\/p>\n

Trump has singled out Germany even as he has chastised other NATO allies for not \u200bsending their navies to help open the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict. The waterway, a chokepoint for global oil shipments, has remained virtually shut, causing market turmoil and unprecedented disruption in energy supplies.<\/p>\n

Merz has said Germans and Europeans were not consulted before the U.S. and Israel started attacking Iran on Feb. 28, and that he had conveyed his skepticism about the conflict directly to Trump afterward.<\/p>\n

“The president has been very clear about his frustrations about our allies’ rhetoric and failure to provide support for U.S. operations that benefit them,” the senior Pentagon official said.<\/p>\n

Trump has long wanted to reduce the troop \u200bpresence in Germany. He pushed for a reduction at the end of his first term, but that cut was never enacted. Trump lost the election, and Biden \u200creversed the plan.<\/p>\n

Trump’s \u200cWednesday announcement that he \u2060was reviewing troop levels in Germany surprised German military officials who spoke to Reuters, citing what they called constructive meetings at the Pentagon earlier in the day.<\/p>\n

They argue that Germany has done more than other allies to support the U.S. war in Iran, including allowing the use of bases and giving permission for overflights. Germany is also home to a huge military hospital in Landstuhl.<\/p>\n

As part of Trump’s \u200cwithdrawal decision, a brigade combat team \u200bnow in Germany will be pulled out of the country, and a long-range \u200cfires battalion that the Biden administration \u2060had planned to begin \u200bdeploying to Germany later this year will no longer deploy, the official said.<\/p>\n

Contributing: Andrea Shalal<\/p>\n

\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from NATO ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5354,2019,666,5,9093,355,3445,2849,619,42,358,3521,9094,259,4618,9091,9095,9092],"class_list":{"0":"post-9629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-international","14":"tag-jobs","15":"tag-local","16":"tag-military","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-politics","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9629","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=9629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}