Trump’s threat to withdraw troops from Germany unlikely to be acted on for now

BRUSSELS – Senior German officials have declined to comment on US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is considering pulling out some of the American troops stationed in Germany.

“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time,” Mr Trump wrote in an April 29 posting on Truth Social, his preferred social media platform.

The threat came days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticised Mr Trump’s approach to ending the war with Iran, suggesting that the “entire” US nation had been “humiliated” by the Iranian diplomatic negotiators.

The hope in Berlin is that Mr Trump’s anger will soon dissipate; after all, this is not the first time he has threatened to pull his troops out of Europe.

But the latest threat comes as relations between the US and Europe are at a particularly low ebb. And they appear to confirm a prevailing pessimism among European governments about the durability of the US commitment to continue underwriting Europe’s defences.

Ironically, Mr Merz was one of the first European leaders to express an understanding for Mr Trump’s decision to attack Iran.

When the US and Israel unleashed their bombing of Iran, French President Emmanuel Macron was quick to criticise the offensive. At the same time, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer emphasised the absence of a legal basis for the US action.

But Mr Merz was at pains to express an understanding, if not outright support, for the US attack.

“The mullah regime,” Mr Merz said on March 1, hours after US bombs started landing on Iran, “is a terrorist regime responsible for decades of oppression of the Iranian people”.

“We share the interest of the United States and Israel in seeing an end to this regime’s terror and its dangerous nuclear and ballistic armament,” he added, implying that he supported the US objective of toppling Iran’s rulers.

Mr Merz also rebuked other European leaders who criticised the US action by invoking high principles of international law while at the same time failing to offer an alternative action against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“This is not the time to lecture our partners and allies,” the German leader advised his European counterparts, referring to the US.

It was, therefore, not surprising that on March 4, when Mr Merz became the first senior European to visit the White House since the start of the Iran war, he was showered with praise.

“The Chancellor is doing a very good job, a great job … very popular,” Mr Trump told journalists with Mr Merz sitting beside him in the Oval Office.

Initially, the German stance infuriated Germany’s key European partners.

The British were offended by the fact the Chancellor appeared to smile when President Trump poked fun at Mr Starmer in public. More bluntly, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez dismissed Mr Merz as a “US vassal”.

Officials close to the German leader say his opinions about the causes of the war and his understanding of the US position have not changed. The problem for Mr Merz is that the conflict has not gone according to expectations and the German economy is beginning to suffer.

“No chancellor before me has had to endure anything like this,” Mr Merz recently told Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s top news weeklies, referring to criticism he faced for his stance on Iran.

This is the background for Mr Merz’s latest remarks in an address to university students. He told them that “the Americans clearly have no strategy” for ending the war in Iran, or for avoiding being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.

He rushed to tell journalists on April 29 that the “personal relationship between the American President and myself remains just as good as before”.

But Mr Trump does not believe in gratitude for past deeds; for him, foreign leaders are only good as what they say or do today. So, the same German Chancellor once praised for his popularity was dismissed as someone who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” in a posting by Mr Trump on April 29.

The President has frequently threatened to withdraw American troops from Europe. Until now, most of these threats applied to Spain, which led European opposition to the Iran war and, indirectly, to Britain.

But Germany, home to at least half of the estimated 75,000 US troops in Europe, is in a different league; the country remains the second-biggest US military outpost in the world, just behind Japan.

The consensus in European capitals is that, as long as the current operations in the Middle East continue, the US is unlikely to take any hasty decisions about its European deployments.

The US military needs all its European bases to sustain deployments to the Gulf. And US military planners rely on the 12-storey US military hospital near the vast Ramstein air base in southern Germany.

Besides, the US Congress recently enacted legislation compelling the White House to notify lawmakers of any troop withdrawals, and the assumption is that the administration has more pressing matters to deal with at the moment than picking another fight with Congress.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump’s repeated threats to reduce the US military’s footprint in Europe, as well as his dismissal of NATO, the US-led military alliance in Europe, as “obsolete”, continue to call into question the enduring American security guarantees to Europe.

Mr Trump’s decision to lash out against Mr Merz also underlines the wider political problem all European leaders have, which is that, almost regardless of what they say and do, they invariably end up on the wrong side of a US president who demands total and unquestioned support.

Still, among the German towns and villages next to Ramstein air base, where most of the economy is dependent on the spending power of American troops and their families, preparations are going ahead for the US Independence Day celebrations on July 4.

And everyone still expects the US military to pay for the fireworks.