When President Donald Trump pledged last week to cut down the number of U.S. troops based in Germany by about 9,500, accusing Berlin of scrimping on its contributions to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and national defense, he was met by a predictable chorus of critics.
Officials from the White House, the Pentagon, NATO, and Germany spouted the sorts of platitudes that have bolstered U.S. military spending for years: Russia is a threat to global security; the United States is obligated to fork over hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars annually to companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon; and Germany needs tens of thousands of U.S. troops lest President Putin come knocking.
The Trump Administration had been hinting at cuts for months, but last Monday, June 15, marked the first time the President publicly addressed specifics. There are currently 34,674 U.S. troops in Germany, alongside about 11,700 Defense Department civilians—by far the United States’ largest military presence in Europe. Trump campaigned on bringing active-duty personnel back from overseas stations.
While Trump’s decisions are regularly driven by narcissism, diminishing the United States’ global military footprint is in the American taxpayers’ interest.
“We are ending the era of endless wars,” Trump told the graduating class at West Point two days earlier. “It is not the duty of U.S. troops to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands.”
But the President has run into resistance from his own cabinet, Congress, and high-ranking military officials, some of whom have (or had) ties to the booming military industrial complex. It’s no accident that 2019 marked the second consecutive year of increased military spending by the United States after seven years of decline—our government spent $732 billion on its military last year, an amount equal to 38 percent of the world’s total military expenditures.
The bipartisan rejection of this proposed troop reduction exemplifies an “any price is worth it” mentality toward national security, propelled by the revolving door between government and companies that profit from American armament and adventurism.
A letter to Trump from Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee expressed concern about “Russian aggression and opportunism,” claiming “the forward stationing of American troops since the end of World War II has helped to prevent another world war and, most importantly, has helped make America safer.” Senator Jack Reed, the committee’s ranking Democrat, called the move “another favor” to Putin.
Congressional Democrats took it further late last week, introducing a bill that would block the use of funds to withdraw U.S. troops without a series of arduous, multilateral measures.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, pulled from the war hawk playbook (perhaps a family heirloom), couching an appetite for military prevalence in pacifist rhetoric: “Our nation confronts the threats to freedom and security around the world posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Chinese Communist Party.” Withdrawing the troops, she warned, would embolden adversaries, “making war more—not less—likely.”
Reuters called Trump’s announcement “a remarkable rebuke” to Germany. Agence France-Presse went so far as to detail Trump’s history of “clashing with powerful women,” wondering if he was perhaps snubbing Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Associated Press noted the indispensable role Germany’s military facilities had played in deploying troops to Iraq—drawing on an invasion that even conservative publications have a hard time justifying anymore—and pointed to “heightened fears of Moscow’s renewed imperial ambitions.”
Logical questions in moments like these seem to go unasked. What threats? Whose security? Does Russia, whose economy is smaller than Canada’s and more than thirteen times smaller than that of the United States, plan to invade Germany? Could it survive a war with NATO, whose member nations’ combined military budgets exceed Russia’s some fifteenfold? And what about NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, which would understandably incite Russia’s wariness on the border?
In a response to Trump’s press conference, Germany’s U.S. ambassador Emily Haber answered some of these questions with a string of euphemisms: “U.S. troops that are in Germany are not there to defend Germany. . . . They’re also there to project American power in Africa, in Asia.”
Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who commanded the U.S. Army in Europe from 2014 until 2017, echoed Haber in an interview with the Associated Press: “The base in Ramstein is not there for the U.S. to defend Europe. It’s there as a forward base for us to be able to fly into Africa, the Middle East.”
When think-tank jargon like “interventions” and “projections of American power” go unexamined (Haber was speaking at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations), enormous sums of public wealth are squandered, mass violence is set into motion, and warped geopolitical narratives attain orthodoxy.
Writing for The National Interest shortly after last week’s announcement, Ted Galen Carpenter said: “Opponents of Trump’s modest troop drawdown need to look at a calendar. It reads 2020, not 1950 or even 1989. There is no totalitarian Soviet threat, and the Red Army is not poised to pour through the Fulda Gap in Germany and try to sweep to the Atlantic. Today’s Russia is a pale shadow of the USSR in terms of population, economic output, and military power.”
Just as the Russian threat is taken for granted, so is the United States’ and NATO’s presence in countries like Libya, Niger, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Somalia. An alliance’s efforts to defend innocent people against “terrorists” and “dictators” seem indisputable when conventional frameworks are untouched and root causes are disregarded—a narrative that concerns itself only with today and yesterday, with “good” and “evil,” can remain successfully jingoistic.
“It is offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayers will continue to pay for more than 50,000 Americans in #Germany, but the Germans get to spend their surplus on #domestic programs,” tweeted Richard Grenell, who recently resigned as U.S. ambassador to Germany.
It might be even more offensive—to us anyway—that domestic programs like education and health care are languishing in the world’s richest country, while U.S. military bases in Germany have awarded over $649 million worth of contracts since January 1 for architecture, engineering, and construction work. In the same time period, our government handed over $963 million in additional funds to companies like AECOM and General Dynamics for services either fully or partially supporting operations out of Germany.
While Trump’s decisions are regularly driven by narcissism, diminishing the United States’ global military footprint is in the American taxpayers' interest. Unfortunately, even if the President is able to withdraw troops from Germany, it seems likely that they’ll remain stationed in other parts of Europe.
On June 24, the White House will receive its first foreign dignitary since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: Andrzej Duda, Poland’s populist president. Duda, who happens to be running for re-election, has made it clear that Poland is willing to spend a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than Germany. Two years ago, at a joint press conference with Trump at the White House, Duda even offered $2 billion “to set up permanent American bases in Poland, which we would call Fort Trump.” Last week, a senior administration official confirmed to Reuters that if troops were removed from Germany, at least a portion of them would go to Poland.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a virtual guest of honor at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on June 19. Sounding very much like a cabinet member who’s previously directed the CIA and owned an aerospace defense firm, Pompeo fielded questions about U.S. troops in Germany by painting the bigger picture, one of a dangerous world, with inexhaustible enemies.
For Pompeo, who seems to sense that Russia might no longer be a convincing culprit, it is crucial to remain “ever mindful that a free and open Indo-Pacific matters to all of us, including to Europe.” He urged democracies to “take off the golden blinders of economic ties and see that the China challenge isn’t just at the gates; it’s in every capital, it’s in every borough, it’s in every province. Every investment from a Chinese state-owned enterprise should be viewed with suspicion.”
He concluded on what was for him a happy note—that NATO has pledged to spend an additional $400 billion by the end of 2024.