President Trump’s announced plan to withdraw nearly one-third of the U.S. military forces from Germany has triggered an international uproar, with even some Republicans joining in criticism of the plan.
The staunchly conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page called Trump’s decision “a gift to Vladimir Putin,” Russia’s authoritarian president. Putin and Trump spoke by phone one week ago.
The Journal broke the story on Friday, reporting that Trump has ordered withdrawal of 9,500 of the 34,500 Americans now stationed Germany, where U.S. forces have been stationed since the end of World War II, primarily to deter potential Soviet (and now Russian) aggression against Western Europe.
The move would cap U.S. troops numbers in Germany to 25,000 — less than half of the current maximum allowed.
Twitter is crackling with commentary on the situation, even from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, who called Trump’s plan “dangerously misguided.”
Along with Putin, Trump spoke last week with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and when she told him she would skip the G-7 meeting he wants to host in Washington, “the call between the two leaders, normally respectful in tone, turned testy,” the New York Times reported on Saturday. Their conversation lasted just 20 minutes.
“It was not a nice call,” one official who was listening in told the Times, which called the intended pullout “a radical departure from American postwar foreign policy.”
With the 2020 election looming, the Times says, some believe his “America First” slogan seems to have morphed into “Trump First.”
As a top German foreign affairs official put it:
“It’s all about him, it’s not about a vision of the world, not about politics, it’s about him, about his need for validation — and sometimes his need for revenge.”
Trump’s withdrawal order “appears to be mostly out of personal pique for … Merkel, who recently rejected Mr. Trump’s invitation to a G-7 meeting at Camp David,” the Journal editorial says.
“Trust between Ms. Merkel and Mr. Trump was lost long ago,” the Times notes. “Now, officials and analysts say, something much more fundamental was slipping away — trust in the strategic foundation of the trans-Atlantic alliance itself.”
Meanwhile, Russia is deploying more of its military to its western region, boosting the potential threat to Europe — exactly the threat American and NATO forces were intended to counter.
The Russian motorized rifle units being re-deployed are equipped with “more modern weapons and specialized vehicles,” including T-90A tanks, armored personnel carriers, combat vehicles and air defense systems, reports Newsweek on MSN, citing the Russian military.
The troop withdrawal will hurt Germany economically, the Times says, noting that about 12,000 German civilians are employed on U.S. bases and “tens of thousands” of other jobs depend on the American presence.
But it will hurt the United States strategically, the Times says, citing unnamed current and former officials like Nicholas Burns, who served in the George W. Bush administration.
Burns notes that American military flights to far-flung parts of the world, from Afghanistan to Africa, go through U.S. air bases in Germany. One of the world’s largest U.S. military hospitals is located there, as well.
