President Trump’s controversial decision to withdraw 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany may come to a screeching halt when President-elect Joe Biden takes office, but experts believe that some elements of the Trump administration’s proposal should stay.
“Everyone knows [former Defense Secretary Mark Esper] proposed this big cut in Germany partly or largely at the president’s request,” Brookings Institution security expert Michael O’Hanlon told the Washington Examiner.
“But some of the specific staff work that went into the individual changes, some of it may be perfectly valid,” he added.
In June, Trump ordered the Pentagon to cap troops in Germany to 25,000, a move that the president later said was punishment for Germany not contributing 2% of its GDP to defense.
By the end of July, the Pentagon had created a European force posture plan to rationalize the shuffle.
Esper couched a pullout of 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany as a modernization effort that emphasized NATO’s eastward expansion. In all, the plan called for redistributing 5,600 troops within other European countries and bringing 6,400 troops home.
Pundits and members of Congress were in uproar about what was labeled a “gift” to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Allies near Russia’s border grew worried.
While emphasizing that Russia deterrence is vital and the troops should stay in Europe, O’Hanlon offered a nuanced look at the Trump plan under a Biden presidency.
“Maybe you do slice off one or 2,000 troops from the Germany presence just because when you look at it, it turns out those weren’t such bad ideas after all,” he said. “Maybe having a few more in Romania or something is a pretty viable, reasonable idea.”
Jim Carafano, a Heritage Foundation security analyst, added: “Ironically, half of those moves are actually just efficiencies.”
Carafano explained to the Washington Examiner that the split in the troop drawdown is about 50-50 between the Air Force and the Army.
From the Air Force side, one wing moves from Germany to join another in Italy, closer to the southern flank of NATO and southeastern Europe. U.S. European Command joins the NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium, reducing duplication.
Carafano, however, disagreed with Esper’s proposal to draw down nearly 4,500 members of the Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment for aspirational rotations in the Black Sea.
“The problem is the infrastructure is not really there yet to support that,” he said. “So, the only way you’re going to get more forward presence is to rotate those forces forward, and it’s actually more efficient to rotate them forward from Germany.”
Starting a series of eastern flank rotations would be very expensive, explained O’Hanlon.
“You can spend a lot of money on these kinds of rotational deployments too, if you, if you do it before the infrastructure is fully developed,” he said. “I don’t really think there’s any great reason to do it in large numbers.”
Since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the United States has invested $20 billion in European military infrastructure as part of a program called the European Deterrence Initiative. Some of the latest projects, however, have been delayed to divert funding to pay for Trump’s border wall.
Troops on the eastern flank have also increased.
Poland hosts 5,000 U.S. troops, and small rotations are present in Romania and the Baltic states, which share a land border with Russia.
“You could put U.S. troops in the Baltic states, but that feels like rubbing Russia’s nose in it in a way I’m not sure Biden wants to do at the beginning of this administration,” O’Hanlon said. “The added presence in Eastern Europe is probably going to be modest.”
O’Hanlon suggests that the Defense Department’s tendency to maintain continuity could merely lead Biden to modify the Trump decision.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep a little bit of it,” he said. “But I would be surprised if they kept the bulk of it.”
Carafano added, “The debate goes away. I’m not sure the moves go away.”
