Last week was busy for news. U.S. coronavirus numbers surged to nearly 2 million cases and over 112,000 deaths. At 13.3%, the second-highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression was spun as good news. Massive peaceful protests, and significant vandalism, looting, and arson, swept the nation in response to a grotesque police murder. President Trump caused the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since Kent State, when his administration likely unlawfully ordered soldiers to use force against demonstrators to facilitate a campaign photo opportunity.
Lost in the cacophony was the appalling decision, hastily made after a tetchy phone call between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to withdraw over a quarter of the American troops currently in Germany with a transparently political deadline of before Election Day. There is no evidence that this policy disaster to cut our troops unilaterally from 36,000 to 25,000 was even discussed with the Departments of Defense or State through a National Security Council process, much less coordinated with our close ally of 75 years.
The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have, under our leadership, defended the western world against the Soviet Union and its Revanchist Russian successor state’s ambitions to dominate its neighbors for the past 71 years. The voluntary nature of NATO was always a sharp slap in the face to Moscow’s thwarted world leadership ambitions. NATO was a sought after gentleman’s club for deserving democracies. The opposing communist Warsaw Pact, in contrast, was a lowbrow gang from which, such as La Cosa Nostra, there was no living exit. Hungary discovered this in 1956, as did Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980.
The contrast between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was exemplified by the clash over the divided city of Berlin, which was moral as much as military. The communists had to build a jailhouse wall to keep their best and brightest from fleeing to religion, freedom, democracy, and capitalism in the West. Finally, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet’s crooked racket collapsed between 1989-1991, thanks to decades of bipartisan effort from Presidents Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. Meanwhile, NATO went from strength to strength, gaining eager new members across eastern Europe, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The dismemberment of NATO, and removal of the U.S. from a leadership position in Europe, is the biggest foreign policy goal of Russia, concomitant with the survival of the authoritarian, financially corrupt, and murderous regime of Vladimir Putin. Putin seeks to re-extend Moscow’s sphere of control to the former USSR borders and its influence to the former extent of the Warsaw Pact and beyond. Along with undermining the good example of our democratic republic of ordered liberty, exposing U.S. defense commitments to NATO as insufficient (or worse, insincere) is Putin’s most devout wish.
In the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Balts were delivered up to the communists in the infamous treaty between the two most evil regimes in history: those of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler (remember whenever you hear Moscow’s self-congratulatory “Victory Day” rhetoric that their entente with the Nazis remains the only major treaty with which they have complied since 1917). Poland, which successfully fought off the Soviets from 1919-1921, was also divided up between the Soviets and Nazis in 1939. Russia murdered the cream of Polish Catholicism at the Katyn Forest in 1940 and deliberately held back its advancing Red Army so that the Nazis could do the same to the leaders of Polish Jews during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
Beginning in 2014 with its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has threatened our treaty allies, such as the Baltic states and Poland, through rhetoric, cyberattacks, covert action, and the forward deployment and exercises of military forces. Moscow is signaling its capability and intent to attack these NATO allies, including by flooding its forces in Kaliningrad with area access/denial weapons, such as anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, to prevent a NATO reinforcement and defense of the Baltics. Russia borders these states and so can mass forces on them without fear of swift retaliation. Tallinn, capital of Estonia, lies 4,324 miles from Washington and 1,159 miles from our largest European base for ground forces at Grafenwoehr, Germany.
While eastern Europe is no longer terra incognita for our forces, neither is it as familiar as were our old Cold War ground defensive positions and maneuver rights areas in West Germany. Problems such as different gauges in railroad tracks across several countries will hamper the logistics of bringing significant mechanized forces to bear at the end of our extended communications and supply lines, compared to the Red Army fighting overland in its own backyard.
Unilaterally diluting the remnants of American combat power in post-war Europe (which topped out at 400,000 troops in 1962) needlessly risks the lives of our soldiers and airmen in a potential conflict, as well as the paratroopers, Marines, and sailors who will attempt to reinforce them. Russia meanwhile has shown advances in its artillery, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine, as well as synchronization between its intelligence services and special operations forces. That should give us pause.
Putin would like nothing more than for the U.S. to face stark choices between cowardly abandonment of our NATO treaty guarantees, embarrassingly losing a conventional military conflict in eastern Europe, or dangerously risking nuclear escalation. Who benefits from this wrong-headed decision to slash our conventional forces?
Putin, obviously. And what might be called the Charles Lindbergh wing of the Republican Party, who led the original “America First” movement that sympathized with Germany and not Great Britain before Pearl Harbor. A jeremiad of Trump’s, and a hobbyhorse of his since he returned from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, has been that our NATO allies’ contribution to their own defense is insufficient.
The dollars-and-cents argument is true so far as it goes: America spends 3.4% percent of its gross domestic product on defense, while most NATO allies (except for, notably, the Baltics and Poland) spend less than the target sum of 2%. Our allies ought to pay more, and due to (or perhaps in spite of) the Trump administration’s efforts, mostly have been spending more. At the same time, U.S. defense expenditures have fallen sharply in real terms under Trump as compared to President Barack Obama, while the wealthiest Americans’ taxes have been steeply cut.
But the financial argument misses the forest for the trees. NATO’s mutual defense Article Five has been invoked once: it was on our behalf, following September 11. NATO allies lost 1,050 service members, killed in our defense in Afghanistan, and another 286 in our misadventure in Iraq. Our troops flow into the combat theaters through bases in Germany, and our wounded come back the same way.
The relationship between American soldiers and Germans since 1945, as I saw during my tour there from 1995-1998, is a happy one, and it is demonstrated by the German American GI families on any U.S. base worldwide. They want us there for good reasons of their own. A militaristic Germany with an independent foreign policy did not work out well for anyone, including itself, from 1914-1945. We should stay.
The order to eviscerate our regular forces in Germany is within Trump’s lawful authority as commander-in-chief. But it is destructive and misguided.
The congressional Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees should exercise their authorization and oversight responsibilities. Call NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe (by tradition a U.S. officer), the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, and the deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy and ask them, under oath, if they think gutting our forces in Germany is wise for America’s long-term interests.
Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, a CIA case officer in the Middle East, and an Army officer in Germany, Bosnia, Hungary, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. Kevin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
