Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed on Wednesday the Trump administration’s decision to trim the United States’s troop presence in Germany. The number of U.S. troops on German soil will drop from roughly 36,000 to about 24,000 personnel. About 6,400 of those troops will return stateside, and another 5,600 will be deployed to other parts of Europe. The headquarters of U.S. Africa Command and U.S. European Command will also be relocating from Germany, as will an F-16 fighter squadron and two U.S. Army battalions.
As expected, Republican and Democratic lawmakers immediately condemned the decision. Sen. Mitt Romney called it “a gift to Russia,” a country that has long considered U.S. troop deployments in central and eastern Europe as detrimental to its own national security. Sen. Dianne Feinstein tweeted that a U.S. troop reduction in Germany would weaken NATO and European allies at a delicate time.
Where U.S. service members are deployed or stationed, however, should not be based on how an adversary or competitor may or may not react. The geopolitical environment and what is in the best national security interest of the U.S. are the fundamentals that ultimately drive these decisions. And right now, both factors weigh heavily in favor of a U.S. troop cut in Germany and Europe at large.
Those who oppose this decision are mainly motivated by a reflex to maintain the status quo in Europe. But there is no good reason why Washington needs tens of thousands of American troops positioned on the continent at a time when the geopolitical game has moved away from Europe and toward Asia, where another near-peer competitor (China) is capitalizing on the last two decades of exponential growth to press its own interests.
Beneath all of the conjecture about a weak and exposed Europe being held captive to a resurgent Russia lies a far less exciting reality: Moscow’s power isn’t as frightening as it’s commonly portrayed. Russian foreign policy under President Vladimir Putin may be utilizing ever more clever ways of challenging the West (Moscow has proven to be quite talented in information operations, covert action, and various other “gray-zone” tactics), but the state of Russia today makes the Soviet Union look like a glorious, well-run empire. For all the Russian military’s exercises and its more frequent run-ins with the U.S. Air Force in Mediterranean airspace, Moscow is in no position to launch some bolt-out-of-the-blue conventional invasion of NATO territory. At $272 billion, NATO-Europe spends more than 4 times as much as Russia on defense. The Russian economy is going through such a squeeze as a result of low crude oil prices and a botched COVID-19 response that the Russian Finance Ministry has proposed that the Kremlin cut defense spending by 5% between 2021 and 2023.
Europe, in contrast, is one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced continents on the planet. With a GDP of $18 trillion, Europe isn’t the vulnerable, poor, and dependent region it used to be in the mid-20th century, when the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were staring at hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Europe has adequate financial resources to do more for its own defense — and European governments shouldn’t be wasting any more time assuming that Uncle Sam will constantly be their security guarantor. Wealthy nations such as Germany will need to begin modernizing their armed forces in order to ensure they are combat-ready and prepared for action. Just as importantly, the European politicians must accept the commonsense concept of Europe being the primary defender of its own security. To the extent the U.S. redeployment from Germany assists these goals, the administration’s move will serve NATO better over the long term than preserving a Cold War-era legacy deployment.
The U.S. can’t afford to be everywhere and do everything for everybody all of the time. U.S. officials may have been able to get away with a lack of prioritization in the early 1990s, but Washington is fooling itself if it believes it can continue to exhaust itself into strategic insolvency. Difficult choices will need to be made. A clear sense of priorities will need to be followed, and nations normally dependent on the U.S. for security will have to make the transformation into becoming capable and responsible security allies in their own right.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
