The United States announces plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Germany
Late last month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said publicly that the U.S. appeared to lack a clear exit strategy in Iran and that Tehran had “humiliated” Washington in peace talks. The comment drew a sharp response from Trump, who soon indicated that U.S. troop levels in Germany were under review.
This week, the Pentagon followed through, announcing plans to withdraw 5,000 U.S. service members – about 14% of the roughly 36,000 troops stationed in Germany, a presence that dates to the early Cold War.
In a statement to NPR last week, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the withdrawal, which reflects “a thorough review of the Department’s force posture in Europe” and conditions on the ground.
The move comes as Berlin said that plans formulated during the Biden administration to deploy U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to Germany might be shelved. Speaking about the Tomahawks on Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said, “There are ideas, but no solution yet” on ways to fill such a gap. NPR reached out to the Pentagon requesting an update on the plans to deploy Tomahawks but received no immediate response.
It will be hard to replace U.S. capabilities
Europe and Canada currently lack the capacity to credibly “go it alone” at the highest end of military operations. They field capable forces but are heavily reliant on the U.S. for long-range precision-strike capability, strategic lift to move troops and matériél to the battlefield, and advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, according to Stelzenmüller.
“For the critical purpose of supporting Ukraine, the U.S. possesses capabilities that we have not yet been able to produce,” she says.
She says there was a sense as recently as last year that the U.S.-NATO relationship was solid enough that “we could still rely for quite a while longer on the U.S. nuclear deterrent and a steady flow of U.S. weaponry for us to buy and then give to Ukraine.” That’s no longer the case, she says. “The scope of what we need to produce ourselves has become much broader, and the timeline to do it in is much shorter.”
NATO leaders are aware that acquiring these capabilities is a vital but time-consuming task, according to Balkan Devlen, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an independent think tank based in Ottawa.
Devlen estimates that it will take between five and 10 years to develop these capabilities, leaving a “vulnerability gap” that Russia could exploit in the meantime. “You cannot just ‘Amazon next day order’ these things,” he says.
As a result, says Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy, “There is some anger now being expressed, because not only is the U.S. stepping away, but we are dumping this on the allies without any transition period.
Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO allies for failing to spend enough on their own defense. In recent years, however, member states have sharply increased military outlays in line with a 2014 pledge to spend at least 2% of gross domestic product on defense. Several countries – including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Denmark – now meet or exceed that benchmark, with some approaching or surpassing U.S. defense spending as a share of their economies. At last year’s NATO summit, members agreed to a new target of 5% of GDP by 2035.
“They’re going to have to translate that into combat capability,” to include spending on ground forces, says Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The discussions about burden sharing in the alliance are nothing new, dating back to long before Trump. But the irony is that the very pressure Trump has applied – combined with the shock of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – helped drive the long-delayed surge in allied defense spending after years of lagging behind.
With Russia at NATO’s doorstep in Ukraine, internal squabbling coming from the U.S. means the alliance is facing “a two-front challenge, east and west,” according to Douglas Lute, who succeeded Daalder as U.S. ambassador to NATO under Obama.
“They’ve got to buy some insurance against longer-standing trends in American politics,” he says.
“A stronger European pillar of NATO is good for America,” Lute, a retired Army three-star general, says. “The problem is that if they step up because they can’t trust us, that, at the same time, is not good for America.”
There is no obvious replacement for the U.S.
In the decades after the formation of NATO in 1949, the U.S. played the lead role, helping rally Western Europe to its own defense even as the region was still trying to rebuild from the devastation of World War II. The U.S., Canada, and 10 European nations, including Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, originally made up NATO. West Germany was added in 1955, and a reunified Germany in 1990. Today, many of the alliance’s 32 member states are drawn from the now-defunct Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact counterpart to NATO.
“America was not just a provider of military capabilities but also the political balancer,” Stelzenmüller says.
Last month, Germany’s Pistorius unveiled a sweeping new defense plan signaling that Berlin is preparing to assume a far larger role within NATO. The first comprehensive military doctrine issued by Germany since the Cold War identifies Russia as the main threat to European security, warning that Moscow is “laying the groundwork for a military attack on NATO member states.” The plan reiterates Germany’s ambition to build Europe’s strongest conventional military by the mid-2030s, with a force of roughly 460,000 troops – including more than 200,000 active-duty personnel – aimed largely at reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank.
Lute acknowledges that Germany in particular is “stepping up in a significant way” but sees the future of NATO leadership as a collective effort. Germany, France, and the U.K. are all likely to pick up the mantle left by a retreating U.S., he says. “To the extent that the three of them can come together – and increasingly be joined by Poland – I think that set of the four strongest, largest, most vigorous NATO allies has the most potential.”
The experts NPR spoke to do not think Trump’s threats to pull out of the alliance will come to fruition. In any case, it’s a decision that cannot be made unilaterally, per a law enacted by Congress in 2023. “I think that there will definitely be a NATO, but it’s going to be a European NATO, if you will,” Townsend says. “It won’t be NATO guided by the United States.”
