Could US military occupation of Germany be ending?

Joaquin Flores
FRN
Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC

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Trump floats a proposal which may end the 70 year military occupation

Germany media Welt.de is looking at this story this morning: According to media reports, US President Donald Trump is considering withdrawing the US soldiers stationed in Germany.

As US Department of Defense tested a deduction stationed in Germany US soldiers, according to a report in the Washington Post. Among the options under consideration are a return of a large part of the approximately 35,000 troops stationed in Germany in the United States or the transfer of all or part of the contingent to Poland, the newspaper reported on Friday.

According to the report, US President Donald Trump had previously raised the idea of ​​a troop withdrawal at a meeting with military advisors and White House officials. European NATO members were worried about the process and tried to clarify whether Trump is serious or the threat of a troop restructuring is a negotiating tactic in the run-up to the NATO summit in July.

According to Washington Post [the reduction] is so far only an internal study of the Pentagon. A spokesman for the National Security Council denied having requested an analysis of a possible withdrawal of troops from Germany. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon also denied a scheduled withdrawal. At the same time, he explained that the deployment of US troops abroad was regularly reviewed and subjected to "cost-benefit calculations". The US remains committed to Germany and NATO, Pahon said.

However, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO in the past, calling it "superfluous", among other things. In a letter to eight European NATO members, he called for higher defense spending. Trump has repeatedly criticized those NATO states that are threatening to miss an agreement reached in 2014 to increase defense spending to two percent of gross domestic product.

"Germany has to spend more money"

In Germany, US soldiers have been stationed since the end of the Second World War. It is the largest contingent outside the US.

The background for Trump's action will probably be the NATO summit in two weeks. The US President has again accused Germany and other European countries of paying too little for the military alliance. "Germany needs to spend more," Trump told journalists aboard the presidential press on his way from Washington to his private golf club in New Jersey on Friday. The same applies to France and Spain. "It's not fair what they did to the US," he reiterated earlier allegations.

NATO states had agreed in 2014 to increase their defense expenditures to two percent in the direction of economic output by 2024. According to budget planning, the German NATO quota is expected to climb from the current level of 1.2 percent to 1.3 percent in 2019 and then fall again.

Joaquin Flores is Editor-in-Chief of Fort Russ News, as well as the Director of the Belgrade based think-tank, the Center for Syncretic Studies. Flores has appeared regularly on Iran's 'PressTV' and Russia's 'RT' news.

Comment: Trump's way is to make brash statements and test the waters. He is a mover and shaker so who knows what the actual result will be.

According to Tasnim News Agency:

Several officials suggested that Pentagon policymakers may have moved ahead with the assessment to prove the worth of the current basing arrangement and dissuade Trump from carrying the thought of withdrawal any further.

Defense officials said a cost analysis of options for changing that was being conducted at a staff level to inform a wider discussion about the US troop presence in Europe. As part of the regular analysis of the cost and justification for its troops around the world, the United States has dramatically reduced the size of its force in Germany from Cold War levels. But persistent doubts in Europe about Trump's commitment to the alliance have made even the possibility of routine changes to American force posture in Europe far more charged.

In recent months, Poland has proposed spending at least $2 billion to obtain a permanent US base. The US military already fields a rotating force in Poland, with other alliance members doing the same in the Baltic States, as part of a NATO effort to deter increasing Russian aggression along the alliance's eastern flank.

Basing its statistics on data from 2002, the study estimated that Germany offset about 33 percent of the costs of US military personnel stationed there. It is unclear how much would be saved by bringing them all home, because the United States would still be responsible for paying them, in addition to housing and other personnel expenses. At the same time, a large portion of the American troops in Germany are engaged in the US military's efforts outside Europe and simply base operations in the nation.

Trump's disdain for the alliance - which he declared "obsolete" during his presidential campaign - has clearly been focused on Germany, and on Merkel in particular, including recent tweets saying she was losing her grip on power at home.