European leaders are struggling with how to deal with Icier relationships with the US since then President Donald Trump Recovered control over the White House this year.
“The Europeans have a serious problem of readyness … that they try to solve, but it takes time,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO officer who is now with the European Council on foreign relations, in a Washington Post report on Sunday. “If Trump concludes:” I’m going to get our troops from Germany because I am angry with the trade onbalans, “that is much more complicated to manage than to say that we have a plan to do this within x years.”
The comments are becoming increasingly anxious as European leaders about the future of the continent of Trump’s second era, in which the Washington Post reports that leaders are on their care that the American president is too friendly with Moscow and that they expect him to withdraw around 20,000 American troops that were deployed to the continent by the continent Former President Joe Biden In the aftermath of the full invasion of Russia in Ukraine.
“It would not surprise me if at some point (those troops) goes back to their home base in America,” a NATO diplomat told the outlet valve as he noticed that those troops were sent to Europe at the peak of an emergency and that their exit would be “to return, a return to normality.”
World leaders Back Zenskyy Na Trump, Vance Oval Office Spat
In Europe, President Trump will allow Russian President Putin to distribute Western alliances. (Getty Images)
The current number of US troops in Europe has been fluctuated between 75,000 and 105,000 since 2022, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where the higher end of that number is the result of the increase in forces in the region ordered by Biden.
But the fears remain that those figures could fall even faster than expected under Trump, despite the guarantees of the Trump administration officials that there are no imminent plans for a large reduction of forces on the continent.
Those fears are stimulated by recent events, including Vice President JD Vances Comments at a security conference in Munich in which the American leader reproduces European leaders for their alleged break of shared values ​​such as freedom of expression and the growing gap of Trump with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zenskyy.
However, American presidents of both parties have warned European leaders For more than a decade of the potential shift of troops away from the continent, while the US strives to focus more efforts on confronting the emerging threat of China in the Indo-Pacific, so that Europe is responsible for a larger part of its own safety.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (Li Gang/Xinhua via AP/File)
JD Vance steps into spotlight and defends Trump’s foreign policy in Oval Office Dustup with Zenskyyy
Indeed the US Army The footprint in Europe has fallen dramatically since the end of the Cold War, according to the CSIS data. At the height of the hostilities between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, the US had used nearly 500,000 troops on the continent. There were still around 350,000 American troops in Europe in the early nineties and the end of the Cold War, a number that fell further than 100,000 in the turn of the century.
Despite the consistent warnings, European leaders now fear that the timeline to move troops from the continent can further accelerate under Trump, so that holes in European security countries that they cannot yet fulfill.
Army Parachutists are preparing for a Blanco-Fire exercise in Germany on March 15, 2022. (American army photo by Markus Rauchenberger)
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“I am only worried that, to be honest, the Mercurial nature of President Trump … How much trust Europe can really have to any degree of American protection and defense,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British diplomat and Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Washington Post.
