Trump confirms he wants to pull thousands of US
troops from Germany
By MAX
COHEN 6/15/20, 11:47 PM CET
U.S.
President Donald Trump on Monday said he wanted to lower the number of U.S.
troops in Germany to 25,000 in response to what he characterized as German
delinquency on military spending.
The
reduction in troop numbers, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is
deeply unpopular among Republican lawmakers and some national security experts.
“We’re at
52,000 soldiers in Germany, that’s a tremendous amount of soldiers, that’s a
tremendous cost to the United States,” Trump said. “Germany, as you know, is
very delinquent in their payments to NATO.”
Roughly
35,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Germany, where force levels are allowed to
go as high as 52,000. Trump noted that Germany was not devoting 2 percent of
its gross domestic product to defense and criticized its trade relationship
with the U.S. through the European Union.
“They are
delinquent of billions of dollars, this is for years delinquent,” Trump said.
“So we are putting the number down to 25,000 soldiers.”
Contrary to
Trump's comments, Germany does not owe that money to NATO. In 2014, European
countries set a goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. In
2019, Germany hit 1.3 percent in defense spending, according to the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute.
Last week,
22 House Republicans led by Republican Representative Mac Thornberry argued
against Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Germany and claimed the move would
undermine the NATO alliance. At the time, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, Senate
Armed Services chair, said reducing U.S. forces in Germany was such a bad idea
that he could not believe Trump would order it.
Withdrawal
of U.S. Troops
Trump’s Former Ambassador to Germany Gets His
Revenge
In order to punish the Germans for their supposedly
low military expenditures, U.S. President Donald Trump wants to withdraw troops
from the country. Observers see it a petty move by former Ambassador Richard
Grenell that will primarily hurt American interests.
By Matthias
Gebauer, Christiane Hoffmann und René Pfister
15.06.2020,
17.27 Uhr
When
American ambassadors leave their positions in the German capital, the moment is
usually marked by a big farewell celebration and a sense of sadness. In 2013,
Barack Obama’s ambassador, Philip Murphy, even rented Berlin’s Olympic Stadium
for his going-away party. He and many of his predecessors still maintain close
ties to Germany to this day.
But when
the news made the rounds in late May that Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany,
Richard "Ric" Grenell, would be leaving his posting early, the
reactions ranged from glee to relief. Former Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel of
the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) described Grenell’s departure as
"an act of kindness." He joked that Trump must still have a soft spot
for the Germans after all.
"Over
generations, every ambassador I have met left Germany as a friend and respected
partner," writes Andreas Nick, a lawmaker with Angela Merkel’s
center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) specializing in foreign policy. Grenell,
he says, behaves like "the representative of a hostile power."
Grenell
reacted in his own way to the jubilation. In late May, he tweeted: "You
make a big mistake if you think the American pressure is off. You don’t know
Americans." It sounded like a threat. It’s now clear that it was.
On Friday
of last week, shortly after Grenell left Berlin, it became known in Washington
that Trump was planning to drastically reduce the number of U.S. troops in
Germany. Without consulting with NATO partners, the U.S. president had asked
the Pentagon to develop plans for the withdrawal of a large portion of the U.S.
soldiers stationed here. According to German and American government
representatives, the decision was made extremely quickly by a circle of three
men: the president, his security advisor Richard O’Brien - and Grenell.
Now the
White House has confirmed plans for the withdrawal in a phone call with the
German embassy in Washington. People in both capitals see the plans as classic
Grenell. The threat of withdrawing U.S. armed forces from Germany has long been
one of his themes. He sees it as a way of punishing Germany for not raising its
defense expenditures as fast as Trump would like. According to high-ranking
representatives in the German and American governments, Grenell is seen as the
driving force behind the withdrawal plans. "That is a typical Grenell
move," one official in the U.S. government says. Grenell did not respond
to questions from DER SPIEGEL about his involvement.
According
to officials in the German government, the reduction of U.S. troops won’t have
grave consequences for Germany’s security. But the symbolic damage to the
German-American relationship, which has already been battered under Trump, is
severe. Since the end of the Second World War, the presence of U.S. soldiers in
Germany has been an important symbol of the closeness between the two
countries.
A Recurring
Threat
It’s
unclear when exactly the decision to withdraw was made. Some signs suggest the
decisive date was in early June, when Grenell had his official farewell visit
as ambassador with President Trump in the White House. Grenell posted an
Instagram photo of the Oval Office showing him with O’Brien, the national
security advisor, as well as with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
High-ranking German and American government representatives describe what
happened in the ensuing days as a perfect storm.
Grenell was
only able to withstand two years in Germany before announcing his resignation
as ambassador. From the beginning, he had an arm's length relationship with the
country. While most post-war U.S. ambassadors to Germany maintain excellent
relationships with officials at even the highest levels of German politics,
Grenell remained isolated. No wonder: He issued directives to German business
leaders on Twitter, berated the German government for its defense expenditures
and ranted to the right-wing U.S. media about the chancellor’s refugee
policies. Soon, he was a pariah in Berlin’s political circles. Even Merkel
steered clear of the diplomat.
In summer
of 2019, Grenell threatened to withdraw U.S. troops if the German government
didn’t accede to American calls to raise the defense budget to 2 percent of
gross national product (GNP), as NATO members had pledged to do by 2024.
"It is really insulting to expect that the U.S. taxpayer will continue to
pay for more than 50,000 Americans in Germany, but the Germans use their trade
surplus for domestic purposes," Grenell said. Officials in Berlin were
shocked by the tone.
At the
time, Trump was also considering reducing the contingent of U.S. troops. His
reasoning, as is so often the case, was simple. Despite the NATO agreement, he
believed Germany’s defense budget was still too low. He argued that Germany was
profiting security-wise from the U.S. presence in the country, despite being
unwilling to pay for the costs.
Trump
backed away from the plan, apparently partly because the proposal didn’t get a
very positive reaction from Republicans in Congress or at the Department of
Defense.
But Grenell
never allowed himself to be dissuaded from punishing the Germans for their
inaction. Although his own people had repeatedly tried to explain to him that
the American troops in the country only served to protect Germany to a small
degree, if at all, the ambassador refused to change his mind.
Now the
gleeful comments about his departure may have once again set off Grenell’s
disdain. He could have ignored the remarks, but that’s not his style, given
that his curt tone is paired with an enormous personal sensitivity. This led to
a Twitter war that even came to involve Trump’s son. In a tweet, Grenell
responded to Nick, the CDU lawmaker, by arguing that it is his duty to
represent the interests of the U.S. -- in response to which Donald Trump Jr.
paraphrased Grenell, "Pay your NATO bill."
Petty
Revenge
Then a new source
of irritation in the White House gave Grenell a unique opportunity to implement
his plan of revenge. Trump was annoyed that Merkel ruined his plan to hold a
G-7 Summit in Washington. Trump wanted the meeting to take place there in June
to send the message that the U.S., and the rest of the world, had overcome the
COVID-19 crisis. Merkel had her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, state that the time
had not yet come for such a meeting. Trump saw this as an insult. "There
was some disappointment that the meeting could not take place
immediately," Grenell told Germany’s Bild tabloid. "We will certainly
not have a G-7 summit without the Germans."
In early
June, when the first rumors that the president had told Defense Secretary Mark
Esper to drastically reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany began making
the rounds, it wasn’t just the German embassy that was taken by surprise. The
State Department and parts of the National Security Council in the White House
were also kept out of the loop. Congress, whose related committees should have
been informed, were also not told.
For the
entire weekend, the German government didn’t know what to make of Washington’s
plans. Leading officials from the German Foreign Office and the Defense
Ministry called their counterparts in Washington, but they couldn’t help and
had to admit that their departments hadn’t been included in the White House's
decision-making.
Even now,
the German government doesn’t have any strong connection to Donald Trump’s
administration, so officials in Berlin decided to wait. They saw the fact that
the planned troop withdrawal wasn’t being announced publicly by either the
Pentagon or the White House as a reason for hope. But early last week, the
German embassy in Washington received a phone call from O’Brien, the national
security adviser himself, making it clear how serious the president was. The
number of U.S. soldiers in Germany was to be limited to 25,000, and 9,500
soldiers were to be withdrawn soon.
But in
practical terms, the punitive act will hurt the Germans less than it will
hinder the U.S. military. "The withdrawal of U.S. troops wouldn’t present
an immediate security risk for Germany," says Sigmar Gabriel, who is now
the head of the Atlantik-Brücke, an Atlanticist non-profit. "We are not a
front-line state anymore," he says. He argues that the U.S. would
primarily hurt itself. U.S. military figures agreed: "The U.S. soldiers
are not here to protect Germany, all of them only serve our aims," says Ben
Hodges, a former commanding general for the U.S. Army in Europe. For this
reason, among others, he describes Trump’s withdrawal plans as a "colossal
mistake."
Germany has
been one of the most important military hubs for the U.S. Army since the Second
World War. Around 35,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed here, along with 12,000
American civilians who work for the troops.
The U.S.
Army uses that personnel to operate a massive base, Ramstein, in the western
German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Almost all military transports to Iraq or
Afghanistan travel through this base, and the site is an almost irreplaceable
communication link. The military hospital in nearby Landstuhl is almost as
central to the country’s military logistics, given that nearly all injured U.S.
soldiers from deployment regions are treated there.
There is a
long list of other bases. The U.S. run their military missions in Africa from a
facility on the edge of Stuttgart. The city is also the site of the army’s
European headquarters. Germany also houses the U.S. Army’s largest munitions
depot outside of the U.S.
"The
Americans mostly use Germany as a logistical hub, since we are between the U.S.
and their opponents in Russia or China," says one German general. A
massive withdrawal, he argues, would ultimately, "primarily harm the
U.S."
Officials
in the Bundeswehr hope that Congress will stop the plans or at least soften
them. "Our approach needs to be to stay calm and to wait," says one
high-ranking German officer. He argues that past experiences have shown that
the most outrageous plans are usually relativized by the Pentagon.
Trump’s
plan, it turns out, is viewed critically at the Pentagon and the U.S. State
Department, and resistance is forming in Congress. That opposition is coming
not only from the Democrats, but also from Trump’s own Republican Party. Even
loyal supporters of the president, including the Heritage Foundation, are
turning away from him.
A letter
signed by 22 Republican members of Congress says: "In Europe, the threats
posed by Russia have not lessened, and we believe that signs of a weakened U.S.
commitment to NATO will encourage further Russian aggression and
opportunism."
Trump’s
former national security advisor, John Bolton, who has an almost mystical aura
in conservative circles, wrote on Twitter that a withdrawal from Germany would
create nothing but problems. And even Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, supposedly has opposed the move internally.
It is
unclear if the attempts to block the withdrawal will succeed. Richard Grenell
seems to have considerable influence in Washington. "The president sees
Grenell as a super-loyal member of his inner circle," says one U.S.
military official. Trump not only gave Grenell -- who headed a PR firm after
serving as spokesman to the U.S.' ambassador to the United Nations under George
W. Bush -- the German ambassadorship, he also made him the special envoy for
Serbia and Kosovo and, for a time, acting director of national intelligence.
Grenell
also cultivates close ties to O’Brien, and he is close with Donald Trump Jr.
Before Grenell’s appearance on right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show
on Monday of last week, Trump Jr. tweeted that it would be "must watch
tv."
Grenell is
a kind of unofficial campaign aide for Trump. There have been rumors
circulating in Washington for some time now that he would have liked to have
become the successor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, before Pompeo decided
against running as senator in Kansas.
The German
government is now trying to play down the conflict. Government officials are
saying that they don’t want to give the impression they are angry or whiny,
given that Trump’s goal is to set off a public fight. They are instead hoping
that Trump’s plans can’t be implemented quickly. After all, who knows if he
will win the election in November.
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