US withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany

[CitizenVectron]

 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/29/politics/us-withdraw-troops-germany/index.html

 

About half of the troops will move to Belgium and Italy, both countries that pay less (as a % of GDP) towards NATO than Germany. The other half will return to the US.

 

Also possibly moving EUCOM from Germany to Belgium.

 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Bring them all home

[Joe]

One of the few things Trumpy is doing that I advocate. If only he was going about in a semi-intelligent manner, but I know that is too much to ask.

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Jose said:

One of the few things Trumpy is doing that I advocate. If only he was going about in a semi-intelligent manner, but I know that is too much to ask.

 

The problem is he's not doing this in a thoughtful matter and is clearly doing this in a way that's intended to just piss off a key NATO ally.

[Massdriver]

I used to be somewhat against NATO and having a presence in Germany.  I flipped to supporting NATO and our allies just as people here became more vocally for an America Only policy. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

I wouldn't have as much a problem with "defending Europe" and being their allies if the bases weren't supporting and launching pads for endless war in the middle east and africa.

 

That and we spend hundreds of billions on overseas bases while people are cast to the wolves here at home.

[marioandsonic]

22 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

The problem is he's not doing this in a thoughtful matter and is clearly doing this in a way that's intended to just piss off a key NATO ally.

Yep.  If Trump ever does something right, there's a 99% chance he's doing it for the wrong reasons.

[Jason]

17 minutes ago, marioandsonic said:

Yep.  If Trump ever does something right, there's a 99% chance he's doing it for the wrong reasons.

 

Riley noted this in the OP too, but worth reemphasizing:

 

 

If he were relocating the troops to Poland, which was what I remember originally reading about, it would have 1) made sense in terms of his fixation on the 2% thing since Poland is hitting that target and 2) actually made some strategic sense, given that one of the points of having troops in Europe is to make sure Russia doesn't get any ideas, and Poland is closer to that front than Germany is.

[PaladinSolo]

I can easily see Putin telling Trump he doesn't want US troops in Poland so Trump didn't do it.

[TwinIon]

If the premise was to reduce our military spending by not having such a substantial presence in Europe, I'd be good with that. 

 

If we just end up spending a ton of extra money moving people and equipment from one country in Europe to another just because Merkel was mean, that seems about the stupidest possible thing to do, which means it's also the mostly likely scenario.

[Anathema-]

I think there's great value in mixing our cultures with others around the world and military installations like these allow for that.  There should be additional civil services that would be treated similar to the military (volunteer for long contractual periods in a chain of command) that we should be doing at home and that we should also be exporting -- but that's a different argument.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

NATO should have disbanded after the death of the Soviet Union.

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The OSCE would've been the ideal organization to address European security issues after the fall of the Soviet Union.  In fact, the US and Canada are already parties to the  OSCE so their engagement with Europe wouldn't have been diminished at all.

 

Instead, NATO expansion  kept pushing eastwards into the former Warsaw Pact states with the resultant growing (justifiable?) paranoia in Russia of NATO forces right on their border.  How many times has Russia suffered invasions from its west that were very much existential threats to its existence?  Let's count: Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon's Grande Armée, Germany twice in the 20th century.  How could a country in that position NOT have a revanchist reaction to military expansion to its borders?

 

NATO expansion was a VERY significant factor in Putin's rise to power, something that gets all but ignored  in the  West.

[PaladinSolo]

16 hours ago, PaladinSolo said:

I can easily see Putin telling Trump he doesn't want US troops in Poland so Trump didn't do it.

This is 100% what happened, LOL'd pretty hard at US troops making things less calm in Europe.