US military footprint in Europe has been declining for decades
European leaders are grappling with how to handle icier relations with the U.S. since President Donald Trump regained control of the White House this year.
"The Europeans have a serious problem of readiness … that they’re trying to fix, but it takes time," Camille Grand, a former NATO official who is now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a Washington Post report Sunday. "If Trump decides ‘I’m going to pull out U.S. troops from Germany because I’m upset with the trade imbalance,’ that’s much more complicated to manage than to say we have a plan to do this within X years."
The comments come as European leaders have become increasingly anxious about the future of the security of the continent in the second era of Trump, with the Washington Post reporting that leaders are wary that the American president is too friendly with Moscow and that they widely expect him to pull back roughly 20,000 U.S. troops that were deployed to the continent by former President Joe Biden in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"I would not be surprised if at some point [those troops] go back to their home base in America," a NATO diplomat told the outlet while noting that those troops were sent to Europe at the height of an emergency and that their exit "would be, so to speak, a return to normalcy."
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Concerns are mounting in Europe that President Trump will allow Russian President Putin to divide Western alliances. (Getty Images)
The current number of U.S. troops in Europe has fluctuated between 75,000 and 105,000 since 2022, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), with the higher end of that number being a result of the surge of forces into the region ordered by Biden.
But fears persist that those numbers could fall even more rapidly than expected under Trump, despite assurances from Trump administration officials that there are no imminent plans for a large reduction of forces on the continent.
Those fears have been buoyed by recent events, including Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at a security conference in Munich in which the American leader scolded European leaders for their alleged break from shared values such as freedom of speech and Trump’s widening rift with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
However, American presidents from both parties have been warning European leaders for more than a decade of the potential shift of troops away from the continent as the U.S. seeks to focus more effort on confronting the emerging threat of China in the Indo-Pacific, leaving Europe in charge of a greater share of its own security.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (Li Gang/Xinhua via AP/File)
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Indeed, the U.S. military footprint in Europe has already fallen drastically since the end of the Cold War, the CSIS data shows. At the height of hostilities between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. had nearly 500,000 troops deployed to the continent. There were still roughly 350,000 U.S. troops in Europe at the start of the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, a number that fell further to more than 100,000 at the turn of the century.
Despite the consistent warnings, European leaders now fear that the timeline to move troops from the continent could accelerate further under Trump, leaving holes in European security countries they are not yet able to fill.
Army paratroopers prepare for a blank-fire exercise in Germany on March 15, 2022. (U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger)
"I just worry that, given, frankly, President Trump’s mercurial nature … how much confidence really can Europe have in 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 the Washington Post.