History may repeat itself, but not always with the same impact.
In 2012, when then-US defence secretary Leon Panetta announced the withdrawal of two combat brigades – roughly 8,000 troops – from Europe in order to reduce military spending, western European governments shrugged it off.
When US president Donald Trump mused this year about withdrawing US forces from Europe, it sent barely concealed shockwaves through European chancelleries.
The difference: Panetta at the time said America’s security commitments to Europe and to NATO were “unwavering”.
By contrast, Trump has threatened not to protect NATO members that spend too little on defence. And his own vice president and defence secretary made disparaging comments about European allies in a now-infamous group chat earlier this year, with defence chief Pete Hegseth expressing his “loathing of European free-loading”, according to the Atlantic magazine.
Get the difference?
On the eve of the NATO summit in The Hague this week, the chatter about the US military leaving Europe for good has somewhat subsided.
Yet, European diplomats do fear an announcement by Trump after the summit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a Euronews request for comment.
Reason enough to hear from top US military experts whether they think a massive US troop withdrawal is on the cards and what the impact of such a move would be for the United States – logistically, financially and politically.
First in line is the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, a lawyer by education, whose task has increasingly tended to soothing nervous European allies.
“Look, European security is on top of my mind,” he said at a recent public forum in Brussels. “America needs allies, we can’t do it all alone. And the reports on the US drawing down its troop presence are absolutely not true. Everything else we will discuss with our allies.”
Right now, the US has nearly 84,000 active service members in Europe, according to the US European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart. The total number varies due to planned exercises and regular rotations of troops in and out of the continent.
For example, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, some 20,000 were deployed to states neighbouring Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to support Ukraine and contain the conflict.
Over the course of the war, the total number of troops has ranged between approximately 75,000 and 105,000 military personnel, primarily from the Air Force, Army, and Navy.
The bulk of those troops is stationed in Germany (40,000), Poland (14,000), Italy (13,000) and the UK (10,000) with the rest scattered across the continent from Norway to Turkey.
The practical logistics of a US withdrawal from Europe, such as redeployments to the US or elsewhere, would be significant and time-consuming.
“If this were to happen in a systematic manner, it would take many months, probably at least a year,” Mark Cancian, a retired colonel and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, told Euronews.
“The entire equipment, every tank, needs to be prepared and shipped. Then the families of the soldiers need to be shipped and finally the service members themselves,” he added. “All in all, a quarter of a million people might be impacted, maybe more.”
The biggest problem would be where they might go. “Current bases in the US could absorb 5,000 people, maybe 10,000,” Cancian said. “But the rest? It would take years to build new facilities.”
Whether Trump would decide something of that strategic and political magnitude the effects of which would only almost certainly be seen beyond his presidential term is more than doubtful, according to Ian Lesser, a senior political analyst at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), a transatlantic think tank.
“We already saw an attempt by Trump to withdraw a sizable force from Europe during his first term, which only met considerable resistance from the security community in the US and was eventually shelved by President Biden,” Lesser told Euronews.
The US Congress would also have to approve the withdrawal, which is not certain given the number of defence hawks, especially in the Senate. A recent bipartisan draft proposal by Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal on tougher anti-Russian sanctions reportedly has the backing of up to 90 of the 100 senators.
“Trump has no desire to look weak. But a dramatic reduction of the American military footprint in Europe would do exactly that to him,” Lesser said.
In addition, a large part of the US forces in Europe are not members of combat brigades, which typically consist of about 5,000 soldiers each, but support troops who man a huge military infrastructure, especially in Germany.
Historically, Ramstein Air Base, for instance, and its neighbouring Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside the United States, played a key role in supporting forward military operations, especially in the Middle East.
“It would make little sense to announce plans to withdraw US troops from Europe the moment there is an escalating war happening between Israel and Iran,” former US ambassador William Courtney told Euronews. “And it would probably lead to massive criticism,” added Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, a global think tank.
And then there are Trump’s efforts to mediate in the war in Ukraine. “Trump viewed a US troop withdrawal in connection with his strong hopes for an end of the war and improved relations with Moscow. Yet, it turned out there is no basis for that, no possibility, the negotiating positions of Russia and Ukraine being too far apart,” Courtney said.
Were US troops to be withdrawn, Europe would have to replace the entire military infrastructure currently provided by the US at all levels, according to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) based in London. That means bases, training areas, weaponry and ammunition, administrative and organisational architecture, intelligence provisions and much more.
This comes with a hefty price tag: the nine authors of the IISS study estimate that replacing the US contribution to NATO with European assets would amount to approximately $1 trillion (€870 billion).
It’s not clear what the cost of a US troop withdrawal would mean for the US taxpayer. None of the experts quoted in this article was ready to advance a number.
That’s one reason none of them considered such a decision as very likely.
“No way,” Daniel Runde told Euronews, a senior advisor with Washington-based consulting firm BGR Group and author of The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power.
“Trump will absolutely not do it. His aim is to get the Europeans to spend 5% of their GDP on defence. Then he will move on.”
