The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops stationed in NATO ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as a rift over the Iran war widens between President Donald Trump and Europe.
Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said Monday that Iran was humiliating the U.S. in talks to end the two-month-old war and that he did not see what exit strategy Washington was pursuing.
The current military buildup isn’t a response to China or inherently supportive of U.S. foreign policy goals, it’s a reaction to Russian aggression. The current U.S. administration is glad to let fascism spread, and thus is doing nothing to stop Russia, but that just means Europe needs to continue supporting the defense of Ukraine, demonstrating the independence of its own foreign policy in the process.
This isn’t the Cold War, and foreign relations don’t have to be purely about siding with either the U.S. or China; the EU can and should stand on its own as a superpower in its own right. The U.S. is being weaponized for fascism under Trump, but that doesn’t solve the problem of China being an undemocratic nation conducting ethnic cleansing against its non-Han citizens and actively interfering in the sovereignty of Taiwan. A push towards green energy serves to boost China’s soft power, but it doesn’t fix those problems, nor account for the massive amounts of fossil fuels still being consumed to power the Chinese economy (including 25% of global coal consumption).