Trump’s troop plan stuns Berlin, rocks postwar order

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump’s directive to pull 9,500 troops from Germany hits home hard for friends of America like Edgar Knobloch, whose Bavarian town has been home to US service members for seven decades.
Like Chancellor Angela Merkel, the mayor of Grafenwoehr was caught off guard. It’s the latest sign of the US’s deterioration of ties with a loyal ally, one that not only hosts most of its troops in Europe but also has seen them fuel the local economy.
This medieval town, with a tiny population dwarfed by the size of the American military presence, shows just what a shadow the US has cast over Europe after World War II and what its retreat symbolises in the eyes of locals and international observers. Another troop cut would signal a further break with a legacy of two generations. Located near the former East German border, Grafenwoehr is a place where overseas US military infrastructure and community bonds survived the end of the Cold War. Locals celebrate Thanksgiving and enjoy spare ribs. Every year, they turn out by the thousands for the German-American Folk Festival to share drink, bratwurst and country music with the roughly 11,000 US troops based at NATO’s biggest training area in Europe.
“They’re completely integrated here,” Knobloch, 55, said in an interview. “Restaurants are bilingual. There are mixed marriages, mixed families. You often hear from the older members of the community: ‘The Americans liberated us.’”
There hasn’t been much nostalgia between Trump and Merkel, who have clashed repeatedly over trade and Germany’s slow timetable for meeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) defense spending target. Last month, Merkel snubbed Trump on his plan to hold an in-person Group of Seven summit in June which he’d like Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend.
US-German relations have become “complicated,” German foreign minister Heiko Maas said, in the first comment by a government official about the planned troop withdrawal. As of Sunday, the government still hadn’t received any official communication from the US “Should there be a partial withdrawal of US troops, we will take note of it,” Maas told the tabloid Bild am Sonntag.
While Trump has taken aim at Germany’s economic might, Merkel — the longest-serving G-7 leader after 15 years in power — has stared him down across a broad front, from defending the rules-based global economy to policy disputes such as defense spending. A physicist by training, Merkel also contrasted with Trump in her science-based approach to reopening Germany from its coronavirus lockdown.
Lawmakers and government officials in Berlin criticised Trump’s troop decision, which would cut US forces in Germany by slightly more than a quarter, as a snub.
“These plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the
involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process,” Johann Wadephul, deputy head of Merkel’s parliamentary caucus, said in an emailed statement.
Trump’s decision and the way it was communicated hint at how much Germany’s relations have cooled with a US president who has publicly questioned NATO’s value.