Trump undermines Merkel as she tries to stand up to Putin

Bloomberg

The reverberations from Donald Trump’s latest broadside against Germany have reached all the way to Moscow.
The president’s decision to withdraw more than a quarter of the US troops stationed in her country leaves Chancellor Angela Merkel exposed at a moment when she’s facing growing pressure to get tough with Vladimir Putin and was welcomed in the Russian capital.
“It’s spitting in Merkel’s face,” said Vladimir Frolov, a former Russian diplomat who’s now a foreign policy analyst. “But it’s in our interests.”
Days after the move was first leaked, Merkel’s office was still waiting for official notification from the US government and a White House press officer had repeatedly declined to confirm the decision. But media reports have set alarm bells ringing all the same in Berlin, where it’s been taken as another sign of the cooling transatlantic relationship and the shifting priorities in Washington.
Whether or not the US president intended to undermine Merkel’s efforts to stand up to Russia, it’s the latest example of his ability to unsettle European leaders with unpredictable policy making.
Earlier this year, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold of Italy, Trump banned flights from the European Union without warning its leaders and in the past he’s signaled his doubts about NATO’s mutual defense clause, which underpins the continent’s security. Two people familiar with the matter said former US Ambassador Richard Grenell had talked for some time about his desire to get the US to reduce its troop presence in Germany, possibly by shifting some forces to Poland or by slashing troop levels outright. But the first many senior leaders at the State Department learned that the plan had been formalised was from the news stories announcing the cut.
Peter Beyer, a senior lawmaker with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and Germany’s transatlantic coordinator, said that he was still unsure whether the reports were a “trial balloon” or a Trump campaign ploy. If the president does follow through, it would mean “weakening the transatlantic alliance,” he said. “This would not be in the interest of NATO and its members, including the US — but in the interests of China and Russia,” he said.
The departure of 9,500 US servicemen would compound a toxic geopolitical environment for Merkel, with Trump looking to orchestrate a face-to-face meeting with the Russian president at a Group of Seven summit during the fall and pressuring Germany to take a tougher stance with China, its biggest trading partner. Russia was ejected from the G-7 in 2014 after it seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.