The US May Walk Away from Europe

There has never been such a crisis in NATO’s 75-year history. European allies have realized that the Pentagon could withdraw its troops from the Old Continent.

“You can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Warsaw last Friday about U.S. troops. His words sent shockwaves across Europe. Officially, everything is fine. President Andrzej Duda claims that Fort Trump (that is, a permanent American base in Poland) may eventually become a reality, and Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz asserts that ties between Poland and the U.S. have never been stronger.

But the tectonic shift brought by the return of Donald Trump to the White House can very quickly make itself felt, warns the U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Joe Biden, Julie Smith.

During the aforementioned visit to the Polish capital, Hegseth did not want to rule out that part of the agreement to end the war in Ukraine may be the fulfillment of Vladimir Putin’s demand to withdraw Allied troops from the eastern flank of the Atlantic alliance. Over this, the Europeans have no control: In Riyadh on Tuesday, U.S. and Russian heads of diplomacy agreed among themselves on the further course of negotiations. As early as February, Trump was assuring everyone that there may be a meeting between the presidents of the U.S. and Russia.

About 20,000 out of the 90,000 U.S. troops in Europe are stationed in Poland and Romania and (on a rotational basis) in the Baltic states. According to Hegseth, 8,000 of them are currently on the Vistula River. The first test for the Germans, French or British would be whether they would maintain their forces in our region, even if Trump and Putin agreed that they should not be here. Smith believes that Paris, London, or Berlin would lack the courage to do so.

However, it cannot be ruled out that the American retreat would be much larger and, in particular, include 30,000-40,000 soldiers stationed in Germany today. The state of relations between the Federal Republic and Washington can be evidenced by the fact that during the Munich security conference last weekend, Vice President JD Vance refused to meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, choosing instead to speak with the leader of the far-right AfD, Alice Weidel. What’s more, Trump recently mentioned the need to denuclearize the European continent. It is unclear whether this could be an announcement of American tactical nuclear and medium-range weapons being withdrawn from Europe.

Europe has recently begun to take the increase in defense spending seriously. However, catching up on several decades of backlog will take a long time. In a report recently leaked to the public, Danish intelligence warns that Russia could attack NATO in just five years if it concludes that America will not come to the aid of its European allies.

Germany, for the first time, does not exclude the issuance of EU debt to finance Europe’s weapons.

The latter still has huge deficiencies in armament. This is especially evident when it comes to air defense. The Europeans also have five times fewer aircraft capable of transferring military forces to the far front line of the fight. They lack medium- and long-range missiles. The shortcomings are particularly evident in command and communication systems.

Nearly 80% of the weapons currently being purchased by European NATO countries come from outside our continent, primarily from the U.S. In part, this is due to political decisions; before Trump, it was assumed that the purchased F-35 fighters or Abrams tanks also included security guarantees from Washington. But it was also about production capacity. Countries such as Poland, faced with the Russian threat, needed to replenish their arsenals quickly. Only the Americans and a few other countries, like South Korea, could guarantee this.

A particular challenge would be to fill the void left by U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. France and the U.K., the only nuclear powers in the western part of the continent, have a total of 545 nuclear missiles. But they don’t have tactical missiles. If Russia were to use such weapons on a battlefield, for example, in attacking Poland, would Paris and London decide to use strategic nuclear weapons and start a global war? It is doubtful.

However, the biggest challenge is building coherent armed forces from dozens of national armies. This was evident at the summit in Paris last Monday. Emmanuel Macron tried to convince everyone to reach an agreement on a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. This could have been a pass for Europeans to participate in negotiations between the U.S. and Russia to end the war. Unfortunately, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland did not support this project.

Nonetheless, there are greater hopes of agreeing on a broad program of support for Ukrainian armed forces and the European army in general. For the first time, Chancellor Scholz has shown some openness to the European Union issuing joint bonds for this purpose. Earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Brussels would agree to deduct defense investment from budget deficit estimates.