How Germany May Have Misjudged Trump’s Anger on Iran
Germany had appeared not to believe President Trump’s threats to pull troops from the country. Once it was announced, Berlin offered a measured response.
As President Trump fired off a series of social media posts criticizing Germany this past week, including a threat to pull some American troops from the country, German leaders showed no public signs that they believed the president was serious.
That now appears to have been a miscalculation — one of several that German leaders have made in the course of Mr. Trump’s war against Iran — but most likely not a catastrophic one for German security.
Pentagon officials said on Friday that they planned to relocate 5,000 troops from Germany to the United States and around the world within the next year.
Officials in the United States and Germany suggested that the decision had been in the works at the political level for months, as part of a broader Pentagon review of its troop levels worldwide, but the announcement had been significantly accelerated to appease a president angered by German criticism of American strategy in Iran.
Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, called the move “foreseeable” in a statement on Saturday morning that was otherwise unyielding.
“The presence of American troops in Europe, and especially in Germany, is in our interest and in the interest of the United States,” Mr. Pistorius said. He also said that Europeans must continue taking more responsibility for their own security.
On Saturday evening, however, Mr. Trump appeared to double down on the step back from Europe. Asked by reporters about the troop withdrawal from Germany, he said, “We are going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.”
Mr. Trump has lashed out at Germany and other European countries for not helping more with the Iran war effort, as he has demanded. And the president has chafed at criticism of his handling of the war and suggestions that the American effort had not succeeded.
On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told German high school students that the United States had “no strategy” to end the war and that Iran’s negotiators had “humiliated” the entire American nation.
The Pentagon is preparing to withdraw a combat brigade that was stationed in Germany after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and that was never guaranteed to remain there. It will also no longer follow through on a Biden administration plan to station a medium-range missile battalion in Germany. The net result, if those plans are followed, will be a return to the level of U.S. troops based in Germany before the war in Ukraine began.
In Washington on Saturday, the decision to remove troops drew unusual pushback from Republican leaders in Congress. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the heads of the Armed Services Committees in their respective chambers, issued a statement saying that they were “very concerned by the decision to withdraw a U.S. brigade from Germany.”
They defended Germany, asserting that it had stepped up its military investment “in response to President Trump’s call for greater burden sharing,” and said that “prematurely reducing America’s forward presence in Europe” would send the wrong signal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
German officials privately made clear that the proposed withdrawals could have been significantly worse, from their point of view, and that their response to the announcement would be measured. The famously mercurial Mr. Trump could always change his mind.
Before Friday’s announcement, the Pentagon had not warned German leaders that a troop announcement was imminent. The consensus view in German politics appeared to be that Mr. Trump was most likely bluffing. He had tried, and failed, to remove some of America’s roughly 35,000 troops from Germany at the end of his first term in office. He would need congressional approval to move troops from Europe now.
In March, when Mr. Merz visited Mr. Trump in Washington, the chancellor told reporters in a German-language news conference that the president “has also assured me not just today, but once again, that the United States will maintain its military presence in Germany.”
German leaders were also confident that the Trump administration needed that German military presence. Unlike some other European allies, Germany had allowed America to help launch attacks on Iran from bases inside Germany’s borders. It has continued to allow injured Americans to be treated in a major American hospital on German soil that has for decades hosted Americans injured in wars including in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Germany’s quiet nonchalance about the possibility of a troop withdrawal was reflected again this past week.
Mr. Merz has offered no public apologies or retreat from his seemingly off-the-cuff comments at the high school.
On Thursday, Mr. Merz, who invested heavily in building a rapport with Mr. Trump over the past year, told German soldiers in the city of Munster that “we maintain close and trusting contact with our partners, including and especially in Washington.” He stressed the relationship with Washington was one of mutual respect and fair sharing of security burdens.
“This trans-Atlantic partnership is especially important to us, and to me personally,” he said.
Mr. Merz’s vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, raised tensions further on Friday.
In a May Day speech, Mr. Klingbeil defended Mr. Merz from the president’s broadsides. “We really don’t need any advice from Donald Trump right now,” Mr. Klingbeil said. “He should see the mess he’s made” with the war, he added.
Mr. Klingbeil leads the center-left Social Democrats, the junior partner in a governing coalition led by Mr. Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats. He has been more critical of Mr. Trump in the past than Mr. Merz has. He had also been traveling with Mr. Merz in Munster, and has been in close consultation with him over a host of domestic issues recently.
Mr. Trump has consistently surprised German leaders with his conduct in the war. After Mr. Merz met with the president in March, some officials came away convinced that the conflict would not last long because Mr. Trump was already expressing concerns over the economic effects of war-related energy price spikes.
Instead, Mr. Trump persisted with attacks even after gasoline and natural gas prices rose sharply from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
German officials also believed they had found a sort of compromise with the president over his demands that Europe send military assets to secure the strait and make it safe for shipping again.
Mr. Merz said repeatedly that Germany would join such a security effort, including by sending minesweepers, but only on two conditions: Germans wanted a permanent cease-fire, as opposed to the temporary one currently in place. And to comply with the German Constitution, they wanted the effort to have the blessing of an international body, like the United Nations or the European Union.
That appears not to have been enough for Mr. Trump. On Friday, a Pentagon official did not cite only Mr. Merz’s comments as a reason to pull back troops. The official also cited Germany’s failure to contribute to the Iran war effort itself.
Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin, and Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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