The U.S. has ordered the drawdown of roughly 5,000 troops from Germany, following through on President Donald Trump's threats to reduce the American military presence in the country, as tensions escalate over the war with Iran.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the withdrawal.
"This decision follows a thorough review of the department's force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground," Parnell said. "We expect the withdrawal to be completed over the next six to twelve months."
The Pentagon did not respond to specific questions about whether the personnel would be repositioned elsewhere in Europe and if the reduction affected rotational or permanently stationed forces.
The U.S. plans were first reported earlier Friday by CBS News, which cited senior defence officials it did not name. Those officials cast the move as a demonstration of the president's frustration with European allies who have balked at his calls to do more to assist the U.S. and Israel in their war on Iran, the report said.
Trump on Wednesday had said he was reviewing troop levels in Germany with an eye toward reducing those numbers. That announcement came just days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz questioned Trump's handling of the Iran war in unusually blunt terms, saying the administration was being "humiliated."
Some 35,000 troops — almost half the total of U.S. forces in Europe — are currently stationed in Germany, where the American command for the region is headquartered. The U.S. has relied heavily on its extensive network of bases and other facilities in Germany, a legacy of the Cold War, to prepare and launch operations against Iran.
Trump's order is likely to face opposition in Congress. His last attempt to remove forces from Germany in 2020 was blocked by legislative opposition.
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the president "should immediately reverse this foolish decision. Withdrawing thousands of American troops from one of our most important strategic positions in the middle of a war is a serious mistake that will reverberate well beyond this moment."
The move is Trump's latest challenge to the NATO alliance, whose other members he's long accused of not doing enough to pay for their own defence. More recently, he threatened to take Greenland from alliance partner Denmark and blasted allies for not doing more to help in the Iran campaign.
Trump has clashed publicly with Merz over the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the future of NATO. At the same time, Merz has led a huge increase in German defence spending, drawing praise from U.S. officials. Still, Merz's recent comments that the U.S. lacked a strategy for the war drew Trump's ire, triggering the threat to remove U.S. troops.
