By Xu Haiyun
According to recent media reports, the Pentagon is planning to withdraw 30% of its troops from Europe in the near term. Under this plan, approximately 20,000 US military personnel will be redeployed from the continent. This strategic move by the US is expected to have a significant impact on the current European strategic landscape.
Since his first presidential term, Donald Trump has frequently propagated the notion that NATO is "obsolete" and repeatedly pressured European member states to increase their defense spending. After beginning his second term, he returned to the same rhetoric. At the NATO summit in The Hague, he compelled European allies to pledge that their annual defense expenditures reach 5% of their GDP. US government officials have repeatedly urged European allies to achieve security autonomy as soon as possible. In April this year, the US withdrew approximately 10,000 troops from Eastern Europe. It is clear that the US is effectively implementing a strategic retrenchment in Europe, pushing European countries to assume greater security responsibilities.
Meanwhile, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has lasted for three and a half years. The US is reluctant to bear the pressures arising from Europe's geo-strategic competition and seeks to offload this burden by conducting a large-scale troop withdrawal from the continent. Donald Trump has also demanded that European allies take on more of the responsibility for supplying military aid to Ukraine, thereby exerting pressure on Russia and promoting negotiations aimed at a ceasefire agreement between Moscow and Kyiv.
Undoubtedly, the proposed 30% drawdown of US forces from Europe would constitute the largest adjustment to US military presence on the continent since WWII, inevitably triggering seismic repercussions to NATO's political and military dynamics as well as Europe's security architecture. The ripple effects warrant strategic vigilance.
Trump's maneuver to withdraw troops not only extends the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific to the so-called Indo-Pacific region but also seeks to project a more assertive military posture. It is evident that the US focus on Asia-Pacific affairs and its further promotion of the so-called major-country competition will become a normalized feature of future US strategy. This is not good news for the peace and development of the Asia-Pacific region.
Second, this troop withdrawal does not indicate that the US intends to completely exit Europe. Rather, it aims to pressure NATO into quickly assuming greater responsibility for defending the Europe. NATO has long served as a key instrument of the US to exert control over Europe. While the US bears enormous costs, it also gains the ability to effectively influence and manage its European allies, leveraging them to uphold its global hegemony. After the US withdrawal of 30% of its forces from Europe, NATO will have to rapidly adjust its established strategies to concentrate more manpower, financial resources, and material assets to quickly create a stronger and more unified military force. Such a force could stabilize Europe's security situation in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and provide effective military deterrence against Russia. However, it is not an easy task for NATO.
Moreover, the US troop withdrawal plan is likely to further undermine strategic trust between the US and Europe. In the future European security framework, while European countries may achieve greater strategic autonomy, the fundamental imbalance of a strong US and relatively weaker Europe will remain unchanged. European allies may accelerate the development of their military capabilities, but they will still be unable to fill the strategic vacuum left by the US. It is foreseeable that this move by the US will further weaken the European security architecture.
Whether the US troop withdrawal from Europe and its push to shift the strategic focus eastward will achieve the intended effect remains uncertain. The stubborn adherence of the US to unilateralism and cold war mentality in geopolitics, which pursues confrontation rather than cooperation, not only runs counter to the principal themes of the times for peace and development but also fails to adequately consider the actual security needs of the Asia-Pacific region and even completely disregards the security concerns of its European allies. All of these factors are likely to constrain the effectiveness of its withdrawal plan.
(The author is from Renmin University of China.)