For many observers, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s speech on the future of NATO, delivered in Brussels on June 18, 2026, constituted a perfect example of how the Trump administration is angrily abandoning the longstanding U.S. commitment to European security. The prevailing picture is that the administration is eager to shift the burden of Europe’s defense and is thus moving to withdraw U.S. forces from the continent, even though Europe is moving to do more militarily. Hegseth stated, “we’re doubling down on our effort to make NATO what it always was supposed to be, a balanced alliance with Europe in the lead for its own defense,” and announced that “to ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading,” the administration would conduct a “real review” of “America’s force posture and basing in Europe.”
For the legions of observers deeply critical of the Trump administration’s purported embrace of isolationism, the speech was yet another lamentable event. In particular, it has left them deeply concerned about the coming NATO summit in Ankara, as they fear the United States will take further steps down the isolationist road.
The Trump administration does indeed have the wrong approach in Europe, but not because it pushes to withdraw from Europe. Rather, the real issue is that the administration is not serious about disengaging from the continent. Yes, the administration is trimming around the edges of U.S. commitments, and it is doing so punitively. But the main thrust of Trump’s policy in Europe remains an extortive exchange: trading an extension of the U.S. presence for defense spending pledges that he can celebrate as landmark achievements, even though they are of dubious strategic value. If the past is any indication, odds are that the U.S. delegation will arrive in Ankara for the forthcoming summit proclaiming the need to radically rethink the alliance and threatening a vast array of force posture changes and other adjustments, but will ultimately do little to meaningfully alter the U.S. role in European security.
Instead of issuing demands to European allies and leaving U.S. force posture in Europe essentially intact, the United States would be better off politely announcing a planned withdrawal of its combat forces from Europe — not as punishment for disloyalty on Iran or for failing to fulfill spending pledges, but because it best serves U.S. interests. U.S. security does not require anything like the more than 80,000 troops stationed there, regardless of whether Europe increases its own effort. The coming NATO summit in early July represents a genuine opportunity to abandon the “dealmaking” strategy Trump has championed to date, and to implement a real change in policy — specifically, to take meaningful steps towards a retrenchment from the continent — that will leave Americans better off and more secure by ending the costly subsidization of European security efforts and sharply reducing entanglement risks.
Confrontation and Confusion
The second Trump administration has seen regular rhetorical assaults on European allies and the U.S. defense mission there. Well before his most recent speech, Hegseth charged that Europe had turned the United States from “Uncle Sam into ‘Uncle Sucker’” by not paying its fair share for defense, while Vice President J.D. Vance attacked modern European culture at the Munich Security Conference and the most recent National Security Strategy lamented Europe’s “civilizational erasure.” That was all before the president’s renewed threats to seize Greenland brought transatlantic relations to new lows.
Most recently, Trump threatened to quit NATO over allies’ lukewarm support for the war in Iran and mused about ways to punish especially recalcitrant allies like Spain. After the German chancellor had the temerity to say Iran’s leadership had humiliated the United States by outsmarting U.S. officials at the negotiation table, Trump swiftly announced he would be withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, and that this would just be the start of more cuts to come.
There followed a confusing series of events: a report that the administration was reducing the forces set to react to a crisis in Europe, the cancellation of the rotational deployment of a long-range fires battalion that the Biden administration had agreed to deploy to Germany, and the Pentagon’s cancellation of a brigade combat team’s rotation to Poland, followed by Trump’s immediate reversal of that cancellation on the grounds that he is a fan of Poland’s new conservative president.
This all nets out to a mild reduction of U.S. forces in Europe, with somewhat less firepower. But the overall direction of U.S. policy is uncertain, to say the least, even for insiders. One defense official recently complained, “we don’t know what this means either.” The easy conclusion is that the president, after some stops and starts, is acting out his isolationist impulse without any real strategic thought beyond punishing European allies.
Illiberal Hegemony at Work
While Trump’s approach to Europe is certainly whimsical, there is nonetheless a dominant logic at play that has little to do with reducing U.S. burdens in Europe. That logic is not retrenchment or even isolationism, but “illiberal hegemony,” where the aim is not reducing or ending U.S. military hegemony, but extracting higher rents for it.
Since the beginning of his second term, Trump’s Europe policy has centered on a clear threat: If you don’t do more, we’ll start doing less and begin pulling forces from Europe. But this threat also implies a promise: Do more in the way we want — like pledging to spend more on defense and buying American defense products — and we’ll stick around. Even Hegseth’s confrontational speech last year contained the assurance that if the Europeans were to finally take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, they would find that “the American military and the American people stand beside you.”
This logic can be hard to discern, as it is mingled with other agendas at play within this administration, and even within the president’s thinking. First, Trump is motivated to reward governments he sees as loyal to him and to punish those that are not. This impulse likely drives the recent flurry of announcements, but, as it seems to operate in the short term, may not produce lasting policy effects. Hegseth’s announced review, which seems to link continued U.S. support not only to European nations meeting their spending pledges, but to their level of support for the war in Iran, may test how far this punitive effort will go.
Second, there is a group of officials, centered in the Pentagon policy office and the vice president’s staff and often characterized as “retrenchers” or “prioritizers,” who want to reduce U.S. force structure in Europe and to let the allies take responsibility for Europe’s conventional security. These advocates of retrenchment have won what, on a generous reading, amount to a few small victories — like cutting a rotational deployment to Romania — and seem to have recently tried to convert the president’s anger over Iran into a real agenda for force reduction. So far, their efforts have produced little meaningful change beyond the surface. In the aggregate, and where it really matters, they’ve seemingly lost out in internal political battles, with the Poland affair being the latest example.
The Europeans have seized this opportunity to secure a continuation of the U.S. troop presence. Most notably, at last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, members pledged to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on defense and an additional 1.5 percent on related infrastructure.
These spending pledges, coupled with bilateral commitments to buy American defense products, seem to have had the desired effect: Trump called the Hague declaration a “monumental win,” and it is likely no coincidence that the subsequent National Defense Strategy, at least in its public version, did not come with a concrete plan to reduce force structure in Europe, as many had initially expected.
Some might argue that this implicit bargain has already fallen apart, that Trump’s persistent rhetorical outbursts and threats to pull troops on a whim have made European leaders realize the unreliability of U.S. commitments. But European foreign policy officials have made their careers servicing the transatlantic habit, and their instinct, by and large, is to try to bide their time until the end of Trump’s tenure in the hope of witnessing a return to what they deem the “natural” status quo. On the other side of the Atlantic, the war against Iran and the president’s anger about the limited support he received from European states might fade into the past, meaning that even the limited punitive energy animating the new Pentagon review will dissipate and quell any momentum for a change in force posture.
The Art of the (Bad) Deal
The real problem is that the deal was never a good one for the United States to begin with. European defense spending, let alone mere pledges to engage in it, is of little worth to Americans as it is unlikely to lead to a reduction in U.S. burdens.
There is no guarantee that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and various other European leaders will fulfill the much-applauded spending pledges, as they confront significant domestic resistance to the rearmament agenda they have come to champion. With elections looming large, they face strong incentives to avoid heavy defense spending for the time being.
Even if they were to nominally fulfill their spending promises, however, odds are they will do so in a way that ultimately does little to increase Europe’s ability to defend itself. For one thing, European leaders will be tempted to meet their publicly declared spending targets — which, again, require them to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on defense as well as 1.5 percent on defense infrastructure — through accounting gymnastics, such as when Italy considered counting toward its defense infrastructure spending goal the construction of a $16 billion bridge from Sicily to the Italian mainland. For another, given Europe’s continued lack of unity in military matters, the various national defense spending increases will split into dozens of pieces, most of which are too small to matter. Thus, even in the best-case scenario, the spending pledges Trump’s exhortative approach yields do little to benefit U.S. national security.
Switching Gears
Instead of continuing the present dealmaking approach to U.S. force posture in Europe, the president should use the coming NATO summit to switch gears and embrace a policy that would, in fact, further U.S. interests: a real, not just threatened, retrenchment from the continent.
So far, the administration seems to agree with European officials that this is a strategic impossibility. Given the severity of the Russian threat to Europe, they argue, the United States cannot disentangle itself from the continent until European capabilities have grown so they can balance Russia’s power on their own. The logical conclusion: U.S. retrenchment will only become possible once NATO-Europe significantly increases its capabilities from current levels.
This assumption, evidently guiding policymaking on both sides of the Atlantic, is mistaken, as it inflates the threat Russia poses beyond Ukraine. There is limited evidence that Russia would ever brave the prospect of nuclear escalation by attacking a NATO state — on the contrary, Russia remains cautious on this front despite the major conventional risks it has taken in Ukraine. Even leaving aside nuclear threats, there is little indication of Russian interest in a campaign of empire restoration, Vladimir Putin’s grandiose speeches notwithstanding. Instead, a plausible explanation for Russia’s decision to attack in both 2014 and 2022 is that it sought to keep Ukraine out of the Western sphere.
Even if this were wrong, and Russia was gearing up to take the fight to NATO after Ukraine, the war should be curative. Not only has the Kremlin failed to achieve its ambitions while facing wide sanctions and condemnation, but it has also lost vast stores of equipment and perhaps half a million casualties. Most analysts think it will take five to 10 years for Russia to reconstitute its military after the war in Ukraine ends. Russian leaders may not admit so publicly, but it increasingly looks as if the war was a mistake they will be loath to repeat.
Intentions are notoriously changeable, so perhaps after a period of recovery, Russia might be more aggressive toward NATO states. But even in that circumstance, severe capability shortfalls should limit the Russian threat. For one, it is not clear that a period of peace and reconstitution will allow Russia to fix the problems its military manifested in Ukraine, including in morale, and combining arms and extending supply lines.
Less appreciated is the fact that the Russo-Ukrainian War revealed defensive advantages in modern warfare that would still hobble any Russian offensive, even if it were to recover its pre-war strength. Drones and more traditional surveillance systems reveal attacks to defenders with newfound clarity, and Ukraine shows how that information is useful for rapidly and precisely targeting fires — artillery, missiles, and attack drones — allowing a smaller footprint of military personnel to protect the front lines. Air-defense systems, and man-portable air-defense systems in particular, make it increasingly treacherous for aircraft to give advancing forces close air support. For both sides, massing forces to achieve breakthroughs has become prohibitively costly. These technological shifts benefit NATO and its defensive plans. Thanks to the NATO forces already stationed in the Baltics — which include British and French units in Estonia, a multinational brigade in Latvia, and a permanent German armored tank brigade expanding its footprint in Lithuania — as well as the ongoing construction of the Baltic Defense Line, even these most vulnerable European states are capable of offering a credible defense against Russia, inflicting enough damage to make the prospect of aggression unappealing, especially given the aforementioned nuclear escalation risk.
Leaving aside Ukraine and Russia’s ability to recover from its war losses, non-U.S. NATO has key power advantages that Russia cannot easily overcome: It has over 30 percent more active manpower, not to mention reserves, plus 10 times Russia’s GDP at market exchange rates and considerably greater military spending (adjusting for purchasing power), even before pledged increases.
Of course, Europe’s political divisions make these European figures hard to compare directly to Russia’s, and European forces remain dependent on key U.S. enablers when it comes to actually going places and fighting. Of particular importance in this regard are airlift platforms; aerial refueling; command and control; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability, especially from space. But presenting such current deficiencies as a reason for the United States to remain has the logic backwards: The only scenario in which NATO-Europe has a real incentive to close any of these gaps, as opposed to making spending pledges, is one in which the United States ceases to serve as Europe’s primary security guarantor. For as long as Uncle Sam is there to bail them out, even a sustained Russian resurgence would do little to get the Europeans to embark on a sustained, unified, and therefore meaningful effort. The fact that even the largest and deadliest conventional war in Europe since World War II was not enough to inspire a serious European commitment to rearmament is telling. It is only since Trump’s sustained threats about troop withdrawals that officials in Europe have seriously explored the future of continental defense and the question of what responsibilities they will have to shoulder. In the absence of incipient fears about U.S. abandonment, it is more than doubtful whether Merz, Macron, and others would have shown any willingness to at least publicly champion the need for greater defense spending.
Another common argument is that while the threat of a full-on Russian invasion of a major NATO member might be limited, the real danger is in more limited gray-zone attacks, including cyberattacks, industrial sabotage or drone incursions, or a fait accompli designed to seize a chunk or all of a Baltic state and thereby demonstrate the emptiness of collective defense threats under the NATO treaty, rendering it effectively null.
As far as the gray zone goes, the argument is not so much wrong as misplaced. Gray-zone threats are less a result of deterrence failure than its success: They are a way of doing something when conventional means of aggression are deterred. That means they are no more likely to occur under a phased U.S. withdrawal than they are with increased U.S. deployments. And from a U.S. perspective, such acts are not consequential or corrosive to deterring real war. Targeted states may seek to stop continued gray-zone activities, and the United States might consider helping them, but the question of whether that is worth the effort has little bearing on the need for conventional U.S. forces in Europe.
As for a Russian fait accompli attempt in the Baltics, the lack of an obvious payoff, the dangers of escalation, and the difficulties Russia has faced in prosecuting a war in Ukraine that it expected to be easy, make this quite unlikely. In any event, this opportunity has stood before Russia since the Baltics joined NATO two decades ago. Given the lack of forces there to stop them, it appears as if those states’ ability to hold the line long enough for allies to reinforce them, coupled with the threat of nuclear escalation and the likely limited Russian interest in attacking in the first place, prevented land seizures. It’s true that fewer U.S. troops and a reduced political commitment could make such moves somewhat more palatable to Russia, but this is a difference of degree, not type. From a U.S. perspective, the slightly increased risk in areas with little strategic relevance is worth running for the substantial benefits of a drawdown in troops.
A Better Way Forward
Instead of treating Europe stepping up its defense efforts as a precondition for any troop withdrawals — the angry bargaining model — the Trump administration should shift to polite retrenchment and make clear that it is a coming reality, not a negotiating stance. That means a scheduled withdrawal of most U.S. conventional forces according to a clear and deliberate plan that gives Europeans time to adjust as they see fit.
At least for now, the key to this plan is not its details but the announcement of and political commitment to its existence, coupled with clear communication that the plan is not contingent on European spending levels, who Europeans opt for in their domestic elections, fealty to Trump’s agenda, or anything else of the sort. Expectations of a future return should also be nipped in the bud: Unless the geopolitical situation changes drastically — think a massive uptick in the Russian threat combined with a steep loss of European latent power — the plan is for the United States to make no return to the continent.
The U.S. withdrawal outlined here is meant to be deliberate, thorough, and gradual rather than abrupt, to give Europeans ample time for the adjustments they may choose to make if they deem them necessary. This is one reason the plan we lay out extends beyond the Trump administration’s term. The other, cautiously optimistic one, is the hope that this approach comes to be championed as an American one rather than something to be abandoned once Trump is gone. If Trump leaves office having meaningfully revised U.S. force posture in Europe and, as we expect, there prove to be a few downsides, future administrations seeking a return to today’s status quo will face a significant burden of proof.
This plan would remove most of the conventional teeth that the U.S. military deploys to Europe today. These include the forces in Germany scheduled for withdrawal (effectively the 2nd Cavalry regiment) as well as the definitive cancellation of the brigade rotation to Poland. That would leave essentially one brigade combat team (the 173rd Airborne Brigade), which the administration should schedule for withdrawal before the end of Trump’s term. Within this time frame (removing forces within essentially two and a half years), the Pentagon should further remove three of its seven fighter squadrons from Europe, that is, one each from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Washington should schedule the remaining four for removal in two additional phases (by 2030 and 2032), as well as the removal within two years of the U.S. destroyers deployed to Spain since 2014, which primarily provided ballistic missile defense.
The United States would also bring its B-61 nuclear gravity bombs and Air Force support units home by 2028. European leaders value the presence of these weapons as a reliable indicator of the fact that the United States remains committed to Europe and would surely come to their aid if push came to shove. The presumption of that commitment is exactly what this plan aims to undermine. The United States would continue to extend nuclear deterrence to European allies under the NATO Treaty for the duration of this plan, but the idea is that U.S. nuclear protection would become less credible with reductions in U.S. combat forces, as it would remove possible tripwires and likely lead to doubt about Washington’s resolve to retaliate against an attack. This might lead Europeans to pursue a genuine Europeanization of nuclear deterrence based on existing French and British arsenals, to support German nuclear weapons, to rely more on conventional deterrence, to do more to accommodate Russia, or to do none of the above out of a general sense of safety. All of the outcomes are fine from a U.S. perspective.
The remaining forces would be focused on logistics, air mobility, missile defense, special operations, and command — much of the key enabling capability on which European forces depend. While something might be said for a shock approach that deliberately removes much of this first to encourage its quick replacement, especially while Russia remains depleted by Ukraine, this plan would leave this enabling infrastructure there initially and remove missile defense units, airlift, and refueling aircraft, and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance between 2028 and 2032.
The logic here is that the phased removal of U.S. forces would indicate the intent to remove these enablers next, allowing them to remain while European states either build sufficient replacements, or decide to forgo doing so if they do not perceive enough of a threat. Bases for access and naval presence, like the Sixth Fleet headquarters in Naples, should be left for even later, the idea being that the ability to surge forces into convenient places should be one of the last things to go in the last four years of the plan (between 2032 and 2036).
Concerns about Europe’s safety during this transition period are overblown. As we have argued above, for the moment and for the immediate future, Russia constitutes no significant threat. As for the future, generally, even in the worst-case scenario in which Russia reconstitutes to the point that it represents a genuine threat to Europe beyond Ukraine, current Russian weakness provides the Europeans with a years-long window to make the necessary adjustments for a world in which U.S. troops no longer carry the burden of European security. Put briefly, if circumstances require, the Europeans will have enough time to fully embrace strategic autonomy and increase collective capacities to deter Russia — and the absence of American troops means they will have every incentive to balance accordingly.
Then again, it might also turn out that the deeply pessimistic predictions of a Russia capable of and intent on challenging Europe beyond Ukraine inflated the threat emanating from Moscow. In either case, a withdrawal will have left the United States better off. Either its departure will create the necessary incentives for a unified, meaningful move towards lessened European dependence, or it will reveal that the U.S. troop presence was not necessary to safeguard American interests in Europe in the first place.
Benjamin H. Friedman is policy director at Defense Priorities.
Moritz S. Graefrath is the Wick Cary assistant professor of international security at the University of Oklahoma and nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities.
Image: Spc. Josephine Malloy via DVIDS
