WASHINGTON – President Biden is freezing plans to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany, government officials said on Thursday, and ordered the Pentagon to conduct a review of how American forces are positioned around the world.
The move would disrupt a plan by the Trump administration – which many national security experts considered punitive – to bring some American troops from Germany home and transfer other units to Belgium and Italy. This plan, which emerged last summer, angered European leaders and angered Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who see the presence of American troops in Europe, and especially in Germany, as the cornerstone of the post-World War II order.
The freeze on the withdrawal of Biden’s troops, announced on Thursday by Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, prior to the president’s visit to the State Department also accompanies what Sullivan called “a review of the posture of global strength”.
The freeze is in line with a series of measures the new president has taken in the past two weeks to undo former President Donald J. Trump’s Pentagon initiatives. Biden also ended his predecessor’s ban on transgender troops serving in the armed forces and, through Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, purged from the Pentagon’s advisory councils several dozen members appointed in the last days of the Trump administration. The Biden government also announced on Thursday that it was interrupting American support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
The top American commander in Europe signaled the review in comments to reporters on Wednesday, when he said Austin was “in the process of conducting a very, very thorough review” of Trump’s withdrawal plan.
“The new administration has comfortably stated to us that we need to carry out a thorough review, from cradle to grave, in all areas,” said General Tod D. Wolters, head of the United States European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe. . at a press conference in Mons, Belgium. After the review, he said: “let’s go back to the drawing board”.
In announcing Trump’s plans last summer, his deputies at the Pentagon tried to portray them as a necessary redesign. But that effort was undermined by Trump himself when he complained – at the same time that his government announced withdrawal – that Germany was, in his words, “delinquent” in its military spending.
The withdrawal announcement last summer surprised German officials and even some American military officials, who have long considered the presence of American troops in Germany as the foundation of their commitment to NATO.
A Defense Department official said on Thursday that it was not clear whether Biden had adjusted troop levels in Somalia. In one of the last Pentagon-related acts under his presidency, Trump ordered 700 American soldiers who were training and advising their Somali counterparts in the battle against Shabab in East Africa to leave Somalia. On January 17, the Pentagon announced in a brief statement that the withdrawal of American troops from Somalia was complete.
Many of these troops simply moved to nearby Kenya.
Biden must also decide what to do with the remaining 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump last year struck a deal with the Taliban calling for the withdrawal of American troops by May 1, but that withdrawal depends on the Taliban fulfilling its own commitment to end violence in the country.