Years ago, I wrote an article about my high school eighth period Social Studies teacher, Edwin Lemkin. Mr. Lemkin was that rare educator who exerts a powerful influence on one long after the classes end. As I'm now older than Mr. Lemkin was when I had him for a teacher, it still amazes me to this day at how prescient he was, how good of an instructor he was way back in the 70s.
To this day, I still recall little pearls of wisdom uttered by Mr. Lemkin as he perambulated throughout the classroom like a modern-day Socrates as I sat in my second row chair, one row from the door (Yes, I still remember the seating arrangements of every class I''d attended in senior year).
And one thing Mr. Lemkin said that always stuck with me was when he said the Soviet Union's worst nightmare was a unified Germany. The unification of Germany was still about 14 years off but Lemkin's assertion was that the Soviets were so terrified of Nazi Germany that they had no wish to see a reprise of the Third Reich or any modern-day analog.
Well, half a century later, the Soviet Union is no more. Germany is unified and there's no more East and West Germany. Checkpoint Charlie is a distant memory, the wall fell and geopolitics has changed dramatically since Jimmy Carter's presidency. But memories, even second-hand memories, persist.
And that brings us to the present day.
Putin may or may not be spooked by a unified Germany but we all know one thing that does: A unified NATO. NATO, as we all know, or should, was created in the first years after WWII to prevent Europe from getting invaded by a dictator like Hitler. Or Putin.
Vladimir Putin has made little secret of his intention to invade western Europe and rebuild the Old Soviet Union. He's already invaded Ukraine, Europe's largest nation, twice and had stolen Crimea 12 years ago. This is why Putin is so militant and belligerent about Ukraine joining NATO. If Ukraine became a NATO nation, then the current hostilities between them and Russia would automatically trigger Article 5, which means all the other member nations would have to take up arms against a nuclear state. This is the exact reason why NATO is slow-walking Ukraine's membership. They're twiddling their thumbs waiting for Putin to leave and he just isn't going to do that. Ever. Win, lose or draw.
Just announcing that we were looking into ways to go about doing that sent Germany into a state of panic. We've had a steady presence in Germany since the first days after the second world war. My own father was stationed in West Germany in the early-mid 60s. As with our troop presence in South Korea, having an American military presence in Germany is a deterrent that all but guarantees Russia wouldn't encroach.
But Trump's threat to pull our troops from Germany alarmed not only Germany but even the Pentagon. Trump had threatened to pull American troops out of South Korea during his slap fight with Kim Jong Un about 9 years ago (although it's difficult if not outright impossible to see how removing US troops from South Korea was supposed to act as a check on the North Korean dictator).
It may surprise one to learn that we have 40 military installations in German at present (two are scheduled to be decommissioned) and that at one point we had 220. Reducing troop presence in Germany is not a new thing for Trump. In June 2020, he started making some noises about doing so (obviously with an eye toward pleasing Putin).
As of 2025, our troop strength in Germany was 34,547, more than all the other European nations combined (30,474). Removing over 34,000 troops from Germany would be tantamount to rolling out the red carpet for Putin.
So why is Trump threatening to do this? Well, his stated reason was that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the US has been "humiliated" at the negotiating table by Iran (which we were, an inevitable outcome when you send to the negotiating table a fake hillbilly and two real estate developers). We all know Trump is famously thin-skinned about even tepid criticism from our allies. But there's something else afoot. Per Politico, emphasis mine:
"Trump’s initial post came hours after he spoke by phone with Russian
President Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to reduce the number of
NATO troops in Europe. And it occurred as Germany’s Chief of Defence,
Gen. Carsten Breuer, wrapped up a day of meetings with U.S. officials in
Washington to discuss Berlin’s new defense strategy."
Of course he's sought to reduce NATO troops in Europe. That's because NATO is doing its job as a bulwark against Russian aggression. This is why Trump's been bad-mouthing NATO for a decade, why he's been threatening to pull out of the alliance.
And every time he does, Putin smiles. Trump is the only world "leader", for want of a better word, who has the power to destroy the NATO alliance. If we leave and take our funding with us, it'll effectively be the end of NATO and Trump knows it. Trump is Putin's perfectly-placed stooge who can single-handedly open up all of western Europe to Putin and his global ambitions.
And don't think for a minute Putin will show the slightest amount of gratitude. This is the guy who put bounties on the heads of our troops in Afghanistan and shared information with Iran about our men and women in the Middle East.
