Bunker Boy has a new tantrum over Angela Merkel

Bunker Boy's administration is playing more games with Germany and NATO, as Alexander Smith and Courtney Kube report for NBC News in U.S. to withdraw almost 12,000 troops from Germany in sweeping reorganization 07/29/2020:

The Trump administration announced plans Wednesday to withdraw almost 12,000 troops from Germany, a sweeping continentwide reorganization that has provoked bipartisan congressional opposition and widespread dismay in Europe.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told a Pentagon briefing that the move would benefit Washington's strategic interests abroad, strengthening NATO and deterring Russia, and equipping the military for "a new era of great power competition."

But President Donald Trump has previously offered a different explanation, suggesting the planned drawdown is punishment for his long-standing complaint that Germany does not spend enough on its military.

I know what rightwing, America First isolationism is, i.e., extreme nationalism and militarism, so I've never expected Bunker Boy to actually have dovish policies, except by total accident. This is another idiotic move, that Trump justifies on the basis that NATO is a protection racket and Germany is behind on their payments.

"The announcement of a massive reduction of the number of American troops in Germany is Trump's revenge on Angela Merkel. There are few heads of government who are as opposed to him as the Chancellor," writes Konstantin von Hammerstein (Trumps Rache an Merkel Spiegel Online 07/29/2020; my translation from the German).

Expecting European countries to move quickly to deal with obvious problems is usually a bad bet. But it might be possible in the (relatively) near term to come up with a more coherent definition of what NATO should be . It's always been basically an anti-Russia alliance, so making it a jumping-off point for bonehead US interventions in the Middle East or Africa is probably not the best idea.

But after the Bunker Boy experience, can any European government really believe the US would go to war with Russia if Putin decided to take a piece of Estonia? Estonia is a NATO member, though Trump probably couldn't identify it as a country, much less find it on an unlabeled map. In any case, Russia is an overstretched regional power that also has the blessing/curse of being a petrostate.

Refounding NATO is probably too much to expect in any immediate future.

But hoping for better algebra isn't too big a stretch. This 2% of GDP goal for military spending is a typical lazy diplomatic marketing move. As NBC reports, "Belgium and Italy, where some American headquarters and troops would be redeployed under the plan, spend even less on defense than Germany in relation to the size of their respective economies."

Russia was spending around 4% or so of its GDP on the military in 2019. (Siemon Wezeman, Russia’s military spending: Frequently asked questions SIPRI (04/27/2020).

But its GDP is basically the size of Italy's, depending on the exchange rates on any given day. Germany and France together have more-or-less the same size military as Russia, and France even has nukes. What percent of GDP countries are spending is all-but-meaningless for the comparison. Europe's problem isn't the GDP % they spend, it's the fact that they don't have a coordinated European force except for NATO, which Bunker Boy is wrecking.

What does Trump's withdrawal of US troops mean for Germany and NATO? Deutsche Welle 07/30/2020: