“Imagine a scenario in which an emboldened Putin fired a nuclear weapon on European territory … What would Trump and the US do then? No one knows. Not even Trump”, an ex-Nato official said.
Andrew Rettman
EUobserver voice is a daily opinion piece by EUobserver staff writers, published published every weekday evening as a newsletter.
Plans to cut American troops in Germany make Russia more dangerous to both Europe and the US, as Donald Trump continues to dismantle Nato deterrence.
“We’re going to cut … a lot further than 5,000,” soldiers from Germany, where the US has some 40,000 troops, said the US president on Saturday (2 May).
He has threatened similar moves against Italy, Spain, and the UK in revenge for their refusal to join his Iran war.
Trump also hiked tariffs on EU car imports in a further blow to transatlantic relations.
And he did it all via off-the-cuff remarks or social media posts, prompting Republican senators and MEPs to voice dismay.
“This is no way to treat close partners,” said German socialist MEP Bernd Lange, the EU Parliament’s trade committee chair.
Some of the most important US deployments in Europe are the 13,000 or so soldiers in Nato’s frontline, Russia-deterrent multinational battalions and in air-defence bases in the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania.
These were a physical guarantee of Nato’s Article V mutual-defence clause, no matter what Trump might say, because if Russia fired on them, the US would be forced to fire back, as retired Italian admiral Giampaolo Di Paola recently told me.
Right now, Russian president Vladimir Putin has his hands full trying to contain Ukraine’s drone fight-back.
But if Putin won the Ukraine war, Trump pulled US servicemen from eastern Europe, and Russia attacked a Baltic state, it would not end well for Nato, according to a wargame by ex-Nato officials.
Putin might even be tempted to fire a tactical nuclear warhead at a European military target on one of his hypersonic ‘Oreshnik’ missiles, if the EU also lost its US nuclear umbrella, according to British defence think-tank the Royal United Services Institute.
“We Europeans must take on more responsibility for our own security,” said German defence minister Oscar Pistorius, reacting to the US troop cuts.
Meanwhile, Trump also has his hands full with the Iran war, despite his talk of invading Cuba or Greenland.
But if he thought that pulling out of Europe would help avoid a US clash with Russia, or help him focus on containing China instead, then letting Putin run a rampage into Nato territory might well end in Trump getting dragged back into an even bigger war with Russia in Europe down the line, a retired Nato official previously told EUobserver .
“Imagine a scenario in which an emboldened Putin fired a nuclear weapon on European territory in order to gain a battlefield advantage in what had, up till then, been a conventional conflict. What would Trump and the US do then? No one knows. Not even Trump knows what he’d do until it happens and history is full of great wars which started in this way,” said Edgar Buckley, Nato’s former assistant secretary general for defence planning and operations.
