By Scott Taylor
Whoah! I remembered it again! Last Wednesday U.S. Secretary of Defence Mark Esper announced plans for the withdrawal of 12,000 American military personnel from their current bases in Germany. On July 29th, true to form, top cognitive genius tweeted.
For a man who has repeatedly claimed to be “the most militaristic person ever” Trump seems to have little real grasp on how this defence stuff actually works.
First of all, the U.S. presently has roughly 38,600 military personnel stationed on German sovereign soil.
Over the past decade the German taxpayers have spent over $1.1 billion U.S. (approximately $100 million annually) to accommodate these U.S. soldiers.
From the U.S. airbase at Ramstein the Americans conducted airstrikes during their 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war which Germany opposed. To this day Ramstein is used as a control center for deadly extra-judicial U.S drone strikes in Yemen and elsewhere.
Also troubling to many German citizens is the fact that the U.S. uses the German air force base at Buchel to house an estimated 20 American nuclear warheads.
The huge U.S. hospital facility at Landstuhl has also been the treatment center for U.S. and allied (including Canadians) wounded during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So Trump’s assertion that the U.S. military presence in Germany is solely to protect Germans from Russian aggression is patently false. Even after this current planned reduction, there will still be over 26,000 U.S. personnel on the ground. Ramstein will continue to coordinate drone strikes, Landstuhl will still treat battlefield casualties and the nuclear warheads will remain on German soil.
Of the 12,000 being withdrawn, the bulk of these troops will be re-positioned to other European countries such as Italy, Poland and the Baltic States. In other worlds, they will still be between the German citizenry and any hostile Russian aggressors.
As for the fact that Germany buys much of its oil and gas from Russia, how can that really bother Trump the capitalist when the U.S. imports most of its energy from Saudi Arabia? Enough said.
Which brings us to Trump’s other point that Germany is being “very delinquent in their 2% fee to NATO.”
For those who are not familiar with the structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it is a 28-country military alliance. It is not a golf and country club with annual membership “fees”.
What Trump is referring to stems from a NATO summit held in Wales in 2014. At that meeting member states agreed to set a goal of spending 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence.
In this regard Canada is also ‘delinquent’ in the eyes of Trump as just prior to the pandemic we spent slightly over 1.3% of our GDP on defence. This is an equivalent percentage to that spent by the recently ‘punished’ Germany pre-COVID19 crisis.
Many have argued that the arbitrary figure of 2% is meaningless as the GDP’s of the various members differ so greatly. For instance in 2019 Bulgaria, which has a relatively puny GDP, bought a total of eight F-16 fighter jets at a one time cost of $1.5 billion and this pushed their defence budget up to 3.25 percent of its economic output.
Only the U.S. spent a higher percentage at 3.4% GDP on defence, but that amount equals more than all other NATO members combined. For the record, Canada’s annual expenditure in actual dollars ranks us number six in spending within the alliance.
However, for those Canadian defence analysts that for the past five years have dutifully parroted the “2% GDP on Defence” party line – your wish might soon be granted.
In April alone Canada’s GDP shrunk by over 11% which means our defence budget climbed above the 1.5% mark. If our economy continues to tank, Trump will get his wish and Canada will soon be spending more than 2% GDP on defence.
Hell, it could be 3% by Christmas. If so, I can think of a few defence cheerleaders in Canada who can shut down their think tanks and leave a ‘mission-accomplished’ sign on the door.
