Trump's Germany troops pullout may be his last gift to Putin before the election

edition.cnn.com

6 points·dmch-1··6 comments

Good. World's 4th biggest economy should be able to defend itself.

Especially one surrounded by allies, many of which are top 10 world economies. This should have been done in the 1990s as bases were closing in the United States.

This misses the point that American bases in Europe serve American interests.

Europe has nothing to fear from Russia. Looking back at history and how both sides compare demographically and economically it's rather the other way round, and that's one of the reasons why Russia has a huge stockpile of nukes (and also why they always try to derail European integration and rooted for Brexit).

The current 'arrangement' with the US allows Europe not to spend much on defence, which suits political agendas and public opinions, but the price is that the US are in control. This is obviously worth a lot to the US. There's a much bigger picture than the narrow accounting side of military presence.

You may want to inquire about stolen territory by Russia in places like Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. They no longer fear. It's just stolen. Poles fear still, Belarus does too, so do people in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and Russians have all kinds of territorial claims and festering wounds that they continue to claim as their own.

The 'arrangement' was to be that Nato members spend 2% of their GDP on defence, which they are not though.

The US presence in Germany is primarily about projecting US power.

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