President Donald Trump raised the prospect of pulling every American soldier out of Europe, one of the bluntest warnings he has yet aimed at the continent’s governments, delivering it in Ankara hours before the opening of the NATO leaders summit.
The remarks, first reported by the Financial Times, arrived alongside a revived American claim on Greenland, the Danish territory whose status has already produced thesharpest rupture in transatlantic relations in living memory.
Seated beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday, Trump put the matter plainly. “We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” he said. On the Arctic island he was equally direct. “It continues to be that [Greenland] should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.”
Trump’s push to acquire the territory from a treaty partner earlier this year rattled the eighty year old alliance, drew warnings of retaliatory trade measures, and produced a wave of solidarity among European capitals directed squarely at Washington. He again described the island as ringed by Chinese and Russian vessels.
He also drew a straight line from Greenland to his broader unhappiness with the alliance. “That’s what hurt my relationship with NATO, because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark. Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” he said.
American, Danish, and Greenlandic negotiators have met at the working level since January. Officials familiar with those sessions describe scant movement. Nato offered no immediate response to the president’s comments.
Roughly 80,000 American troops are currently posted across Europe. Allied governments treat that presence as the spine of continental defense, a standing deterrent and a physical guarantee that Washington would answer an attack. The size of that footprint is now under formal review. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a study last month covering six months of assessment work that could produce additional reductions. The Pentagon had already moved in May, announcing the removal of 5,000 troops from Germany and scrapping a planned battalion deployment armed with long range systems, Tomahawk missiles among them.
Trump also revealed that his requests for European backing during the recent conflict with Iran, now paused under a ceasefire while Washington and Tehran talk, were a deliberate probe. “I was testing to see whether or not they’d be there, because I’ve long said that we help them, but I’m not sure that they’d be there for us,” he said. Italy, Germany, and France, he added, “turned us down.”
“Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us, we’ve always been there for them?” Trump asked.
He told reporters he “was very disappointed with Nato,” and suggested his attendance had hinged on the venue. Were the summit convened somewhere other than Turkey, “where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended.”
Trump is right to say the quiet part out loud, but saying it is not the same as doing it, and the American people deserve to follow through rather than another round of leverage plays. NATO was built to contain a Soviet empire that ceased to exist thirty five years ago, and the alliance now survives as a subsidy program in which American taxpayers underwrite the defense of wealthy nations that decline to show up when Washington asks.
The United States should withdraw fully, bring the 80,000 home, and rebuild a defense posture centered on this hemisphere, where our actual borders, sea lanes, and vital interests lie.
Trump is right to say the quiet part out loud, but saying it is not the same as doing it, and the American people deserve to follow through rather than another round of leverage plays. NATO was built to contain a Soviet empire that ceased to exist 35 years ago, and the alliance now survives as a subsidy program in which American taxpayers underwrite the defense of wealthy nations that decline to show up when Washington asks.
The United States should withdraw fully, bring the 80,000 home, and rebuild a defense posture centered on this hemisphere, where our actual borders, sea lanes, and vital interests lie.
