Senate GOP quietly seeks to curb Trump troop moves from Europe

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Republicans in Congress are quietly trying to take back influence from the Trump administration when it comes to the U.S. role in NATO, as lawmakers seek to assert further control through legislation.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is moving to curb President Trump’s power to remove troops from Europe, as the White House reportedly plans to draw down its commitment of air support to European countries.

The annual defense policy bill contains several provisions that would prevent the Pentagon from using funds to reduce the number of American troops in Europe below 76,000 without providing Congress with a justification well beforehand. It comes as Trump has, in recent weeks, moved to cancel deployments of troops headed for Germany and Poland.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the panel, said Republicans on the committee backed those measures in the 1,500-page bill because they, too, want to keep supporting NATO with consistent American troops.

“All of us recognize the critical nature of NATO in terms of global stability, and many of the things the president is doing is undermining our relationship with NATO and our ability to deter the Russians,” Reed said. “We’re sending a clear signal … we have to maintain that posture to maintain peace.”

Trump has hammered NATO during his second term, questioning its value, threatening to leave the alliance and pulling U.S. troops from Germany over frustrations with the lack of European allies’ support for the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. It’s part of the administration’s broad argument that European nations are not investing enough in defense and have overly relied on U.S. military assistance.

While the House and Senate under Republicans have generally deferred to Trump in his second term, the recent efforts are an example of Armed Services Republicans seeking to reassert some influence on the U.S. commitment to NATO.

“It was not a controversial issue,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said. “It’s very well supported within Congress. We recognize how important it is to have a strong message to our NATO allies that we’re still good partners, and that what President Trump wanted from day one was to have them be even stronger partners and to contribute more to their own defense, and they’re doing that.”

There are other Republicans in the conference who are less eager to prop up Europe and more about giving Trump, or any president, the freedom to maneuver troops at his will.

Philippe Dickinson, deputy director with the Transatlantic Security Initiative (TSI) at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, said the pro-NATO Republicans are the “most vocal and least inhibited” among the conference, but there are others who align more with an isolationist bent, or Trump’s focus on combating China.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) is more in the latter category. He said Trump should have the ability to put forces where he deems them most necessary.

“He’s not gonna abandon Europe,” Tuberville said of Trump. “But there’s obviously places, like we probably got more people in Poland right now because of the Ukraine war, and when that starts to draw down, you gotta be able to move them out, move them somewhere, we might need more people in the Philippines, you know, or India, or South Korea, because our biggest adversary is China. We only have so many.”

In early May, the Pentagon, at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, canceled the long-planned deployment of 4,000 U.S. service members to Poland. The move sparked bipartisan fury in Congress and a week later, Trump announced that the U.S. would be sending 5,000 troops to Poland.

Nevertheless, the provisions in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act give U.S. allies hope that there is still a pro-NATO sentiment in the halls of Congress, irrespective of the defense burden-shifting, which is supported by both parties, said Jim Townsend, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy under former President Obama.

“I think what the Democrats would say, and what the Republicans are saying too, is we’ve got to do this as a transition and not just dump it on the Europeans and say good luck to you. And it’s because it’s going to take the European allies some time to actually have delivery of systems from, whether it’s the U.S. or from European industry, the delivery of systems that NATO needs to fulfill the war plans that they already have,” Townsend, now an adjunct senior fellow in the Center for a New American Security’s Transatlantic Security Program, said in an interview with The Hill.

Democrats, too, generally agree with Trump and Republicans that European countries should take responsibility for more of their own defense than they previously have, and say that the allies are now stepping up to do so.

“The European countries have to do more to support their own defense, they recognize that fact, and they are doing more,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “But we need to be an ally in providing the tools, whether it’s munitions or air defense or drone production. Europeans are becoming more and more of a power unto themselves, but we’re severely underestimating the value of friends.”

The U.S. informed European allies earlier this month that it would reduce the number of fighter jets and warships it would deploy for NATO operations in the early stages of a potential conflict, The New York Times reported. The planned drawdown includes reducing the number of F-16 and F-15E fighter planes from about 150 to 100, and P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft from 26 to 15. An aircraft carrier, a submarine and several warships will be relocated, along with a group of bombers assigned for the defense of Europe.

Dickinson said that European officials are worried that in the “short” to “medium” term, the planned drawdown will be “really damaging” — both in terms of “practical deterrence, but also the psychological effect of deterrence.”

“The erosion of trust and the erosion of alliance cohesion is, just as damaging, and in terms of what that signals to Europe’s adversaries, particularly Russia,” he said.

Townsend said there was talk about reducing U.S. commitment during the Obama administration and that now other alliance members will have to buy more aircraft, munitions and be at a higher state of readiness. But the lack of commitment still does not mean the U.S. will leave other NATO members hanging in case conflict erupts.

“That doesn’t mean that the US wouldn’t show up. I mean, it could be that if something happens, — and even though the US is not committed like we used to be to provide something — it’s so important to US national security that we go ahead and send it anyway,” Townsend said.

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