The Obama administration has decided to remove two of the four U.S. Army brigades remaining in Europe as part of a broader effort to cut $487 billion from the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade, said senior U.S. officials.
The reductions in Army forces, which have not been formally announced, are likely to concern European officials, who worry that the smaller American presence reflects a waning of interest in the decades-long U.S.-NATO partnership in Europe.
Sure, we say that we will rotate units through Europe for training (probably battalions going to Romania and Bulgaria, based on old ideas about how we'd live with a 2-brigade European force), but even if this is enough presence to reassure our allies and potential foes, future budget cuts will make it easy to cancel those rotations and argue that we are keeping the same number of troops permanently based there.
We need to stay in Europe. The stakes are too high to risk what can happen without us. But the Obama administration doesn't worry about what can happen in Iraq without our troops when bombs still go off, so I guess they aren't going to worry about Europe 66 years after World War II and two decades after the Cold War.
This is surely a "reset" that Moscow can support.
