The Hotel Angerer in Vilseck, near Nuremberg, opened its doors in 1557 and has seen out plagues, the Thirty Years’ War pillaging – but may not survive Donald Trump. That, at least, is the worry of Sabine Kederer, who has kept the family-owned hotel running in the 14th generation thanks to US military personnel passing through the town with links to the nearby Rose Barracks.
But not for much longer, if the Trump administration follows through on its plans to shrink its strategic footprint in Europe.
Vilseck got a first taste of what’s to come with surprise news of the departure of 5,000 US soldiers, one third of the total, from the nearby base that has been a US defence linchpin in Europe since 1949.
“For us in Vilseck, we don’t split Germans, Americans, they are part of Vilseck, it’s one big community,” she said. As for the future? “It will become difficult, it will be quieter but we hope we can survive and make the best of it, somehow.”
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Her fears of a transatlantic split, tempered by a pragmatic survival instinct, echo the soundbites of Europe’s Nato foreign ministers on Friday, gathered in Sweden ostensibly to plan the upcoming alliance summit in Ankara.
Nerves in the alliance were already strained by January’s Greenland crisis and the more recent row over joining the US-Israeli war against Iran. But Friday’s session zeroed in on the future scale of US “crisis-ready” resources in Europe.
In advance of the meeting, unnamed Pentagon officials told Reuters the Trump administration would scale down these resources “significantly” as part of a long-running demand that European countries do more for their continent’s security.
Whatever the plan is, though, US secretary of state Marco Rubio was not telling anyone in Helsingborg.
“This is highly classified, because we don’t want to make anyone any wiser,” he told journalists in Helsingborg.
Pressed for more detail, he said there was a “broad recognition there are going to be eventually less [sic] US troops in Europe than there has historically been for a variety of reasons”.
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From their parting words, Rubio’s Nato foreign minister counterparts sounded as puzzled as the assembled journalists. “It is confusing indeed and not always easy to navigate,” said Maria Malmer Stenergard, Sweden’s foreign minister, to reporters.
Latvian foreign minister Baiba Braze insisted that, while the US was reconsidering its European strategy, “there is no change of posture, for now”.
Few are more confused by Washington than Warsaw. For years, successive Polish governments have pressed for a permanent US base in their country. The current US administration, senior Polish officials complain, is running hot and cold.
In total around 10,000 US troops are stationed in Poland, most on rotational deployments lasting several months. But Warsaw was caught off-guard when the Pentagon halted a routine, nine-month deployment of 4,000 US troops to Poland, reducing US combat troop numbers in Europe to 2021 levels, before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Then, in a U-turn, US president Donald Trump announced on Thursday that, rather than a 4,000 troop reduction, Poland would soon welcome a 5,000 deployment. Some attendees took comfort from the vague timelines, contradictory messaging and, above all, a US undertaking to maintain its nuclear deterrent for Nato members.
While Nato allies – and Vilseck – wait to see what is coming, Rubio’s talk of change “over time” caused considerable eye-rolling in Berlin. German chancellor Friedrich Merz noted recently how first-term Trump troop reduction promises never came to fruition, while some of the latest reductions involve a second long-range battalion that had yet to be deployed to Europe.
In Helsingborg, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte remained unruffled. The US plan – whatever it is – was “to be expected”, he said, as part of a wider pivot to “end the over-reliance” on the US for alliance defence.
“I think it’s only right it happens,” said Rutte to reporters. When one asked him if Europe was in a position to defend itself, the Dutch politician said: “Dream on.”
Even without detail, the US announcement came at the end of a nervous week for Europe. On Wednesday, residents of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, were told to take shelter after air raid alarms were triggered by drone activity near the border with Belarus.
As residents rushed for bunkers, Lithuania’s president and prime minister were taken to safe locations, an indication of growing fears on Nato’s eastern flank over Russian incursions. Hours earlier, a Nato fighter jet shot down a Ukrainian drone that strayed into southern Estonia, prompting an apology from Kyiv for an “unintended incident”. Latvia’s government collapsed last week following a row over handling multiple stray drone incidents suspected to be from Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Britain’s military revealed two Russian jets “repeatedly and dangerously” flew close to an RAF spy plane last month in international airspace over the Black Sea.
A year has passed since the last Nato summit, where Trump secured a commitment from leaders of the 32-member alliance to boost military spending to five per cent of annual economic output. Since then, Washington has delivered a series of geopolitical shifts – and shocks: regime change in Venezuela and increasing pressure for a similar shift in Cuba.
After initial protestations that the Iran conflict was not their war, European Nato members are now offering support in securing the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, they have stepped up to fill the military funding gap that has opened during the second Trump administration.
