On July 27, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby formally kicked off the Pentagon’s Europe force posture review. The announcement follows Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s preview of the effort last month in Brussels. The force posture review is the Administration’s most important opportunity to turn its speeches about European burden-shifting, which date back to February 2025, into an enduring policy reality.
The Trump Administration is right to encourage Europe to rebuild its militaries, but America’s interests in a reduced military presence on the continent should come first. The review should be an opportunity to reliably incentivize European rearmament by showing that the United States is withdrawing tens of thousands of additional troops, not a means to reward countries that spend more with additional U.S. deployments.
Before the Trump administration took office, the United States had over 100,000 troops in Europe. Despite the continents’ steadily reducing importance for U.S. security, the Biden Administration reached this total by surging 20,000 additional troops to Europe following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The deployment sought to reassure our European allies, but Russia’s inability to defeat Ukraine quickly rendered the surge obsolete.
In the meantime, the larger U.S. deployment heightened America’s long-standing reassurance dilemma—the paradox that our excessive efforts to make allies feel more secure undermines their political will to make themselves more secure by rebuilding their defense capabilities.
Our European allies’ economic capacities make them quite capable of shouldering the primary burden of their regional defense. These nations should feel the urgency to resource their vital interest in the security of their home region.
As the 2025 NSS reflects, Europe is a tertiary concern for the United States, less important to American security than the stability of our own hemisphere and Asia. What the United States says about its priorities should reflect where the United States deploys its troops. The Europe force posture review is a chance for America to finally put its money where its mouth is after generations of rightly complaining about European defense underinvestment.
The Trump administration’s steps so far to right-size the U.S. military footprint in Europe are commendable, but roughly 80,000 permanent and rotational U.S. troops still remain on the continent. To shape his legacy, President Trump needs to honor the NSS’s claim that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world like Atlas are over” in the remaining time he has left in office. Our allies will not take the steps to become the primary providers of their own security until U.S. force posture decisions show them that they must.
Putting the 2025 NSS into practice in Europe requires substantial U.S. redeployment from the continent. The force posture review should move beyond the Pentagon’s existing planned reduction to pre-2022 regional troop levels and fully implement existing recommendations to transition to a pre-2014 European force posture. This would leave around 60,000 U.S. troops on the continent by further reducing the number of deployed Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) as well as further drawing down air and naval assets.
To set a new standard for U.S. burden-shifting rather than returning to the status quo of the 2010s, the Trump Administration should make additional cuts. For example, the Pentagon restored a rotational Armored BCT deployment to Poland in early July that it previously cut in mid-May. The force posture review should recommend not replacing this deployment when it wraps in about nine months.
Poland commendably prioritizes its national defense, especially compared to other NATO members, but that does not mean it is in America’s interest to permanently garrison it against Russia, as its government has lobbied for. Members of NATO-Europe, such as Germany, should further increase their own capacity to conduct these front-line deployments instead. Unless the United States meaningfully reduces its European force posture, NATO-Europe will not build the defensive capabilities it needs.
The United States and Europe’s close cultural and economic ties can and should endure, but U.S. policymakers must recognize that the continent is far less important to American security interests than it once was. American leaders owe it to their citizens to accurately assess changed strategic conditions and do the best they possibly can to allocate our limited defense resources accordingly. The Europe force posture review is vital opportunity for an overdue reset.
Tyler Koteskey is Policy Director at Concerned Veterans for America
