US reducing number of troops in Germany to 25K, confirms Trump

TIL Desk/World/Washington/ The United States will reduce its troop strength in Germany from the nearly 52,000 at present to 25,000, President Donald Trump has said. In an interaction with reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump attributed the move to high costs and Germany being “delinquent” in its payment to NATO.       

“We have 52,000 soldiers in Germany. That’s a tremendous amount of soldiers. It’s a tremendous cost to the United States and Germany, as you know, is very delinquent in their payments to NATO.  “They are paying one per cent and they’re supposed to be a two per cent. And then two percent is very low. It should be much more than that. So they are delinquent of billions of dollars,” Trump alleged.              

“So, we’re putting the number down to 25,000 soldiers. We’ll see what happens, but Germany has not been making payments. In addition to that, I was the one that brought it up. Everybody talks about Trump with Russia. Well, I brought this up a long time ago. Why is Germany paying Russia billions of dollars for energy and then we’re supposed to protect Germany from Russia? How does that work? It doesn’t work,” the US president said.