TheMarketForIdeas

The recent announcement that the Trump Administration will reduce its forces in Romania by not replacing the forces here on rotation has caused consternation in the political environment and in society, in the context of the challenges of the war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s mixed messages, over time, regarding military support for US allies. The partial withdrawal is not a surprise except in the context of the eternal present of the 24-hour media cycle – the first declarations of intent came to light in March 2025, and the respective forces were part of the additional forces sent by the Biden Administration in the initial phase of the war in Ukraine in 2022, when the allies feared a potential conventional war on their own territory. Whether right or wrong, the Trump Administration does not seem to believe that Russia has the capacity to attack a NATO member in any other way than hybrid and unconventionally in the immediate future, given the situation in the war in Ukraine and the losses suffered by Russia (issues such as drone intrusions being solvable by other means such as the acquisition of MEROPS systems and other anti-drone systems). President Trump’s mercurial changes in attitude towards Ukraine and President Zelensky also fuels anxieties among allies, through a wrong conflation between the American will to help Ukraine and the credibility of the guarantees to NATO Treaty allies. However, the emphasis on the analysis of the movement of American troops through the lens of a shortcoming of the governments of the affected countries or a possible anti-European hostility of the Trump Administration has become excessive and has marginalized in the public space a rational discussion about the constraints under which any Administration in Washington DC operates. Such an analysis would help us become more realistic about American resources in the multipolar world and stop reacting with shock to American moves. Romania, like other US partners, needs to understand the US in order to develop and implement strategies to get what they want from the Americans. Europe has proven since 2016 and until recently that it finds it very difficult to act in this way, generating awkwardness and counterproductive interactions in a complicated relationship that had become more uncomfortable anyway.

The hegemon’s resource constraints

Fundamentally, the US is increasingly constrained in the resources for exercising and projecting its power in the world. The decline on which revisionist powers such as Russia rely is both absolute and relative. The US remains the hegemon capable of acting in any area of ​​the world, but adversaries (or systemic rivals) seek to deny it primacy in regions of their choosing, such as in their neighbourhood. The need to maintain the capability to act anywhere in the world and to fight a war on at least two fronts has led to an overextension of US forces combined simultaneously with other pressures. The latter include: fiscal pressures on defence budgets; the pressure of servicing the national debt, which this year will exceed $1 trillion, or 20% of federal government revenues; the pressure of rising interest rates, including for the government debt (whose service costs were only $350 billion per year in 2021 and $263 billion in 2017); the impact of government shutdowns and political polarization on the capacity to adopt and implement various policies; the inability of any Administration, regardless of political colour, to reform the Pentagon’s cash haemorrhage estimated by the McCain Commission report at $150 billion in 2015 alone that could not be justified (which may be a background reason for Donald Trump’s recent and culture war-like statements to top officers of the US forces).

The world is just as big, but American resources are increasingly limited.

The overextended fleet

From a post-Vietnam peak of 594 warships in 1987, the US fleet has shrunk to 271 ships in 2015. Donald Trump took over an Obama aAdministration plan in his first term to increase the fleet to 355 ships by 2030 (and added the intention to create a fleet of 40 icebreakers for US Arctic ambitions), but it has failed miserably in the context of American deindustrialization and various other problems. The US fleet today stands at around 300 ships. Already 10 months into its second term, the Trump Administration has yet to place any new orders for warships or icebreakers. It shows no sign of initiating a firm reindustrialization program to increase American shipbuilding capacity in the context of alarm signals regarding the inability to repair and replace ships in the event of a conflict with China, but also the state of the American merchant fleet that should be convertible to support the logistical effort of operations in the Indo-Pacific. This issue is perhaps the greatest failure and disappointment produced by the Trump Administration, including for his supporters in the MAGA movement, but it remains insufficiently exploited even by his political enemies, perhaps out of ideological or factual ignorance of the problem. Even though American ships have much more developed capabilities compared to those of the 1980s, including through access to satellite data and unmanned vehicles, the pressure to cover an increasingly turbulent world with a smaller number of ships is felt. Of the three aircraft carriers (with the associated battle groups) that they have active in the world by rotation, Europe must share the one in the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean (Ed.N.: moved to the Caribbean by the Administration). In addition, there have been a number of incidents such as collisions with civilian ships or fires on board that suggest human resource problems, such as recruitment, training time, rest time, and which underscore the efforts made by the Americans to fulfil their obligations to their allies.

Recruitment crisis

Things are not any better for the ground forces. Of the 1.3 million people in the US Armed Forces, approximately 480 thousand are part of the Ground Forces, to which are added 180 thousand soldiers from the National Guard and 120 thousand reservists. Having had an all-volunteer force after the Vietnam War, the Americans have always had recruitment problems, despite the prestige of the institution in American society and the vocal way in which it is supported. For various reasons, including the opportunity cost, but also the effects of divisions in American society (woke culture or the conflict over the destruction of Southern symbols, in the context in which 70% of the American army comes from the historical South), recruitment problems have become acute. The armed forces need 65 thousand new recruits per year to maintain the current level. With the exception of the Marines, all of the U.S. branches are struggling with recruitment, falling 25 percent below target in 2022 and 2023, and 17 percent in 2024. This shortfall is cumulative and is felt most acutely in combat positions, which also involve the highest level of personal risk. For this reason, Trump was vocalizing what other administrations have thought about the need for flexibility, to reduce Cold War-era garrisons, to replace substantial new garrisons with small, highly mobile “tripwire” forces that would deter attacks without locking large numbers in one place. The Romanian and Eastern European hope was that the process of reducing forces in Germany (a real turntable for American forces in Central and Eastern Europe) would result in some troops being permanently moved to the East (also bringing troops home to the US and satisfying the security needs of Eastern Europeans), which is what has happened in recent years. The slowness with which NATO expanded its bases to the East reflected not only a potential reminiscence of the three NOs of 1997 through which Russia conditionally agreed to NATO expansion into the former communist space, but also the desire that the deficient infrastructure in the area would not hamper the mobility of forces to get where they were needed in the context of their decreasing numbers. In this context, the increase in US forces in Eastern Europe, reaching 10 thousand people in Poland and the plans for the largest NATO base in Europe at Mihail Kogălniceanu reflected greater American comfort with the current state of infrastructure and the prospects for military mobility in the region (which is also a priority for the Three Seas Initiative).

Current situation

I would see the current situation in a semi-political register. Donald Trump is increasing the US military presence in the Caribbean as part of a potential confrontation with Venezuela, manifested including by the destruction of civilian ships of (alleged) drug smugglers. The most important withdrawal of US capacity in Europe will not be the few hundred soldiers from Eastern Europe, but the relocation of the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier and the associated battle group to the Caribbean. Donald Trump is currently playing a game of intimidation, because he has not assembled enough troops for a realistic attempt at regime change in Venezuela, although there is the potential for a sporadic bombing campaign like the one in Iraq in the 1990s. If Venezuela will rely on the increasingly important partnership with Russia and especially China from a political and military point of view and will implement its threats regarding the Essequibo region in Western Guyana with its recently discovered and exploited hydrocarbon riches, then the US will find itself in a conflict that will inevitably distract its attention from other regions, including Eastern Europe. In a predictable return of Donald Trump to the Monroe Doctrine, but also as a result of issues such as illegal migration and drug trafficking, Donald Trump is seeking to counter external powers that conclude important partnerships in the region, as seen from the strictly (non)diplomatic interventions in Panama, Mexico or Argentina. In the past, revisionist powers have used regional crises to distract the US from other important geopolitical issues and even to extract concessions from the Americans in exchange for cooperation in resolving the new crisis. The classic example is North Korea, whose nuclear issue has been a continuous distraction for the US from other regional issues over time and for which it has needed cooperation with Russia and China to end each new round of tensions and aggressive North Korean gestures. Now, we may be witnessing a Latin American crisis as a geopolitical issue to distract the US. And attention is a resource as limited as military forces.

Conclusion

In the context of the challenges facing America and the American statements regarding the pivot to the Indo-Pacific and, more recently, the Latin American focus, the movement of American forces is a matter of optimizing the use of limited resources. The priority of European countries is to ensure the reliability and credibility of American security guarantees for NATO members and other treaty allies. The flexible way in which troops are stationed opens the possibility of both a strengthening of the American presence on the Eastern Flank and a greater reduction as a result of the possible improvement of the security prospects in Eastern Europe, but also of a greater European capacity to deploy its own forces in the region. It would be a mistake to interpret and greet redeployments stridently, because they would fuel the isolationist and anti-NATO branch of the US electorate and political class. Rather, European countries (including Romania) must resort to continuous dialogue, lobbying, and public diplomacy to convince American elites and the American people that their interest in allocating their dwindling forces lies in Europe and that it is in the US interest to remain a security provider for countries in the region.

Photo source: PxHere.com.