When Estonia’s Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur headed to this month’s NATO summit in Ankara, he disclosed to reporters at home that several hundred American troops who had been stationed in the Baltic nation since winter had been quietly withdrawn — and there was no clear timeline for their return.
At the Ankara summit, representatives from the Baltic states and Poland wore badges identifying themselves as members of the so-called “five percent club” — the only NATO nations to have already met the defense spending goal established at last year’s alliance meeting in The Hague. Those nations had believed that reaching that benchmark would guarantee continued U.S. military support.
Despite what observers described as some of the most assertive behavior yet from U.S. President Donald Trump at a major international gathering, NATO leaders — including Secretary General Mark Rutte — declared the summit a success. They pointed to new defense agreements, increased European spending commitments, and what they called an “ironclad” pledge of mutual defense.
However, many of those commitments — among them a nine-nation defense financing arrangement led by Canada and a long-range missile strike consortium involving a dozen countries valued at $50 billion — are expected to take years before they become operational.
Publicly, even leaders skeptical of Trump, such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, credited the U.S. president for pressuring NATO members to boost their defense budgets.
Yet on the ground this summer, the reality looks different. The U.S. has drawn back forces from some of the most exposed areas in Eastern Europe at a time when concern is growing that a Kremlin increasingly embarrassed by Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile strikes deep inside Russian territory could be tempted to strike back against NATO neighbors.
An analysis of European news coverage by AI monitoring and predictive analytics firm Omniforecaster estimates an 18% probability of a deadly clash between Russia and a NATO member nation before the end of 2026 — a level of risk significant enough to put governments on alert, especially as Washington quietly reduces its troop presence in the region.
At the annual Chatham House conference last week, former UK Armed Forces Minister Al Carns said the current strategic environment was the most dangerous since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Even so, most analysts and government officials believe Russia is more likely to keep pressing its campaign of so-called “hybrid warfare” — covert disruption and sabotage — rather than launching direct military action.
The risk of unintended escalation, though, extends beyond Europe. The U.S. appears increasingly entangled in tensions in the Gulf region, with Trump suggesting in Ankara that he could order further strikes against Iran’s core infrastructure — a prospect that has alarmed U.S. allies in the Gulf who worry they could face the worst of Iran’s retaliation.
In the Middle East, the U.S. began pulling personnel from forward operating bases in mid-January as a precautionary move amid rising tensions with Iran. Most analysts doubt the U.S. will again station significant numbers of non-air defense troops or equipment in countries such as Qatar or Kuwait, following a complete withdrawal from Syria and a reduction in Iraq.
In some instances, operations have been relocated back to the United States — including most coordination work previously conducted by the Coalition Air Operations Centre at Qatar’s Al Udeid air base. In other cases, the U.S. has chosen to station aircraft and drones in locations it considers more secure, such as Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and parts of mainland Europe.
UNCERTAINTY AND NERVES
Foreign officials widely believe that decision-making in Washington has become so concentrated around Trump and his closest advisers that future moves of this nature could happen with little or no advance notice.
As recently as May, Estonia’s Pevkur had been telling local media that “U.S. forces are in Estonia and will remain there,” though he conceded that “nothing can be ruled out” given the unpredictability of recent U.S. policy decisions.
He has since acknowledged that the number of American troops in Estonia has fallen to fewer than 100 — roughly one-sixth of the level from last winter, when a contingent of U.S. tanks was stationed in the country’s southern region.
Senior U.S. military commanders in Europe told him that another detachment could arrive later in the summer — but Pevkur noted that even that possibility may be subject to an ongoing policy review.
According to Baltic, Polish, and U.S. defense officials, the Baltic troop reductions were a direct result of the Trump administration’s surprise decision last month to cancel a long-scheduled deployment of approximately 5,000 troops to Poland — a move that caught the Polish government off guard and left some soldiers literally about to board flights to Europe before being turned around.
That cancellation had a cascading effect on troop movements through the Baltic states. Around 1,000 U.S. troops reportedly departed Lithuania in June and were not replaced.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby have both repeatedly emphasized the need to focus U.S. military resources on countering a rising China, promoting what they call “NATO 3.0” — a vision in which European nations shoulder far more responsibility for their own defense.
But uncertainty is also spreading in the Pacific. Most traditional U.S. allies in the region — including Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines — are growing increasingly anxious that the long-term trajectory may point toward at least a partial American military withdrawal from that part of the world as well.
Some Ukrainian commentators have speculated that the U.S. pullback from the Baltic states may be intended to appease Russia. Certain pro-Kremlin voices, and occasionally Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, have called for U.S. and broader NATO troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe as part of any eventual peace settlement in Ukraine.
BASING QUESTIONS
But there is another possible explanation: that the U.S. is positioning itself so that, if conflict does break out in Eastern Europe and NATO territory comes under attack, fewer American troops will be directly in harm’s way.
That would represent a significant change in U.S. military strategy — and one that may not be clearly telegraphed ahead of time. In Washington, some voices — including the Defense Priorities think-tank, which has long advocated for reducing the U.S. military footprint abroad — have argued for years that American forces should avoid exposed positions overseas, pulling back not only from the Middle East and Europe but also from vulnerable Pacific locations.
Those include the Japanese island of Okinawa and U.S. installations on Guam, which some military strategists argue would be highly vulnerable to Chinese attack in the event of a conflict.
Advocates of this approach argue that where U.S. forces are deployed, they should be highly mobile units equipped with long-range missile systems such as ATACMS, capable of threatening both Chinese naval vessels and the Chinese mainland. Some of those systems were used for the first time in U.S.-led military exercises in Japan and the Philippines earlier this summer.
Concerns about the long-term reliability of U.S. commitments are already pushing allies in both Europe and the Pacific to deepen coordination among themselves — including on weapons procurement — though that effort has drawn pushback from some U.S. officials.
Pentagon policy chief Colby wrote this week that without U.S. involvement, such allied efforts would simply squander resources. “The simple fact of the matter is that no alternative country or countries can compete with the U.S. defence industrial base either in quantity or quality,” he wrote.
Last week, the head of the German air force, Holger Neumann, told Politico that Europe does need to buy more American weapons. “Developing our own capabilities takes time,” he said. “Right now, we do not have time.”
German officials believe the threat environment will peak in 2029, though some fear it could arrive sooner. Either way, those who had counted on the presence of U.S. troops as a deterrent “tripwire” may find themselves disappointed.
