LONDON – It was designed to be low-key. In a move that went unnoticed by most media outlets, the United States military announced that 700 of its soldiers currently deployed in Europe won’t be replaced when they return home from their current tour of duty.

So far, hardly remarkable: The planned pullback affects less than 1 per cent of the estimated 84,000 US military personnel stationed in various European countries.

And US President Donald Trump deliberately played down the move’s importance. “It’s not very significant, it’s not a, not a big deal,” he told journalists.

But European leaders are hardly reassured. Although small, the troop withdrawal will almost halve the US military presence in Romania, a key European front-line state closest to where the current fighting between Russians and Ukrainians is raging.

And this may be just the start of a broader US withdrawal from Europe.

President Trump has long opposed US military deployments in Europe, which he dismissed as merely allowing the Europeans to spend less on their own defences.

Yet throughout the first Trump presidency, the size of the US contingent in Europe barely changed. And the Joe Biden administration boosted US troop numbers with additional deployments after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which

started in February 2022

The bulk of the US forces continues to be billeted in Germany, right in the heart of the continent, a deployment pattern that goes back to the start of the Cold War almost eight decades ago.

However, since 2022, the US has also deployed additional troops in eastern Europe, closer to Russia’s borders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin often cites these deployments as the chief reason for h...