Biden freezes Trump's withdrawal of 12,000 troops from Germany

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - President Joe Biden is freezing plans to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany, administration officials said on Thursday (Feb 4), and has ordered the Pentagon to conduct a review of how American forces are deployed around the world.

The move would halt a Trump administration plan - which many national security experts had viewed as punitive - to bring some US troops home from Germany and shift other units to Belgium and Italy.

That plan, which came last summer, rankled European leaders and angered both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who view the presence of US troops in Europe, and especially in Germany, as a cornerstone of post-World War II order.

Biden's freeze of the troop withdrawal, announced on Thursday by Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, before the president's visit to the State Department also accompanies what Sullivan called "a global force posture review."

The freeze is in keeping with a series of moves the new president has made in the last two weeks to undo former president Donald Trump's initiatives at the Pentagon.

Biden has also ended his predecessor's ban on transgender troops serving in the military and, through Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, purged from Pentagon advisory boards several dozen members who were appointed in the waning days of the Trump administration.

The Biden administration also announced on Thursday that it was discontinuing US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

The top US commander in Europe signalled the review in remarks to reporters on Wednesday, when he said that Austin was "in the process of conducting a very, very thorough review" of Trump's drawdown plan.

"The new administration has comfortably stated to us that we need to conduct a thorough review, cradle to grave, in all areas," General Tod Wolters, head of US European Command and Nato's supreme allied commander for Europe, said in a news conference from Mons, Belgium.

After the review, he said, "We'll go back to the drawing board."

In announcing Trump's plans last summer, his deputies at the Pentagon tried to portray it as a needed reshuffling. But that effort was undercut by Trump himself when he complained - at the same time his administration was announcing the withdrawal - that Germany was, in his words, "delinquent" in its military spending.

The withdrawal announcement last summer blindsided German officials and even some US military officials, who have long looked at the US troop presence in Germany as the bedrock of its commitment to Nato.

A Defence Department official said on Thursday that it was unclear whether Biden would adjust troop levels in Somalia. In one of the last Pentagon-related acts in his presidency, Trump ordered the 700 US troops who were training and advising Somali counterparts in the battle against the Al-Shabab in East Africa to leave Somalia.

On Jan 17, the Pentagon announced in a short statement that the US troop withdrawal from Somalia was complete.

Many of those troops simply relocated to nearby Kenya.

Biden must also decide what to do about the remaining 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan. Trump last year struck a deal with the Taleban that calls for the withdrawal of US troops by May 1, but that withdrawal depends on whether the Taleban meet their own commitment to end violence there.