#14 Why the US Is Pulling Troops Out of Germany
The Iranian regime told the world on Sunday that its uranium enrichment program is non-negotiable. The same week, drug prices in Tehran jumped four hundred percent and pharmacies ran out of cancer medication.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin held A scaled-back Victory Day parade in nearly two decades. Hours later, he told reporters he thinks the war in Ukraine is coming to an end.
In Washington, Donald Trump pulled five thousand American troops out of Germany. He said Italy and Spain are probably next.
Three regimes running on fumes.
Start with the language. Pay attention to the language. The Iranian government did not say it would consider giving up enrichment. It did not say the question was open. It did not say negotiations might find common ground. The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, on Sunday, said the enriched uranium Iran has been stockpiling is sacred. He used a religious word. He said it would not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances. A regime that frames a chemical process in religious language is a regime that is preparing its own people for sacrifice.
Iran told the world on Sunday that its uranium enrichment program is non-negotiable. The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson said that the enriched uranium Iran has stockpiled is, quote, as sacred to us as Iranian soil and will not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances.
That stockpile is four hundred forty kilograms of sixty-percent enriched uranium. At ninety percent, that is enough material for roughly ten nuclear weapons. A single cascade of two hundred advanced centrifuges could finish that enrichment job in about ten days.
That is what the regime is fighting to keep.
Here is what the regime is asking its own people to survive while it fights.
An Iranian pharmacists association reported on Sunday that drug prices inside Iran have surged four hundred percent. Pharmacies in Tehran cannot get medication for patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, dialysis dependence, organ transplants, or hemophilia. The chairman of the Pharmacists Association said the country is now choosing between higher prices and the absence of medical supplies altogether. Brokers have set up shop on the streets of the capital, selling life-saving drugs at black-market rates to families with no other option.
A member of the Iranian parliament's health commission said this month that the choice in front of the country is between price increases and empty shelves. He named the rising cost of plastic, raw chemicals, and pharmaceutical inputs. He did not name the deeper problem, which is that Iran has no hard currency to import anything.
The Iranian rial has lost ninety-eight percent of its value. It used to take forty-two thousand rials to buy a US dollar. Today it takes one point one million.
Inflation crossed one hundred percent this month. The basket of basic groceries that used to cost twenty-two million rials now costs nearly thirty-eight million. Estimates earlier this year put twenty-two to fifty percent of Iranians under the poverty line. The regime created a new ministry in April called the Ministry of Crisis Administration and Prevention. The name says everything.
Iran is running out of electricity too. The country is operating with a generating shortfall of twenty-three to twenty-four thousand megawatts. That number used to be eight or nine thousand. It has nearly tripled. The regime is planning one hundred twenty days of forced power restrictions for the summer ahead. Schools, offices, and government services have already been shut down across multiple provinces this year to save power.
Last week the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, addressed his base. He told regime supporters to walk through their own neighborhoods and check whether their neighbors were turning off their lights at night. Turning off a light, he said, was like firing a bullet at the enemy in the current war.
A government that asks its citizens to inform on each other over electricity usage is not a government that is winning a war. It is a government that is losing a country.
Inside Tehran the streets look like a military deployment. Citizens describe the capital as a garrison. Armored vehicles park near government buildings. Police checkpoints sit at major intersections. Basij militia handle the smaller checkpoints. Motorcycle units from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps wait in side streets to intercept young protesters. The regime did this to itself in January when it crushed a wave of street protests with live fire. Iran International, working from hospital records and eyewitness accounts, estimated that at least twelve thousand civilians were killed across two days of mass shootings. The Iranian government admits to three thousand. Either number is a state shooting its own people in the streets.
The brutality is documented. Iran Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, documented one thousand six hundred thirty-nine executions inside Iran in 2025. That is a sixty-eight percent increase over the previous year. The highest execution count Iran has hit in nearly forty years. Iran executed a man named Amir Ali Mirjafari for the alleged crime of burning a mosque. Iran International verified that no mosque was burned. The regime executed a man for a crime that did not happen. Iran also executed a man named Mehdi Farid, an employee of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, on a charge of spying for Israel. No evidence was provided. In March, the regime hanged a nineteen-year-old national wrestling champion for an alleged attack on police officers during the January protests. The regime claimed he was acting on behalf of Israel and the United States. The regime claims that about anyone it executes.
In April, an Iranian member of parliament named Mohammad Bayat went on state media and publicly called for the assassination of Donald Trump and the Israeli prime minister. Bayat sits on the Internal Affairs Committee of the Iranian parliament. Quote, killing them alone does not finish the work, he said. The roots must be cut. End quote.
That is a sitting member of the Iranian parliament calling for the murder of a sitting American president on Iranian state television. The same Iranian government that says its uranium is sacred says American leaders should be killed. The same Iranian government wants sanctions relief. The same Iranian government wants the blockade lifted. The same Iranian government refuses to surrender enriched material that could be turned into ten bombs.
Add to all of that the economic siege the United States has in place.
US Central Command confirmed on Sunday that the US naval blockade in the Persian Gulf has now redirected sixty-one commercial vessels. Four have been disabled. More than twenty US warships are enforcing the blockade. The Department of Defense estimated that by May first, Iran had lost four point eight billion dollars in oil revenue since the war began. The blockade is costing the regime roughly five hundred million dollars per day. Iran is not bringing in enough money to pay its own bills.
So Russia has stepped in.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Russia is now shipping drone components to Iran across the Caspian Sea. American officials told the paper that the supply line is helping Iran rebuild a drone fleet that lost roughly sixty percent of its capacity during the US and Israeli air campaign earlier this year. The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water. Only five countries border it. The United States cannot send a naval vessel into it. American policy planners refer to the Caspian as a geopolitical black hole.
Russian businessmen who track the maritime industry on the Caspian say cargo volume there could double by the end of the year. Trade routes that were considered economically unfeasible before the blockade are now getting emergency funding. Iraq has allocated one point five billion dollars for a pipeline connecting Basra to Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. Pakistan, which bought Kuwaiti oil for fifty years, is now sourcing crude from Nigeria, Libya, and the United States. China is accelerating its pivot to nuclear and solar to escape the bottleneck Iran created.
While Iranian families wait in line for medication that does not exist, Russian cargo ships unload drone parts at Iranian ports. While ordinary Iranians are told that turning off a light bulb is a patriotic act, the regime keeps spending what foreign currency it has left to rebuild weapons. While the country bleeds, the centrifuges spin.
The same week, Trump received Iran's latest response to the US ceasefire proposal. The proposal was delivered through Pakistan, the only country at the table as mediator. The president called Iran's response, quote, totally unacceptable. He also said combat operations are not concluded. Quote, they are defeated, but that doesn't mean they're done, he said. We could go in for two more weeks and do every single target. We have certain targets that we wanted, and we've done probably seventy percent of them, but we have other targets that we could conceivably hit.
Asked about the uranium stockpile, Trump said the United States has it under surveillance. Quote, if anybody got near the place, we will know about it, and we'll blow him up. We'll blow them up. End quote.
The US has asked Iran to agree to zero enrichment for at least twelve years. Iran has countered with five. Trump rejected five. He wants the ban permanent. The proposal includes a US-led blockade lift, Iran handing over the four hundred forty kilograms of sixty-percent uranium, and gradual sanctions relief. Iran has refused to give up the uranium and refused to commit to zero enrichment.
Iran has had four months to look at what the war has cost it. Its people are eating less, paying more, working in factories that lose power for hours at a time, and dying because the pharmacy shelves are empty. Its currency is in free fall. Its drone fleet exists only because Russia is shipping parts across a sea Americans cannot reach. The Supreme Leader installed in March, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not appeared at the forty-day commemoration of his own father, the previous Supreme Leader assassinated in February. Foreign media reports cite possible health complications. Nobody is fully sure he is functional. A funeral for his father has not happened.
The country is being run by a Provisional Leadership Council. Pezeshkian. The Chief Justice. A cleric named Arafi. Three men holding the structure together while the man who is technically Supreme Leader does not appear in public.
And the regime says the uranium is sacred.
The hardliners are willing to take the country down with them.
That is the situation.
On Friday, Vladimir Putin presided over the most scaled-back Victory Day parade Moscow has seen in nearly two decades. May ninth is the most important day on the Russian calendar. It is the day Russia commemorates the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Every year, the parade across Red Square is supposed to be a showcase of Russian military power.
This year there were no tanks. No intercontinental ballistic missiles. No surface-to-air systems rolling past the Kremlin walls. Russia played a video of its military hardware on giant screens instead.
Russia also threatened retaliatory strikes against Kyiv if Ukraine launched any attacks during the commemoration. The country that started this war by invading its neighbor had to threaten its neighbor to keep its own parade safe.
Hours after the parade, Putin spoke to reporters. He said, quote, I think the matter is coming to an end. He was talking about the war in Ukraine.
This is a man who has ruled Russia, as either president or prime minister, since the last day of 1999. He has ordered Russian troops to fight in Ukraine for more than four years. That is longer than the Soviet Union fought Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The conflict Russia commemorates every May ninth lasted less time than the war Russia is fighting right now.
Russia controls just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory. Russian advances slowed this year. Russian troops have not been able to take the full Donbas region, where Ukrainian forces have pulled back to a line of fortified cities.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed. Hundreds of thousands more have been wounded. Russia has lost more men in Ukraine than the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and every other regional conflict since 1945 combined.
Russia's three trillion dollar economy has been drained. The German government's internal analysis last year concluded that the war was costing Moscow more than it could afford. Interest rates and food prices are rising inside Russia. The ruble has lost more than twenty percent against the euro in the last five months. The military-industrial complex is working three shifts a day and still cannot hide the collapse in other sectors. Economic growth in 2026 is projected at just over one percent. In 2024 it was nearly four. The German tabloid Bild reported that the Putin administration is already preparing what it calls the image of victory for the 2026 Russian parliamentary elections. Translation. Russia wants out, and Russia wants to leave with a story it can sell at home.
Russia is also losing the soldiers it had counted on. Recruitment from Russia's own population has slowed. Sign-on bonuses that started at the equivalent of three thousand dollars in 2022 are now north of thirty thousand dollars per recruit. The wave of foreign mercenaries Russia recruited from countries like Cuba, Nepal, India, and parts of Africa has thinned out. The men who thought they were taking a paycheck to drive a truck found themselves in trenches being shelled. Word got back. The pipeline has narrowed. North Korea sent troops to plug the gap. They were chewed up in their first deployments. There is no second wave coming. The Wagner mercenary group that was Putin's hammer for the first two years of the war was gutted after its leader's plane fell out of the sky in 2023. The Russian Ministry of Defense never replaced what Wagner provided.
And the dead are not just Russian. Ukraine has reported foreign nationals from more than thirty countries killed fighting for Russia. Families in Havana, Kathmandu, and Lagos are not being told where their men went. Russia stopped sending bodies home a year ago. The men signed up for a paycheck and disappeared.
Putin's preferred negotiating partner tells you what he has left.
Asked who he would like to talk to on the European side, Putin named Gerhard Schroeder. Schroeder is the former Chancellor of Germany. He left office in 2005. Since then, he has been on the payroll of Russian state energy companies. He chaired Nord Stream, the pipeline that sent Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. He sat on the board of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company. He took compensation from Gazprom. He is the European leader most thoroughly compromised by Russian money in modern memory. He is also the European leader most likely to give Putin what he wants.
Putin did not ask to talk to Friedrich Merz, the actual current Chancellor of Germany. Merz has Germany on track to spend more than three percent of GDP on defense by next year. That is well above the NATO target. Merz is rearming his country. Putin does not want to talk to him. Putin wants to talk to a man who has not held office for twenty-one years and is on Russia's payroll.
Putin also said he would only meet with the Ukrainian president after a lasting peace deal had already been agreed. That is the same line he has held for three years. The Kremlin rejected Trump's August 2025 offer of a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin, and the Ukrainian president. Putin will not sit at the same table as the man whose country he invaded. He wants the terms settled before any handshake. He wants the win on paper before he shows up.
Earlier in the day on May ninth, before he hinted at ending the war, Putin praised his troops fighting in Ukraine. He called the war a just cause. He called Ukraine an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc. Quote, victory has always been and will be ours, he told the troops on Red Square.
Six hours later, the same man told reporters the war was coming to an end.
That is not the language of a leader who is winning. That is the language of a leader who is trying to figure out how to walk away from a war he cannot finish without admitting that he could not finish it.
During the same parade weekend, the US announced a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, plus a one thousand prisoner exchange. The exchange was the largest single swap of the war. The ceasefire held for the parade. Then Russia broke it. Ukrainian officials reported on Sunday that Russian forces conducted close to one hundred fifty combat engagements along the front lines in the previous twenty-four hours. Russia attacked Ukraine through its own ceasefire. Three Ukrainians were killedAnd remember the Russia-Iran Caspian pipeline from the first segment. Russia is keeping a regime alive in Tehran by shipping it drone parts across a sea America cannot reach. The reason Russia is doing that is the same reason it is in Ukraine in the first place. Russia cannot beat America on the front. So it props up other countries that fight America for it.
Iran in the south. Ukraine in the west. Russia does the same thing in both places. It supplies a war it cannot win directly. It uses its geography to keep a pressure point open. It tries to make America bleed in the wallet because Russia cannot make America bleed on the field.
Putin is running out of time. His economy is bleeding. His casualty rolls are public. His war is longer than the war his country defines itself by. The man he wants to negotiate with has not held office in two decades. The young population he needed for the next phase of his rule does not exist anymore. The mercenaries are not coming. The North Koreans are not coming again. And his Iranian client is on life support paid for in Russian shipping.
And he just told the world the matter is coming to an end.
Whether that is a truth or a lie is almost beside the point.
It is the language of an exit.
Notice what Putin did not say. He did not say victory. He did not say objectives achieved. He did not say the special operation succeeded. He said the matter is coming to an end. Matter. That is the language of a businessman trying to close out a bad investment. Not a wartime leader. Not a conqueror. A man trying to write a press release that gets him out of a war his country cannot win, in front of a Russian electorate that is starting to ask why the bodies keep coming home.
On Friday May first, the Pentagon announced that the United States would withdraw five thousand troops from Germany. The official Pentagon statement said the decision came after a thorough review of the department's force posture in Europe.
The next day, Trump said the withdrawal was not the end. It was the start.
When reporters at the White House asked him whether the withdrawal would continue, he said, probably. He named Italy. He named Spain. Quote, why shouldn't I? Italy has not been of any help to us and Spain has been horrible. Absolutely horrible. End quote.
The numbers matter.
As of December 2025, the United States had sixty-eight thousand sixty-four active duty military personnel stationed in Europe. They were spread across thirty-one permanent bases and nineteen smaller military sites. Germany, Italy, and Spain together host nearly fifty-three thousand of those troops. The largest US base in Europe is Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Ramstein has been a US installation since 1952. It currently houses thirty-six thousand four hundred thirty-six active service members. .
The total US troop presence in Europe surged to one hundred thousand after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was the highest level since 2005. By the end of 2025, that number was down to sixty-eight thousand. Now it is dropping faster.
The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, passed by the Senate last year, bars the US troop presence in Europe from being permanently reduced below seventy-five thousand.
The US is already below seventy-five thousand. The current total in Europe is sixty-eight thousand. The five thousand troop withdrawal from Germany takes it lower. And Trump just said Italy and Spain might be next.
Congress wrote a floor of seventy-five thousand. The president is going to go below it anyway.
Here is the underlying argument from the administration. The United States has subsidized European defense for eighty years. The arrangement was built after the Second World War, when Europe was rubble and the Soviet Union was a real threat. American troops stayed in Germany to deter the Soviets. American troops stayed in Italy and Spain to anchor the southern flank of NATO. American taxpayers paid the bill.
The deal was supposed to be temporary. The deal lasted eighty years.
Europe got rich while America paid for the umbrella. The European Union average for defense spending is one point nine percent of GDP. The agreed NATO target is two percent. Trump has demanded five. The average is below the agreed minimum. Spain spends one point two eight percent. Italy spends one point four nine percent. Most NATO members in Europe have spent decades skating under their own treaty obligation while collecting the security benefit and lecturing Americans about everything else.
And then the Iran war happened.
In February of this year, the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure. The strikes opened a corridor for what is now a months-long economic siege of Iran. American troops, American ships, American aircraft, and American intelligence drove the operation.
Europe sat it out.
Italy refused to let US bombers use Sigonella, the US air base on Sicily that has been operating since 1959. Italy is the country that hosts that base. Italy denied access for a fight America was carrying. The strike packages had to route around it.
The British Prime Minister initially refused to let US forces use UK bases for strikes against Iran. Trump publicly criticized him by name. The strikes happened anyway, but the point was made and the relationship has not recovered.
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez clashed openly with Trump over the war. Spain has been one of the lowest defense spenders in NATO for years. Spain's Prime Minister has spent more time criticizing the United States in the European press than he has spent funding his own armed forces.
Trump made his case publicly. The United States helped Europe defend Ukraine against Russia. America put money, weapons, and intelligence into the Ukrainian fight for almost four years. When America needed help in Iran, Europe was not there. Trump's view, said openly, is that the deal has been one-sided for too long.
The Pentagon's response was the May first withdrawal.
Germany did not push back hard. The German defense minister Boris Pistorius called the withdrawal anticipated. He said Germany would shoulder more of the burden of its own defense. Germany is doing exactly that. Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the country is on track to spend more than three percent of GDP on defense by next year. Merz is rearming Germany faster than any German government has in seventy years. Merz read the writing on the wall. He moved before Trump made the call. He understood that begging would not save the arrangement and that paying would.
Italy and Spain did not read the same wall.
Italy is now reportedly pressing Washington to keep American troops on Italian soil. The same country that refused to let US bombers fly out of Sigonella during the Iran war is asking America to please not pull its bases. The defense minister in Rome is on the phone. The foreign minister is on the phone. There is no public reporting that Trump is taking the call. The Meloni government is finding out that closing the door during a war and then knocking on the door for protection is not a strategy that produces good outcomes.
Spain has not lined up at all. The Spanish government has continued criticizing Trump publicly through the spring. The Sánchez government appears to believe that a NATO ally can publicly attack the country carrying the bill and still expect the bill to keep being paid.
Trump tried something like this in his first term. He ordered nine thousand five hundred troops out of Germany in 2020. That order was never executed. Biden formally reversed it within weeks of taking office in 2021. The structural pull was always there. The political conditions were not.
Now the political conditions have changed. Republicans control the Senate. The 2026 NDAA wrote a floor that the executive is already crossing. The political bandwidth to challenge the withdrawal does not appear to exist. The first term test run is now a second term execution.
And the European response to the withdrawal is the response Trump has been waiting for.
Bloomberg reported this week that European NATO members are preparing for further American troop withdrawals from the continent. They are not lobbying to keep the troops. They are preparing to lose them. That is a behavioral change Trump and previous American presidents have been trying to produce for thirty years. Bush asked Europe to spend more. Obama asked Europe to spend more. Trump in his first term threatened. Biden tried charm. Forty years of asking, threatening, and reasoning. Five thousand troops out of Germany in 2026 produced more European defense investment than every speech and summit since Reagan.
The complaints have been loud. European leaders have called the move a betrayal. They have called Trump unreliable. They have called the United States a country that no longer keeps its commitments. The complaints are public and they are bitter.
They are also irrelevant to the math.
Either Europe pays for its own defense or it does not. Either the populations of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the rest of the continent vote for governments that fund their own militaries or they continue funding social programs and counting on American taxpayers to pick up the security tab.
The American taxpayer is no longer picking up the tab.
The eighty-year arrangement is ending. Not because of a vote. Not because of a treaty. Because America is walking out and Europe is not stopping it. Five thousand at a time.
And there is the other piece. The strategic piece. While American troops have sat in Europe deterring a Soviet Union that no longer exists, China has been building a navy. China launched more naval tonnage in the last ten years than the entire US Navy currently floats. China has built the largest standing army in the world. China has militarized islands in the South China Sea that did not exist before 2014. China has the production capacity to outbuild the United States in shipbuilding, drones, missiles, and rare-earth processing. The threat is no longer in Berlin. The threat is in the Pacific.
Every American soldier guarding a German airfield in 2026 is an American soldier not training for the Pacific. Every American transport aircraft tied to a European mission is an aircraft that could be flying in the South China Sea. The Pentagon under both parties has tried for fifteen years to shift force structure toward the Pacific and away from Europe. Both parties have failed because the European deal was politically too sticky to break.
Trump just broke it.
And the deeper structural point. America did not just walk out of Germany this month. America walked out of an eighty-year deal where Europe got security for free and America got the bill. The deal was built when Europe was on its knees and the Soviet Union had tanks in East Berlin. The Soviet Union has been gone for thirty-five years. East Berlin is part of a free Germany that spends below two percent of GDP on its own defense. The threat that justified the arrangement died in 1991. The arrangement lasted thirty-five years after the justification was gone.
That is the third story.
Three regimes running on fumes. Iran's hardliners. Putin's exit. Europe's free ride.
All three stories share a structure. A small group of leaders made a bet that the next decade would look like the last decade. The world would keep paying the bill. The Americans would keep covering. The pressure would not come.
All three of them are finding out they made the bet at the wrong table.
Now everyone knows.
AND THAT'S IT.
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknws1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent