IS NOT MY pres drumpf / trump going to attack the authoritarian government of Kuwait and the brutal mbs dictatorship in Saudi Arabia for denying the US Military access to military bases and airspace like he attacked the heads of state of the U.K., France, Spain, Italy and Germany? My guess is he won't because he doesn't care about the 15 American servicepeople killed or the 381 wounded or the $25 Billion+ spent on his illegal and immoral war on Iran. He won't say anything negative about Kuwait's or Saudi Arabia's governments because his corrupt greedy no class trash family has too much invested by these cuntries in their projects to risk loosing their financial investments. These from DemocracyNow! and the New York Times.....
Trump Abandons “Project Freedom” After Saudi Arabia and Kuwait Suspend Access to Bases and Airspace
Reporting from Berlin
As President Trump fired off a series of social media posts criticizing Germany this past week, including a threat to pull some American troops from the country, German leaders showed no public signs that they believed the president was serious.
That now appears to have been a miscalculation — one of several that German leaders have made in the course of Mr. Trump’s war against Iran — but most likely not a catastrophic one for German security.
Pentagon officials said on Friday that they planned to relocate 5,000 troops from Germany to the United States and around the world within the next year.
Officials in the United States and Germany suggested that the decision had been in the works at the political level for months, as part of a broader Pentagon review of its troop levels worldwide, but the announcement had been significantly accelerated to appease a president angered by German criticism of American strategy in Iran.
Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, called the move “foreseeable” in a statement on Saturday morning that was otherwise unyielding.
“The presence of American troops in Europe, and especially in Germany, is in our interest and in the interest of the United States,” Mr. Pistorius said. He also said that Europeans must continue taking more responsibility for their own security.
On Saturday evening, however, Mr. Trump appeared to double down on the step back from Europe. Asked by reporters about the troop withdrawal from Germany, he said, “We are going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.”
Mr. Trump has lashed out at Germany and other European countries for not helping more with the Iran war effort, as he has demanded. And the president has chafed at criticism of his handling of the war and suggestions that the American effort had not succeeded.
On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told German high school students that the United States had “no strategy” to end the war and that Iran’s negotiators had “humiliated” the entire American nation.
The Pentagon is preparing to withdraw a combat brigade that was stationed in Germany after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and that was never guaranteed to remain there. It will also no longer follow through on a Biden administration plan to station a medium-range missile battalion in Germany. The net result, if those plans are followed, will be a return to the level of U.S. troops based in Germany before the war in Ukraine began.
In Washington on Saturday, the decision to remove troops drew unusual pushback from Republican leaders in Congress. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the heads of the Armed Services Committees in their respective chambers, issued a statement saying that they were “very concerned by the decision to withdraw a U.S. brigade from Germany.”
They defended Germany, asserting that it had stepped up its military investment “in response to President Trump’s call for greater burden sharing,” and said that “prematurely reducing America’s forward presence in Europe” would send the wrong signal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
German officials privately made clear that the proposed withdrawals could have been significantly worse, from their point of view, and that their response to the announcement would be measured. The famously mercurial Mr. Trump could always change his mind.
Before Friday’s announcement, the Pentagon had not warned German leaders that a troop announcement was imminent. The consensus view in German politics appeared to be that Mr. Trump was most likely bluffing. He had tried, and failed, to remove some of America’s roughly 35,000 troops from Germany at the end of his first term in office. He would need congressional approval to move troops from Europe now.
In March, when Mr. Merz visited Mr. Trump in Washington, the chancellor told reporters in a German-language news conference that the president “has also assured me not just today, but once again, that the United States will maintain its military presence in Germany.”
German leaders were also confident that the Trump administration needed that German military presence. Unlike some other European allies, Germany had allowed America to help launch attacks on Iran from bases inside Germany’s borders. It has continued to allow injured Americans to be treated in a major American hospital on German soil that has for decades hosted Americans injured in wars including in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Germany’s quiet nonchalance about the possibility of a troop withdrawal was reflected again this past week.
Mr. Merz has offered no public apologies or retreat from his seemingly off-the-cuff comments at the high school.
On Thursday, Mr. Merz, who invested heavily in building a rapport with Mr. Trump over the past year, told German soldiers in the city of Munster that “we maintain close and trusting contact with our partners, including and especially in Washington.” He stressed the relationship with Washington was one of mutual respect and fair sharing of security burdens.
“This trans-Atlantic partnership is especially important to us, and to me personally,” he said.
Mr. Merz’s vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, raised tensions further on Friday.
In a May Day speech, Mr. Klingbeil defended Mr. Merz from the president’s broadsides. “We really don’t need any advice from Donald Trump right now,” Mr. Klingbeil said. “He should see the mess he’s made” with the war, he added.
Mr. Klingbeil leads the center-left Social Democrats, the junior partner in a governing coalition led by Mr. Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats. He has been more critical of Mr. Trump in the past than Mr. Merz has. He had also been traveling with Mr. Merz in Munster, and has been in close consultation with him over a host of domestic issues recently.
Mr. Trump has consistently surprised German leaders with his conduct in the war. After Mr. Merz met with the president in March, some officials came away convinced that the conflict would not last long because Mr. Trump was already expressing concerns over the economic effects of war-related energy price spikes.
Instead, Mr. Trump persisted with attacks even after gasoline and natural gas prices rose sharply from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
German officials also believed they had found a sort of compromise with the president over his demands that Europe send military assets to secure the strait and make it safe for shipping again.
Mr. Merz said repeatedly that Germany would join such a security effort, including by sending minesweepers, but only on two conditions: Germans wanted a permanent cease-fire, as opposed to the temporary one currently in place. And to comply with the German Constitution, they wanted the effort to have the blessing of an international body, like the United Nations or the European Union.
That appears not to have been enough for Mr. Trump. On Friday, a Pentagon official did not cite only Mr. Merz’s comments as a reason to pull back troops. The official also cited Germany’s failure to contribute to the Iran war effort itself.
Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin, and Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Was Trump’s Anger Over Iran Misjudged By the Germans?.
Trump’s Clash With Merz Shows It’s Hard to Stay Friends With the President
Reporting from Berlin
Fallout from President Trump’s war with Iran has made it harder for foreign leaders to stick to their time-honored playbook for currying favor with him. They are increasingly finding they must choose between appeasing the president or their own voters, and they aren’t picking Mr. Trump.
The latest example is Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, who drew Mr. Trump’s ire by saying what he really thinks, out loud, about the strategic shortcomings of the American war plan.
In nearly a year in office, Mr. Merz has invested heavily in a friendship with Mr. Trump. He has visited the White House repeatedly, including in the early days after the Iran war began. He flatters Mr. Trump on camera and texts him often. Mr. Merz has done nearly everything the president asked on Iran, including allowing America full use of military bases in Germany to launch attacks, and committing minesweepers to patrol the Strait of Hormuz after the war formally ends.
But the war has battered the German economy and cost Mr. Merz politically. German drivers and manufacturers have been shocked by fuel-price spikes caused by the blockage of the strait. The government has slashed its forecasts for economic growth this year. Since the war began, Mr. Merz’s party, the center-right Christian Democrats, have fallen from first place in national polls and now trail the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by a few percentage points.
Those pressures seemed to overwhelm the chancellor this week. Mr. Merz, who has a penchant for going off-script in less formal speaking sessions, told a group of German students that the Iranian government had “humiliated” the entire American nation with its slow-walk approach to negotiating an end to the war.
“The Americans obviously have no strategy,” Mr. Merz said at a high school assembly in western Germany on Monday, “and the problem with such conflicts is always that you don’t just have to go in, you also have to get out again. We saw that very painfully in Afghanistan for 20 years. We saw that in Iraq. So this situation is, as I said, at least ill-considered, and I do not see at the moment what strategic exit the Americans are choosing now.”
Mr. Trump, who has a penchant for attacking his allies when they criticize him publicly, was quick to respond. He accused Mr. Merz, who has repeatedly said Iran can never be allowed to build a nuclear weapon, of supporting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
“The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post. For good measure, he added: “No wonder Germany is doing so poorly, both Economically, and otherwise!”
The exchange stirred a small media tizzy in Germany, with political reporters asking whether Mr. Merz had squandered his hard-won good will with the president.
It also revealed just how thin Europe’s patience has worn, for a war its leaders did not choose and were not consulted on.
Nearly every major European leader has, at some point since the war began, taken steps to criticize it, or Mr. Trump, or both.
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, said this month he was “fed up” with Mr. Trump, complaining that the war had driven up energy costs for the British public. He has also feuded with Mr. Trump over restrictions on American usage of British bases for the war.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, riled the president by wading into his verbal battle with Pope Leo XIV over the war. Ms. Meloni, long viewed as a key ally of Mr. Trump in Europe, sided with the pope. She had realized, analysts said, that her association with Mr. Trump had become a liability in Italy, where the president is highly unpopular.
No European leader has made more political advantage out of clashing with Mr. Trump over Iran than Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain. His early and vocal opposition to the war, including refusal to allow American use of Spanish bases, angered the president but buoyed Mr. Sánchez’s sagging political fortunes at home.
Until this week, Mr. Merz had offered some measured critiques of the war but still won praise from Americans. He seemed to be in the president’s good graces. In the Oval Office in early March, he sat quietly by as Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Starmer and Mr. Sánchez.
Privately, though, German officials were skeptical of Mr. Trump’s war plan from the start, even when he announced a cease-fire with Iran. Mr. Merz and his cabinet braced for lasting economic fallout, approving some temporary relief for drivers stung by high gasoline prices.
Still, the chancellor is far from breaking with Mr. Trump, even if he is increasingly willing to criticize him.
“The personal relationship between the American president and me is, from my perspective, still good,” Mr. Merz told reporters on Wednesday.
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed from Berlin.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
A version of this article appears in print on April 30, 2026, Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Hard to Be a Friend Of Trump, Merz Learns.
More on the Fighting in the Middle East
U.S. Troops in the Middle East: Some 50,000 troops have been part of President Trump’s declared mission against Iran “to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.” Now, the U.S. military is on standby in the region, as the White House gives contradictory signals about the status of the war effort.
Iran’s Economy: As Iran reviews the latest U.S. peace proposal, lifting the U.S. military blockade of its ports and relieving pressure on its oil industry is one of the main incentives for Tehran to seek a deal.
Rockets vs. Drones: To avoid using $4 million missiles to knock down $25,000 Iranian drones, the U.S. military has adapted a small laser-guided rocket first used in the Korean War.
Stranded Ship Exits Persian Gulf: A U.S.-flagged ship operated by a Maersk subsidiary exited under American military guidance, part of President Trump’s effort to encourage ships to pass the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. Fast-Tracks Arms Deal: The Trump administration has authorized more than $8.6 billion in emergency arms sales to partners in the Middle East as negotiations to end the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran remained at an impasse.
