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THEAMERICANCONSERVATIVE (Doug Bandow) - Bring U.S. Forces Home—From Around the World Thu Oct 8 04:25:09 2026

If assets are under threat even in the UK, it’s time to wind down America’s global presence. The post Bring U.S. Forces Home—From Around the World appeared first on The American Conservative .

Foreign Affairs Bring U.S. Forces Home—From Around the World If assets are under threat even in the UK, it’s time to wind down America’s global presence. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images President Donald Trump imagines himself to be the most powerful person in world history. And he has increasingly sought to act the part internationally. Yet his party faces a daunting midterm election, and he nears true lame duck status while finding it increasingly difficult to impose his will upon the rest of the globe. Despite Trump’s protestations of greatness, he is turning ever more nations against his administration. Despite commanding the world’s strongest military, he has been unable to force an isolated middling power, Iran, to submit to his will. America’s Asian and European allies have rebuffed his attempt to conscript their navies to do what U.S. forces cannot, open the Strait of Hormuz.  Even more extraordinary has been his inability to protect Washington’s international basing network, upon which the Pentagon’s global reach depends. Shockingly, the administration appeared to be almost helpless as Iran wreaked devastation on America’s Mideast installations and the Persian Gulf states where they are located. The U.S. no longer can support Gulf naval operations from its naval base in Bahrain, but instead must rely on Diego Garcia, some 2,600 miles away from the critical waterway. The administration is assessing the future of its Mideast facilities, and Washington’s military presence almost certainly will shrink dramatically . Now, it turns out, Washington does not trust its ability to protect its military forces even in the United Kingdom. The Washington Post reports the administration “has removed all of its bombers from Royal Air Force Fairford, a base that authorities in the United Kingdom called the target of a suspected terror plot.” Removed as in returned the planes back to America. “While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have re-deployed to their home stations in the United States,” announced the Pentagon. No doubt, the military must be vigilant in protecting personnel and equipment from threats, especially those assessed as significant and imminent. Yet who imagined that the Pentagon would believe itself unable to protect aircraft based in the UK from Iran? What if America was battling Russia—would the administration also withdraw its bombers from the UK? Withdraw all planes from all Europe? Empty its bases in Asia and the Middle East as well? After all, if Washington cannot protect aircraft in the UK from Iran, how can it defend personnel and equipment from Russia? Or China? Or a potpourri of rising powers? The problem will only worsen, as noted elsewhere in the Post: “The growing vulnerability of U.S. bases because of the proliferation of cheap drones and missiles—which will only get worse with the spread of artificial intelligence guidance—has no easy solution.” One of Washington’s presumed greatest strengths—its hundreds of bases in foreign countries—is becoming a significant weakness. And the most powerful man in the world, despite commanding the most powerful military in the world, faces increasing limitations. The president, as well as other leading policymakers in Washington, should treat the threat to America’s overextended military as an opportunity. Time is long past for retrenchment, winding down a global presence that no longer serves serious, let alone vital, American interests. The original Donald Trump appeared to believe that “America First” was more than a popular political slogan. Well before being elected in 2016, he complained about European cheap-riding on Americans for defense. During his first term, he threatened to pull out U.S. troops and even quit NATO. He similarly questioned Washington’s defense of South Korea, which enjoys a GDP 70 times and population twice that of its northern antagonist. But he quickly went astray, treating U.S. personnel and equipment as a coercive tool to extort government payments, trade preferences, and economic investment from allied nations. During his first term he demanded that Seoul increase host-nation support for stationing U.S. troops in South Korea tenfold to $10 billion annually, an effort abandoned by his successor. More recently, he has pressed the Republic of Korea to offer far-reaching trade and investment concessions, efforts leading to complaints that he has turned the alliance into a “transactional relationship” characterized by “extortion.”  Trump has done much the same to Japan and Europe. Indeed, he redistributed U.S. troops among NATO states rather than bring them back to America, and he ostentatiously used Washington’s commitment to Europe’s defense as leverage to win the European Union’s acceptance of a trade deal bad for most Americans as well as Europeans. Continental leaders acknowledge that they are paying more to preserve the American people’s defense subsidy. In the opinion of Thorsten Benner of Berlin’s Global Public Policy Institute, the U.S.–EU trade deal is a “direct function of Europe’s weakness on the security front, that it cannot provide for its own military security and that it failed to invest, for 20 years, in its own security.”  If Trump truly believed in America First, he would have been working to expeditiously transfer responsibility for the continent’s defense to the Europeans. But he now has a second chance to transform American foreign policy based on American security. He should begin a gradual global force withdrawal. Doing so could plausibly be framed as a sign of strength, not weakness: The U.S. is the most secure great power ever.  The U.S. began as a coalition of independent colonies 250 years ago, a weak commercial republic in a world of avaricious empires. Its geography became a key defense, with weak neighbors north and south and fish east and west. Although Americans warred against native peoples as the new republic expanded westward, Washington mostly avoided the seemingly endless European conflicts until the 20th century. It was security at home that allowed Americans to eventually intervene in foreign battles with little security relevance—wars of choice, not necessity. America’s entry into the First World War was sheer madness, a reflection of President Woodrow Wilson’s extraordinary sanctimony, egoism, and ambition. It was this conflict, and its unbalanced outcome resulting from U.S. intervention, which led to the Second World War, a bitter battle between totalitarian powers much harder for the U.S. to avoid. Although in retrospect the Soviet Union’s Cold War ambitions appear more limited than believed at the time, the desire to shield war-ravaged states from potential Soviet coercion and aggression was understandable. Even then, U.S. officials originally insisted that the American military presence be limited in scope, ambition, and duration. Once the Cold War ended, any serious case for what amounted to a quasi-empire that reached virtually every region of the globe collapsed.  Unfortunately, the Blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, resisted change, preferring to concoct new justifications to maintain outdated international strategies and military deployments. Out of that effort came President George W. Bush’s “what we say goes” doctrine . Trump, in term one, did damage to the Blob’s ideology but failed to unwind America’s global presence. Then, both Presidents Joe Biden and Trump declared that they were “running the world.” And they were, it turns out—into the ground. Trump continues to demand that the world obey him. Yet his pretense of omnipotence is imploding. Uncle Sam has fiscal feet of clay , racing toward budgetary collapse. Now the president has been forced to admit that he can’t defend American military assets in the UK, let alone in the Middle East.  Instead of leaving American military personnel at risk around the world, he should begin bringing them home. Starting now. The post Bring U.S. Forces Home—From Around the World appeared first on The American Conservative .