President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would deploy 5,000 troops to Poland, despite the Pentagon’s decision a week ago to cancel the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops there.
In a social media post that caught Pentagon officials by surprise, Mr. Trump suggested that he was making the move “based on the successful election” of Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s conservative nationalist president whom Mr. Trump endorsed in his election — nearly a year ago.
Mr. Trump’s apparent reversal of the Defense Department’s decision was the latest in series of head-snapping announcements that have stunned leaders of Poland, one of the administration’s staunchest allies in Europe, and drawn intense bipartisan criticism from lawmakers who said troop cuts in Eastern Europe would send the wrong signal to Russia.
The Pentagon declined to comment on Thursday, referring questions to the White House. That left a raft of unanswered questions, including whether the military would now need to cut troops elsewhere to fulfill Mr. Trump’s larger goal of having Europe shoulder more of its own security burdens and allow the United States to reduce its roughly 80,000 forces there.
The confusing situation started three weeks ago when the Pentagon said it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany and would redeploy them to the United States and other posts overseas. It also canceled a plan developed under the Biden administration to put a missile-equipped artillery unit in Europe.
Those decisions came after Mr. Trump angrily responded to remarks by Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, that Iran had “humiliated” the United States. Mr. Merz questioned how Mr. Trump planned to end that conflict.
But then last week, the Pentagon shifted gears and abruptly canceled the deployment of more than 4,000 troops to Poland, saying that those troops — some of whom had already arrived in the country with their equipment — would count against the announced drawdown in Germany.
That decision set off a firestorm of criticism among lawmakers and a series of frantic phone calls from Polish officials. The Pentagon said on Tuesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had spoken to his Polish counterpart, and that a planned troop reduction in Europe would result in only “a temporary delay of the deployment of U.S. forces to Poland, which is a model U.S. ally.”
That temporary delay appeared to come to a screeching halt on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s announcement on Truth Social.
Pentagon officials have said the reduction of about 5,000 troops — it is now unclear from where — would return U.S. forces in Europe to the level they were in 2022, before Russia began its war in Ukraine.
Last year, the Pentagon redeployed a brigade in Romania and did not send replacement forces.
NATO officials have said that the American troop reductions and realignment would not affect the alliance’s deterrence and defense plans, noting that Canada and Germany had already increased forces on the alliance’s eastern flank.
In the statement on Tuesday, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said that the decisions over the past three weeks that have bewildered allies, angered lawmakers and sent U.S. military commanders scrambling to come up with palatable options were “the result of a comprehensive, multilayered process.”
