Germans: how do you actually feel about the Americans leaving? Honest answers, not slogans.
Every newspaper has a position. Every politician has a position. I want to know what people actually feel, because in my building nobody agrees with anybody.
My neighbour is delighted. My mother is frightened. My brother says it changes nothing for him. I do not know what I think and I would like to hear from people who also do not know.
From the closed record — not known to anyone in this thread
3 February 2026, 18:00 — Four courses of action for sixty warheadsForce the fence and start a war with three founding allies. Burn the weapons in place. Sit still and call it leverage. Or sign Rutte's page. Hegseth recommends sitting still.
26 January 2026, 18:30 — Rutte asks for one pageThe Secretary General writes directly to the President. Not custody, not security, not a change in who holds the weapons. One page conceding that the oldest guarantee in the alliance will not end by departure rather than by decision.
8 comments
I grew up here. Every third person I know works for the base or for somebody who serves the base.
I have spent my whole life listening to people in Berlin talk about American occupation as a political abstraction. Here it is a payroll. 12,000 local jobs in this district.
I am not delighted. I am not frightened. I am doing sums.
Honest answer, and it embarrasses me: relief, then shame at the relief, then fear.
I have campaigned for the weapons to leave Büchel since I was nineteen. This month they might leave. Not because we won an argument. Because the man who owns them is behaving in a way that makes me want them to stay while there is a lunatic in the Kremlin.
Twenty years of my politics resolved in the worst possible way.
This is the most honest thing anybody has posted about this in a month and I say that as someone who disagrees with you about everything.
I was 14 in 1989 in Leipzig.
I remember exactly what it felt like to believe that the west was a real place with real rules that would hold. I have carried that for thirty-seven years and it has been the organising fact of my adult life.
I do not have a policy view. I have a feeling, and the feeling is that something in me that closed in 1989 has opened again.
Engineer, defence supplier. Cold answer.
We cannot replace what leaves. Not in five years, not in ten. Air defence, strategic lift, satellite intelligence, refuelling. We have almost none of it and the parts we have are American.
Everyone talking about European strategic autonomy this week is describing a project that takes fifteen years and a fortune, and we have neither.
The Americans have come into my shop on Saturdays for eleven years.
I do not know what any of this means. I know that on Saturday two of them came in and we could not find anything to say to each other, and that I gave them the bread for nothing, and that I have thought about it every day since.
That is my honest answer. It is not about strategy. It is about not knowing how to say goodbye to somebody you were not sure was your friend or your landlord.
Ich glaube, das ist die beste Antwort hier. Danke.
(I think that is the best answer here. Thank you.)
Polish, reading this thread with a lot of feeling.
You are all having a philosophical conversation. Please understand that four hundred kilometres east of your philosophical conversation, we are having an arithmetic one, and the arithmetic is about how many days.