In the early hours of 7 May 1945, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, commander of the Wehrmacht, led a German delegation into a small, unassuming red schoolhouse in the historic French city of Reims. Outside, Europe lay in ruins – its cities reduced to rubble, its economic and political systems shattered, millions of people dead or displaced. Nazi Germany had unleashed hell on earth, inflicting destruction of previously unimaginable proportions.

But with Adolf Hitler’s Germany utterly defeated, the time had finally come to terminate what had amounted to the deadliest war in human history. Stepping up to a large wooden table, which had been prepared for the occasion – featuring neatly placed note pads, pencils, name plates, and ashtrays – Jodl lifted his pen at 2:41am and sternly signed the official ‘instrument of surrender’ under the watchful eyes of the Allies.

The American officers standing witness to unconditional capitulation could hardly have imagined that their supposedly temporary deployment would transform into an enduring presence that continues to this day. Eight decades after VE-Day, the United States still maintains an extensive military footprint in Europe that totals about 100,000 service members. For Europeans born after the war, the presence of US forces on the continent has been a continuous fact of life that has never been seriously called into question.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, however, a contentious policy debate about America’s role in Europe has rocked the transatlantic relationship. Many high-ranking officials within the current administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have repeatedly entertained the idea of significant troop reductions. European defence, they argue, should be primarily the responsibility of Europeans themselves. Conversely, critics of such proposals have warned forcefully that American retrenchment from the continent would amount to nothing less than a geopolitical disaster. Many observers fear that a strategic US withdrawal would open the door to the westward expansion of Russian influence.

Resolving this grand strategic debate requires an understanding of why American troops came to be stationed in Europe in the first place. The conventional narrative paints the US presence as an inadvertent consequence of the war effort against the Axis powers. According to this argument, American troops landed on the continent with a purely military goal in mind: victory in the war.

An examination of the US’ wartime strategy, however, reveals that this narrative is misguided. A close study of the available source material indicates that America’s leaders were acutely aware of the fact that war is the continuation of politics, as Clausewitz highlighted long ago. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations intentionally sought a US presence on the continent for a decidedly political goal: to prevent the Soviet Union from filling the power vacuum that Nazi Germany’s demise threatened to leave in Central Europe.

To be sure, in the early years of the Second World War, Roosevelt and his principal advisers were rightly focused on winning the war. After all, Hitler’s initially successful Barbarossa campaign in the East rendered German hegemony over Europe a real possibility. But as the Soviet Union’s series of decisive victories on the Eastern Front in 1943 made it increasingly clear that Germany would lose the war, Washington grew more concerned with the question of who would come to exert leadership over postwar Europe. Tellingly, while Roosevelt reiterated at the time that ‘victory in the war is the greatest goal before us’, he now also stressed that ‘victory in the peace is next’.

US officials quickly came to worry deeply about the Soviet Union’s intentions vis-à-vis the postwar power vacuum created by the defeat of Nazi Germany on the continent. While currently allied in the fight against Hitler, they were acutely aware that the cooperative relationship with Moscow might not persist. The rapid speed with which the Red Army advanced westward only further increased their fears that the Soviet Union would be able to unilaterally dominate postwar Europe. After all, they concluded, wherever the Soviets maintained a substantial troop presence, they would be able to exert unilateral control. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, ‘possession’ through troop presence bestowed upon the occupying power ‘99 and 44/100 per cent of the law’.

Intent on preventing this scenario, US military and civilian leaders reached the following conclusion: to prevent a Soviet-dominated Europe – which would pose a serious threat to US national security – American troops had to enter the continent as soon as possible, occupy areas of vital significance, and, through their presence, prevent the Red Army from pushing into the heart of the continent.

In collaboration with their British counterparts, American leaders designed a two-pronged strategy. First, they planned for a massive cross-Channel assault to be launched by 1944. Codenamed Overlord, this operation found its realisation in the Normandy landings on D-Day. But there was a second component to their strategy: a little-known contingency operation codenamed Rankin.

This planned for an emergency introduction of US troops onto the continent in case Germany showed signs of significant weakening or collapse before a cross-Channel invasion could be launched. In other words, even if Nazi Germany had already been defeated without the direct involvement of American troops, Washington would have initiated a massive movement of troops onto the continent and pushed them as far eastward as possible to ensure that it would be the Western Allies – and not the Soviet Union – that controlled vital parts of the emerging power vacuum.

In many ways, the Rankin plans tell us more about the origins of the US troop presence in Europe than Overlord. They reveal that the America’s leaders were acutely aware of the need to design wartime strategy in a way that would be conducive to their political goals for postwar Europe. The US troop presence in Europe emerged not as an unintended consequence of wartime deployments but rather as part of a deliberate effort to prevent Moscow from filling the power vacuum Nazi Germany’s collapse had created.

In the immediate postwar years, these same concerns continued to dominate. Devastated by the war, Europe was in no position to oppose Soviet encroachment on its own. Consequently, US forces had to remain on the continent to serve as a bulwark against any possible expansion of Soviet influence.

An appreciation of the political origins of America’s European troop presence provides a vital perspective on the current debate about possible US retrenchment from the continent. When US troops first arrived, their presence was desperately needed. Without them, Europe would have been overrun by the Red Army, the Soviet Union would have shifted the balance of power greatly in its favour, and the Cold War would likely have taken a much different course.

The power vacuum left by the collapse of Germany gave leaders in Washington no choice but to become deeply involved in European affairs. It would have been disastrous for US national security and the European population if they had decided otherwise.

Yet, today, the world looks much different. American troops are no longer needed to prevent Europe from being overrun by an adversary that stands a reasonable chance at dominating the region. For one, no such adversary exists on the continent today. As Russia’s lacklustre performance in Ukraine has shown, its military power pales compared to the might once wielded by the Soviets. What’s more, Europe today possesses the means to build an independent defence and provide for its own security. And while it lacks the motivation and unity to embark on a serious rearmament program, a substantial US retrenchment would provide the necessary impetus.

One of the US officials present in the little red schoolhouse at the moment of Germany’s surrender in May 1945 was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Six years later, after he became NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, he proclaimed: ‘If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.’

Eight decades after Eisenhower witnessed Germany’s capitulation, it is time to finally fulfill his vision of a Europe that secures its own future.