Helen Pitt

Because for a long time, the German army, the Bundeswehr, has been mocked by many other armies.

I remember hearing a colonel from the British army dismiss it as an aggressive camping organisation.

This idea that they couldn't really, you know, if somebody did attack Germany, that they would be pretty helpless.

Yeah, and that brings us nicely to the latest spat and potentially the most serious one.

And it all began last week, didn't it?

When Friedrich Merz was talking to some school children in Marsburg.

I'm not sure where Marsburg is.

What happened?

Yeah, as you said, it seemed to be a bit of an about turn for Friedrich Merz because when he made his first visit to the White House, didn't he give Trump this gold-framed birth certificate of Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who emigrated from Germany in 1885?

Naturally, what Merz said in front of those schoolchildren reached Trump's ear and he was not happy about it, was he?

How did he respond?

So Trump is cross and then very quickly he acts, doesn't he?

And not only is Trump withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany and potentially more in future, it looks very much like the US is also not going to be stationing some really crucial long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles there either.

And these are missiles that the Europeans were counting on, really, to deter Russia.

Europeans are already building their own, but they are somewhere off being finished.

So that's going to leave them pretty exposed.

But when it comes to the troop withdrawal, do you think that it was purely to spite Friedrich Merz?

Or does it fit, do you think, a pattern of Trump wanting to reduce troop numbers in Europe to reduce the European reliance on America?

And there's an irony there, isn't there?

Trump telling the Europeans when it comes to Ukraine, you're on your own, because he's the guy that returns to the White House for the second time and then invites Putin to Alaska for talk, completely cuts out the Europeans, not to the Europeans, but Ukrainians themselves.