Trump’s Germany tantrum and LIV’s last mulligan: two case studies in confusing “I didn’t get my way” with “we need a new strategy.”
Part 1: Trump Pulls Troops From Germany Because His Feelings Got Hurt
On Friday, the Pentagon announced it’s withdrawing about 5,000 of the roughly 36,000 American troops stationed in Germany. The official reason is “a thorough review of force posture in Europe.” The actual reason is that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. war with Iran was “ill-considered,” that the negotiations had gone nowhere, and that the whole affair was humiliating America. Trump’s response, paraphrased: fine, then you don’t get my soldiers. Take that, Friedrich.
Here’s the thing nobody mentions when the President starts stomping toward the exit: those troops aren’t there to protect Germany. Germany is fine. The Russians are not massing at the Brandenburg Gate. What’s actually in Germany is Ramstein Air Base, the headquarters of U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command, and the Landstuhl medical center where casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan were treated. It’s our forward operating base for the Middle East and Africa.
You know. The region we’re currently fighting a war in.
Let that one cook for a minute. We are at war with Iran. The thing that makes fighting wars in the Middle East logistically possible is having infrastructure within an eight-hour flight of the Middle East. We are now reducing that infrastructure because the German chancellor was rude in a press conference.
This is the geopolitical equivalent of yelling “fine, I’ll walk home!” at your buddy in the parking lot and then realizing he had the car keys. Even the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — not exactly the Bernie Sanders fan club — flatly pointed out that our presence in Germany “facilitates the projection of American military power into the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa.” That is, in fact, a description of why the troops are there. Senator Jack Reed put it more bluntly: this move “suggests American commitments to our allies are dependent on the president’s mood.”
Which is the part nobody likes to say out loud, so I’ll say it: this isn’t strategy. It’s a sulk with a press release. There is no three-dimensional chess board on which you weaken your own forward base during an active war because a NATO ally publicly observed the war is going badly. There is only the one-dimensional chess board on which you knock the pieces over because someone questioned your opening move.
For bonus pettiness, Trump also reportedly told Merz to spend more time “fixing his broken country” instead of worrying about Iran. Cool. Very chancellor-to-chancellor energy. Always great when American foreign policy is conducted in the same tone as a Yelp review.
Part 2: LIV Golf Discovers That Image Laundering Has a Subscription Fee
Meanwhile, in sports, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund finally looked at the receipts and said, you know what, maybe we don’t need to set five billion dollars on fire every year to host golf tournaments. PIF announced it is ending LIV Golf funding after the 2026 season. The league’s architect, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, stepped down as chairman. An event got postponed citing “heat” and a “soccer scheduling conflict” — which is the corporate equivalent of “I’m washing my hair that night.”
Let’s revisit the original pitch, which was that LIV existed to grow the game. Grow! The! Game! With shotgun starts and 54-hole no-cut events the Official World Golf Rankings refused to recognize. With team names like the Crushers, the Smash, and the Rangegoats, which sound less like elite athletic franchises and more like Beyblades. With a broadcast that recently had to go off the air for two and a half hours because of a “local power outage” that just happened to coincide with reports of unpaid vendors.
If LIV was about growing the game, the game was apparently a very specific person, and that person was Phil Mickelson’s accountant.
What it was actually about is what Saudi Arabia spends a lot of money on these things for: sportswashing. The basic premise is that if you sponsor enough Formula 1 races, boxing cards, soccer leagues, and golf circuits, eventually people will Google “Saudi Arabia” and see a leaderboard before they see a human rights report. Notably, after being trumpeted as a flagship piece of PIF’s Vision 2030 strategy, LIV quietly disappeared from the fund’s marketing materials. Mission either accomplished or abandoned. Hard to tell. Either way, the Crown Prince’s PR team has moved on.
Now here’s the catch, and this is where this story bites the rest of golf: LIV is going away, but the prices it set are not.
The PGA Tour, panicking that its stars would defect, jacked signature event purses to $20 million — exactly matching LIV’s individual purse, which is definitely just a coincidence. Total Tour prize money this season is north of $500 million. Multiple signature event sponsors are reportedly paying less than the asking price. The Tour just laid off 4 percent of its workforce. Two Hawaiian events got cut from next year’s schedule. Strategic Sports Group already had to drop $1.5 billion of private equity in just to keep the lights on at this purse level.
You can already see the tagline for the 2027 season: “PGA Tour — Now With Bryson DeChambeau Back, And Also Slightly Less Hawaii.”
Even Paul McGinley — a guy who would know — has flatly called the whole purse arms race “unsustainable.” And he’s right. The players got rich. The fans got a diluted product across two tours and a viewing experience where the best players almost never face off outside the four majors and the Ryder Cup. The sport got a five-year civil war. And now Saudi Arabia is quietly setting the bill on the table, looking at its watch, and asking the PGA Tour if it can pick up the check.
The Common Thread
Both stories are really about the same thing: what happens when the people in charge confuse their personal feelings with a plan.
Trump withdraws troops because Merz hurt his feelings, and the United States loses strategic depth in the middle of a war we started. PIF spends five billion dollars to feel better about itself, decides it has felt better enough, and walks away leaving a crater behind in professional golf.
The fix in both cases is the same, and it is also extremely boring: think one move ahead. Ask whether the thing you’re doing still makes sense after the satisfying part wears off.
The satisfying part always wears off. The withdrawal orders, the canceled tournaments, and the inflated purses do not.