One corner of Europe feels sharp chill in trans-Atlantic ties

The density of pickup trucks and baseball caps increases. Bilingual signs are everywhere and live country music is played every Thursday at Big Emma’s brewery.

But a chill has gripped the tiny village just across the fence surrounding Ramstein Air Base. “We still play soccer [with the Americans], we cook together, we’ll celebrate Easter," said Mayor Ralf Hechler. “We just don’t talk politics all that much."

Since returning to office in January, President Trump has turned against allies, reserving some of his harshest barbs for Europe. He has raised questions about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the security alliance that underpins the U.S. presence here—and he has attempted a rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has slapped import tariffs on European industries, threatening further damage to Germany’s export-reliant economy, which was already struggling to eke out growth.

It is perhaps no surprise that in Europe, views on Trump and the U.S. have nosedived. The feeling of abandonment is particularly pronounced in Germany, one of the U.S.’s closest allies and home to some of the largest overseas American military installations in the world. A YouGov survey from February showed only a third of Germans viewed the U.S. favorably compared with roughly half last August.

“We’ve known for a long time that we can have different economic interests. Tariffs, trade, industrial policy, all this is fair game," said Nils Schmid, a center-left German lawmaker and foreign policy expert. “The fundamental question is that of shared security and the fact that the U.S. is questioning it…That line was never crossed before."

Unlike France and the U.K., Germany doesn’t have centuries of shared history with America. But the country as it was rebuilt and remodeled after the war, from its constitution to its federal institutions, its capitalist economy, its media, court system and consumer culture, is something of an American creation. Karl Loewenstein and Ernst Fraenkel, two jurists and political scientists who shaped Germany’s postwar reinvention, had fled Germany for the U.S. in the 1930s.

Enhancing the sense of kinship is the fact that up to 40 million Americans claim German ancestry, according to past censuses. The bond is perhaps strongest in those regions that came under U.S. occupation after World War II and where U.S. troops are concentrated today.

Germany is America’s military bridgehead in Europe. Some 35,000 U.S. service members—not counting family members, contractors, civilian employees and retirees—are scattered across facilities in the country’s south and west. About half are based in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, home to the Kaiserslautern Military Community. It is the largest outside the continental U.S. and includes the giant Landstuhl military hospital and Ramstein Air Base, headquarters of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and a hub for operations in the Middle East and Africa.

The military community alone contributes some €2.3 billion a year to the economy, equivalent to around $2.5 billion, according to the state government. Unlike nearby Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate doesn’t have a dense network of manufacturers, and concern is growing that its economic lifeline could evaporate if the U.S. pulls back.

After Trump took office in January, some of the 6,500 German civilians employed by the U.S. Army and Air Force in the state were notified of a hiring freeze, said Sandra Schäfer, a local official for the Verdi trade union, which represents local hires working for the U.S. military in the region. Some people on temporary contracts were told they wouldn’t be extended, she said.

“There is a new rumor every day. There is a lot of fear that the troops will go," she said. “It is almost as though the uncertainty was designed to push people to look for other jobs."

Earlier this month, some German civilian employees staged a protest in Kaiserslautern after receiving emails from Elon Musk’s DOGE asking them to justify their work, as well as communications announcing the end of work-from-home policies, Schäfer said.

A Defense Department spokesperson confirmed that a civilian hiring freeze was issued on Feb. 28 and said the intended recipients of the DOGE email were U.S. federal employees. While the U.S. government “continually reviews and adjusts force posture as conditions evolve," the spokesperson added, “at this time no decisions have been finalized to reduce troops in Germany."

Some of the growing distance between Americans and locals predates Trump. As a child, Hechler said he could cycle through the air base on his way to school. Access was restricted after far-left terrorists detonated a makeshift bomb at the base in 1981, wounding 20 people. Security has tightened ever since, but locals never forgot how U.S. soldiers brought “the American way of life" and the strong dollar to the region in the 1950s, said Hechler.

The four years Jochen Balzulat, an engineer and president of Kaiserslautern’s German-American Club, spent in Detroit in the early 2000s were “the most satisfying of my professional career," he said over a beer in Kaiserslautern’s old town. Two of his four children were born there and have U.S. citizenship.

“The infrastructure is a disaster—even worse than here—and don’t get me started on American washing machines, but I love the U.S.," he said. “And I get it if they don’t want to spend so much on us. What’s harder is their hostility toward a key partner, the interference in our elections."

In a speech in Munich in February, Vice President JD Vance suggested America could pull out if far-right parties weren’t allowed into government in Europe. There should be no “firewalls," he said, shorthand for the agreement among mainstream German parties not to work with the nationalist AfD.

Friedrich Merz, a mainstream conservative who is poised to become Germany’s next chancellor after winning a recent election, hit back after his victory, saying that “my absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as fast as possible so that it can gradually become independent from the U.S."

Merz, a decadeslong advocate of trans-Atlanticism, then broke with years of German policy by calling for talks with France and the U.K. about extending their nuclear deterrent to Germany and by unveiling his country’s biggest military buildup since the end of the Cold War, worth an estimated €1 trillion over the next decade.

Josef Braml, a political scientist and author, said no one should be surprised by the turn of events. In a 2022 book, Braml warned that Trump might return to office and pull the U.S. out of Europe, making Russia a bigger threat. Now that these have happened, he said, Germany and Europe should boost their defenses, deploy a joint nuclear deterrent and become less reliant on the U.S.

“Whoever keeps blathering about shared values has been spending the last 10 years on Mars," he said. “As long as we had joint interests, it worked. But the minute Trump stops providing for our security, there is no reason for us to pay tribute anymore."

Some of Braml’s recommendations—a Franco-German military union, closer EU integration and the issuance of European sovereign bonds to fund defense and tech investments—are well outside the German mainstream. But even some who believe the trans-Atlantic partnership will endure say Europe must take the lead on defending itself.

“People here have been hiding from reality. Europe should have seen this wake-up call coming for 20 years," said Julia Friedlander, a former U.S. National Security Council official and now chief executive officer of Atlantik Brücke, a German-American friendship association that Merz chaired for 10 years.

While the message is being delivered in a brutal way, she said it looks like it is finally leading to “a more modern partnership."

Write to Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com