I exaggerate once in a while.
And I don’t feel bad about it because I know you do too.
But I’m not exaggerating when I say that our beloved Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has never said one good word about Donald Trump since he arrived on the political scene in about 1915. It must be one of the cardinal rules in all CBC offices that saying anything good about Trump is something you just don’t do.
So the website headline didn’t surprise me: “No mercy from Trump: Now Italy and Spain face US troop pullout talks.”
So what’s going on with the US pulling troops out of Italy and Spain? Why would they have been there in the first place? World War II is over.
So here’s the story.
After WWII ended in 1945, the US left troops in many countries, partly at its expense, but also with the local countries paying some of the cost, and my impression is that, in the years after the war, there was competition between the US and the Soviet Union in terms of world domination, both military and economically. So having some troops around the area where the war had been fought must have seemed like a good idea.
And it probably was, but it was also likely very expensive. Here is at least a partial list of the troops: Italy, 13,000, since 1943; Britain, 10,000, since 1945; and Germany, 35,000, since ‘45; Spain, 4,000, since ‘53. I can see that it was important to show some strength, especially considering that the span of time between WWI and WWII was only 21 years, and nobody wanted it to happen again in another twenty years. But think of the expense. That’s a lot of troops, and most of them are still there, 81 years later. And so far, we haven’t counted troops in Korea, another 23,000, since ’52; an additional 73 years of expense.
It seems to me that a country, meaning Iran, that would execute twenty, thirty or forty thousand (who knows what the number is?) of its own people would be a risky place to have nuclear weapons aimed at the rest of the world. Yet when Trump wanted to use the airspace and joint bases to eliminate that threat, Spain and Italy decided to throw their weight around and say no. Who could blame Trump for threatening to pull the American troops out of their countries?
Our CBC, that’s who! Because no matter what the issue is, CBC is against Trump. Always have been, likely always will be.
What matters now is what Trump does with the bases in those two spots, Italy and Spain. He should do as he said. Shut them down, bring the troops home.
Just think of the expense of maintaining them. I don’t know what it costs to employ a soldier for a year, but I would doubt that it’s less than a hundred thousand dollars once all the costs are included. And if my arithmetic is correct, the 90,000 troops listed above, at $100 thousand per soldier per year, comes to $9 trillion a year. That’s a lot of tax to collect from the cab drivers, farmers, school teachers and doctors in the country. It’s hard to even know how much $9 trillion dollars is.
Let me give you a comparison. The total expenditures for the Province of BC for the year 2026, which doesn’t end until the end of March in 2027, are forecast to be something like $98 billion. So if you took the cost of maintaining the US troops in the countries listed above, you could support 92 provinces the size of ours. Now, even if I’m wildly incorrect in my numbers here, the point is: it’s a lot of money!
Do you remember reading in this space a few times before that I think Trump knows something about the American government bank accounts that most US citizens don’t know? Like, what bad shape the country is really in? I still think he does. But I think he isn’t making what he knows public because he doesn’t want to cause a depression. And he’s right.
But he’s governing in a way that is responsible. His first job is protecting his people. Which is what the war in Iran is all about.
Secondly, he’s trying to protect his country economically, which is what things such as tariffs, bringing manufacturing back to the US, eliminating government waste and rooting out fraud, such as what we see in Minnesota, are all about.
So the idea of pulling American troops out of Spain and Italy makes a lot of sense. If he does, those two countries would find out how much economic benefit they’ve been getting from all those direct and indirect jobs. They’ll find out how much it costs them to be so hard to get along with. He should pull some thousands out of Germany and Korea as well.
But if he does, don’t look to the CBC for a headline about Trump having done something good for the US taxpayers.
You’ll never find it!
What does this have to do with us here in Golden?
The issue here is called softwood lumber, and it’s not the same as the ones above, but it is one of their cousins. And while we should negotiate aggressively in our trade deals with the US, we should make sure we aren’t as careless as Italy and Spain were in their military issues with Trump.
Now, since starting this piece a few days ago, I see today, Sunday, that Trump is pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany. Good for him! He should pull more out and then all 4,000 out of Spain and half of what they have in Italy.
It’s far better for Golden and for Canada to be beside a healthy USA than beside a bankrupt US. You may remember that the per capita debt, per person, not total debt, is double south of the border compared to what it is here. And while he is responsible for some of it, if you ever hear about it on CBC, he’ll get all the blame.
