ABSTRACT
The future of American troops in Germany will, of course, not depend entirely, or perhaps even chiefly, on the preferences of Germany, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the United States military; other factors must also be taken into account in assessing the likely dimensions of that troop presence. The exigencies of the Second World War first drew the United States militarily into Germany. The legal basis of the American troop presence in Germany is the Presence of Foreign Forces Convention, originally signed in 1954 but extended in late September 1990 by an exchange of notes between Bonn and the stationing governments. The Gulf War, revealing as it did the prospects of a dangerous isolation of Germany from its European and North American allies, has taken some of the persuasiveness out of the Germanization thesis, at least for the time being.
