Pompeo is talking to the Senate foreign relations committee.

Mike Pompeo has been questioned on the decision announced yesterday to pull nearly 12,000 US troops out of Germany, bringing 6,400 of them back to the US, and how that squared with Pompeo’s claims to be leading a tough policy towards Russia. He confirmed the state department was “very involved at the strategic level” but argued that bringing the troops home did not mean they were “off the field.”

Uh…that’s exactly what it means.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked him whether the impact on relations with Germany had been taken into account, to which Pompeo replied: “This is personal for me I fought on the border of East Germany when I was a young soldier I was stationed there.”

Pompeo was stationed in West Germany as an army lieutenant in the late eighties. There was no fighting there.

Hey it was a moral fight! A political fight. A spiritual fight.

Mitt Romney, who continues to be the only Republican senator to seriously challenge the administration, picked up the issue in his own remarks, saying: “I have heard from the highest levels of the German government that this is seen by them as an insult to Germany, and I can’t imagine, at a time when we need to be drawing in our friends and allies so that we can collectively confront China, we want to insult them.”

We don’t, maybe, but Trump does. Trump threw a handful of candies at Angela Merkel; I think it’s safe to say he’s happy to offend Germany.