Trump to look at a US military base in Lithuania
Vilnius has offered to pay for a permanent American presence, while Warsaw is still waiting for Washington to name the site of its own base.
US President Donald Trump has said he would consider establishing an American military base in Lithuania, days after the Baltic country offered to pay for it. Asked about the idea by reporters on October 5, he described Lithuanians as friends of his and said “we’ll certainly look at it”.
Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius told Bloomberg on September 30 that his country was “ready to pay the bill” for a permanent US deployment. He said he had raised the question with John Coale, the US envoy for Belarus, and that Vilnius would provide the infrastructure and the conditions for the troops.
Lithuania borders both Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and hosts no large permanent American installation. US units have rotated through the country since 2019 and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that presence became a continuous deployment of about 1,000 soldiers with armour.
The run ended in June, when the armoured battalion left without a replacement arriving. The gap followed the review of the roughly 85,000 American personnel in Europe announced the same month by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, which was expected to take up to six months.
A new rotation of up to 1,000 US troops is due in Lithuania in late October for a nine-month tour. President Gitanas Nausėda thanked the Trump administration on September 22, when he said the soldiers were already on their way.
Lithuania is NATO’s biggest defence spender relative to the size of its economy, at about 5.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year, and the government has pledged to stay above 5 per cent in 2027. Vilnius is also weighing a constitutional change on nuclear weapons so that it can shelter under allied deterrence.
Trump said a base in Poland could happen as well. He had already announced major progress towards a US Army base there on September 17, crediting Polish President Karol Nawrocki.
Warsaw has narrowed its choice to two areas near Poznań and Wrocław and expects to cover most of the cost, which defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has put at 15 billion to 17 billion zloty (€3.5 billion to €4 billion). About 10,000 US troops are stationed in Poland, almost all of them on rotation.
No location has been confirmed, though, and Washington asked Warsaw to postpone a Pentagon visit by Kosiniak-Kamysz in September. Both capitals are offering to pay for an American presence that Washington has yet to commit to, and the Pentagon review of its European posture has still to report.