It seems very unwise to suggest that we do not need an alliance with Germany, or that they are not useful allies. They allow us to park our world-ending level armaments in their country to help secure the US's own interests. The fact that Germany doesn't pay as much as we want them to seems like a fairly small trade off for maintaining a US-world-order-keeping fighting force there.
The U.S. has the ability to extend forces anywhere in the world on a level that no other country can touch.
Asking the world's 4th largest economy to fulfill their economic and expenditure obligations to the NATO alliance is an extremely small ask in the grand scheme of things.
The U.S. spends nearly $10 billion a year on its facilities in Germany. Germany "helps" on that effort at around $150 million a year. That doesn't even include the economic impact of 35K U.S. service members pumping millions of Euros into the German economy every year. The 35K number doesn't include the tens of thousands of civilian personnel the U.S. pays in Germany, all amounting to billions being pumped into the German economy.
Our payback . . . Germany pumps billions into Vlad Putin's pocket, including helping to fund a pipeline that is a major point of contention for Ukraine.
