London ? Germans clogged the phone lines of radio talk shows Tuesday, worrying that payback time had finally arrived after the nation’s decision to oppose last year’s U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. President Bush is retaliating, they said, by announcing that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be withdrawn from their country over the next seven years.

Newspapers across Germany echoed the same concerns, warning that economic hard times are coming as the Americans close bases and move billions of dollars in military contracts to more supportive nations in eastern Europe.

But European defense analysts said the American decision to redeploy up to 70,000 troops from Germany and Asia was largely expected and based on common sense. The presence of about 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe today is expensive, largely symbolic and, as Bush stated Monday, a relic of Cold War conditions that no longer exist.

The analysts said it was increasingly difficult for European governments to justify a reliance on U.S. military support when Europe could defend itself. In fiscal 2003, Germany spent $35.1 billion on defense, a little less than 10 percent of the U.S. defense budget for the same period, according to militaryperiscope.com.

U.S. officials said the Europe-based troops, including two heavily mechanized divisions in Germany, would be exchanged for lighter, more mobile rapid-reaction forces to be based in Poland, Romania and Uzbekistan.

“To be honest, the Europeans don’t need an American security guarantee today in the way they did during the Cold War,” said Adrian Hyde-Price, a specialist in European security issues at the University of Leicester. “There are no major threats requiring large numbers of U.S. combat forces in Europe, and Europe should be able, at least, to take a greater responsibility for its own security.”

A 2001 U.S. General Accounting Office study said the United States was paying $11.2 billion annually to finance its military presence in European NATO countries in spite of a post-Cold War drawdown that had reduced the number of U.S. military personnel in Europe from 300,000 in 1990 to 100,000.

A 2002 study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that, as a percentage of gross domestic product, U.S. taxpayers were paying a much higher percentage for defense than their European counterparts.

That disparity eventually had to end, said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies.

“It is right and proper and understandable that the American population is saying: What are we spending all these dollars for when the Europeans are not spending for their own security?” he said.

In Germany, however, many people spent the day on talk shows recalling the benefits of a nearly six-decade U.S. military presence in their country, said James Davis, a professor of international politics at the University of Munich, who participated in numerous radio call-in programs.

“It’s a big deal. … It’s something that interests the Germans quite a bit,” he said. “The first question they had was whether this was some sort of punishment for having opposed the war in Iraq.”

Callers also worried about the economic impact of a large-scale troop withdrawal in rural areas that rely on U.S. bases for jobs and commercial activity. “Some of these areas are less developed in terms of indigenous industry, so the military provides quite an economic stimulus,” Davis explained.