During wartime, Polish policy proved prescient

Until a few years ago, the atmosphere between Brussels and the national-conservative government in Warsaw was still tense. In addition to lawsuits accusing the Polish government of violating EU rule of law standards and a daily penalty of one million euros, outright expulsion from the EU was mooted, at least hypothetically. These problems largely concerned the erosion of the judicial independence of the Polish state.

Does anyone else remember this? Everything has changed since the start of the war in Ukraine. The government of the right-wing populist Law and Justice party has also disappeared.

No sooner had Russia attacked Ukraine than Poland wanted to hand over MiG-29 fighter jets to its eastern neighbor. The government in Warsaw was initially persuaded by the United States to wait, but a year later the first MiGs were finally in Ukraine. Warsaw surged forward, just as Polish generals fought in the American War of Independence in 1776, and just as thousands of Poles fell on the side of the Allies against Mussolini and Hitler in Italy during World War II .

Poland has always done things well, it always has its heart in the right place. This impression has become even stronger since France’s descent into political weakness following the ill-advised dissolution of its Parliament this summer. Germany, for its part, has just lost its government coalition. In relation to these two pillars of the EU, Poland finds itself in a stable and decisive position at the end of this year. And almost no one here is afraid of the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, and even less afraid of Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister.

Abortion is only a secondary problem

Tusk, the former president of the EU Council, may have ideological problems with his centrist government coalition partners. However, given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threatening gestures towards the West, many in Poland are considering controversial issues such as LGBTQ+ marriages and/or a policy allowing abortion in a number of weeks as marginal issues at the moment. The Tusk camp is also expected to win next spring’s presidential elections with left-wing liberal Rafal Trzaskowski chosen as candidate on Saturday. If he wins, the government will no longer be blocked by an outgoing president from the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party.

Poland warned early on against the imperialist voracity of the Russian president. When Putin sent his army to invade Georgia in 2008, Polish President Lech Kaczynski traveled to Tbilisi for a solidarity visit. Warsaw has always supported Ukraine’s independence from Moscow. During the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan Revolution in 2013 and 2014, Polish flags flew alongside Ukrainian and European flags. But above all, Warsaw vehemently opposed the German-Russian gas pipeline projects Nord Stream 1 and 2. Polish policymakers argued that these were not purely economic projects, as Berlin claimed, but that Rather, it was about Russia’s preparations for a possible war. Their position was ridiculed by many in Western Europe.

But Poland was proven right at the end of February 2022. It is also clear today that Western Europe, and in particular Germany, effectively pre-financed the war in Ukraine thanks to their thirst for cheap natural gas.

The Poles, on the other hand, quickly diversified their energy supply despite a heavy dependence on Russian sources inherited from the socialist era. They even built a gas pipeline to Norway, although this natural gas was of course more expensive than Russian gas. However, unlike Berlin, Warsaw did not want to gain any economic benefits at Ukraine’s expense. Poland imported liquefied natural gas from Qatar early on, as well as the United States. Warsaw’s policy has always been pragmatic and transatlantic. Although the central European country joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004, it has always relied on bilateral mutual security guarantees from the United States.

This is also why Poland has just received a new permanent US army base in Redzikowo, 120 kilometers west of Gdansk. This was initially planned during the George W. Bush era as a station to intercept missiles launched by Iran. Now, in the third year of Russia’s war of aggression against its Ukrainian neighbor, the American base is of even greater value to Poland.

The stationing of American soldiers represents a real guarantee of American security, the Poles believe – and therefore a much more effective mechanism than membership in the EU or Article 5, NATO’s collective defense clause. And no other EU country spends as much on defense as Poland, which spends 4% of its gross domestic product.

As a result, Poles have fewer reservations about Trump than their counterparts in the rest of the EU, because after all, it was Trump who deployed the first US troops to Poland, but only in the form of rotating staff.

In retrospect, Poland was also right on migration policy. When Tusk was President of the EU Council in 2015, he already considered quotas for the distribution of refugees within the EU to be the wrong path. Today, Warsaw feels vindicated by the EU’s more restrictive asylum policy.

Asylum suspended

The prevailing view in Western Europe is that Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party has pushed Poland ever closer to the abyss over the past eight years. It is often forgotten that the Law and Justice government pursued policies critical of Russia, imposed stricter controls on migration and increased defense spending – all measures which were supported and continued by Tusk after his electoral victory in 2023.

Nevertheless, Tusk caused a sensation across the EU in mid-October by announcing that it would suspend the right to asylum in Poland for an indefinite period. “Tusk was misunderstood at the time. These are only asylum requests from illegal migrants on the Belarusian border,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski recently declared, covering 418 kilometers of the almost 3,000 kilometer long Polish border.

Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of foreign ministers from the five largest EU member states and the United Kingdom in Warsaw last week, Sikorski said Warsaw wanted to avoid becoming the target of a new Putin’s hybrid war. Poland is now also trying to forge a “coalition of the willing” to provide more military and civilian aid to Ukraine. “We will rise to the occasion,” Sikorski said.

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