Trump Won’t Help Poland Fight the EU

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In 2014, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was secretly recorded saying the Polish-U.S. alliance was “worthless” and created a “false sense of security.” The recording became part of a scandal that helped bring down the liberal government of which Sikorski was part and hand power to the nationalist Law and Justice Party, or PiS.

. Now, the nationalists are finding out they can’t get much out of the U.S., either, even under friendly President Donald Trump. On Wednesday he effectively rebuffed their plans for a U.S. military base in Poland.

. The PiS government has tried to use Trump’s U.S. as a counterweight to Germany and the rest of the European Union, where Polish nationalism and especially the ruling party’s attempts to put courts under tighter political control are unpopular. Poland has proved an eager buyer for U.S. liquefied natural gas. It has also signed a $4.8 billion deal to buy Patriot missile defense systems from the U.S. and wants to buy F-35 fighter jets. Trump, for his part, made a major speech in Warsaw in 2017, laying out his vision for Europe, and the U.S. organized a Middle East conference in Warsaw earlier this year in signs that the Polish government’s staunchly pro-U.S. stance is appreciated. What the PiS leadership hoped to get out of this was a permanent U.S. military base to help guarantee Poland’s protection from any potential Russian depredations.

. The Polish defense ministry last year published its vision of the ramped-up U.S. presence. It offered a financial commitment of up to $2 billion to host a U.S. armored division -- 10,000 or more troops. The proposed location for the base, near the cities of Bydgoszcz and Torun, wasn’t quite on the border with Belarus, Poland’s pro-Russian neighbor, but it would have been on the path of Russian troops if they poured through the so-called Suwalki Gap on that border.

. Last September, Polish President Andrzej Duda tried to make the proposal personally attractive to the U.S. president by suggesting the new base be named Fort Trump.

. On Wednesday, as Duda visited the White House, it transpired that no permanent U.S. base was in the offing. Poland would merely build a new facility to house an additional 1,000 or so U.S. troops – roughly an extra battalion, far from a division -- that will arrive on the same rotating basis as the roughly 4,500 service members who currently move in and out of Poland. The new U.S.-Polish military cooperation package also includes a squadron of Reaper reconnaissance drones, a training center and some logistical enhancements to support potential U.S. deployments. This is a meaningful step forward for the U.S. presence in Poland – but it’s not the same as a large military base housing U.S. troops and their families. Attacking such a facility would inevitably entail a full-scale war with the U.S., something that would deter any aggressor.

. From a purely military point of view, the addition of 1,000 U.S. soldiers doesn’t make Poland – or the Baltic States – any safer from a Russian conventional attack . And the U.S. refusal to make the presence permanent shows it doesn’t necessarily share the Polish government’s belief that the Founding Act , a document signed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia in 1997, is no longer binding, despite Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014. In the agreement, NATO promised to refrain from permanently stationing substantial military forces in its new members.

. The PiS government is spinning the Trump package as a huge victory. But given all its efforts to sidle up to Trump – and the fact that Poland is going to pay for all the additional infrastructure, if not to the tune of $2 billion – it’s a letdown that shows the limits of Trump’s gratitude for Polish support.

. In the end, those limits are dictated by a geopolitical reality that even the Russian land grab in Ukraine hasn’t changed: Peace in Eastern Europe depends on an implicit understanding between the U.S. and Russia, and no U.S. administration wants to be the first to break it, no matter how much it may like a particular Polish government. Poland’s geography forces it to build a neighborly relationship with Russia on its eastern flank and Germany on its western one; the U.S. can help protect it, but it can’t serve as the country’s sole patron – and there are certain things it just won’t do without very serious justification, such as open a permanent military base.

. To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

. Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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Trump Won’t Help Poland Fight the EU