It was good that President Biden chose Warsaw as the venue for a major speech and meetings with other allies in the wake of his visit to Kyiv.
It was good that President Biden chose Warsaw as the venue for a major speech and meetings with other allies in the wake of his visit to Kyiv.
Reading a CNN account of that speech, I couldn’t help noticing one detail (emphasis added):
“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and most important, it stands free,” Biden said as a crowd, many waving American flags, cheered underneath cold rain.
“Many waving American flags.” I wonder if that would have been the case in Berlin.
But Berlin has a habit of doing things differently than Warsaw.
From a Reuters report in October (again, emphasis added):
Gas started flowing to Poland through the new Baltic Pipe pipeline from Norway via Denmark and the Baltic Sea on Saturday morning, Polish gas pipeline operator Gaz-System said.
The pipeline is at the centre of Poland’s strategy to diversify its gas supplies away from Russia that began years before Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine triggered a global energy crisis.
Andrew Higgins, writing in the New York Times:
[Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki] recalled that before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent his military into Ukraine, Warsaw’s insistent warnings about the threat posed by Moscow and by Europe’s reliance on its energy supplies “were only sort of half heard.”
Since the war began, Germany has ditched its previously Moscow-friendly policies and also its heavy dependence on Russian natural gas. At the same time, Poland has become a hub for Western weapons flowing into Ukraine, a shelter for millions of Ukrainian refugees and a driving force behind European sanctions against Russia.
“All governments have admitted that my government was right with regards to Russia, to all the threats related to the Russian-German gas relationship,” Mr. Morawiecki said. He said the policies toward Russia of Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel, were “completely wrong.”
In a speech in Warsaw on Tuesday, President Biden hailed Poland as “one of our great allies, praising its embrace of refugees from Ukraine and its key role in the West’s united response to Russian aggression.
“Thank you, Poland. Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing.”
Yet, while acknowledging that Poland has become a pivot around which much of that response now revolves, some foreign policy experts worry that it might not be entirely ready for prime time.
Something tells me that those “foreign-policy experts” may include some who used to sing the praises of Angela Merkel as some kind of stateswoman when, in reality, and as was long evident, the only area in which she succeeded strategically was in ensuring her own political survival.
And, while Germany has, as Higgins notes, “ditched” its earlier Moscow-friendly policies, it’s not hard to detect signs that some in Berlin’s leadership are nostalgic for the time when relations with Moscow were cozier.
Meanwhile, read on a little further in the Times’ report to discover that:
Behind the din generated by Poland’s highly polarized domestic political scene is a broad consensus on the need to support Ukraine. This has allowed the government to ramp up spending on the military, which is now around 3 percent of gross domestic product, far above the 2 percent target set by NATO but missed by most members of the alliance.
Germany will fail to meet a NATO guideline of spending 2% of gross domestic product on its military next year and again from 2026 onwards, according to an analysis quoted in local media on Monday.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged in a speech to parliament shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February that Germany would invest “more than 2% of GDP annually” in defense, and announced the creation of a special fund worth €100 billion ($105 billion) to help achieve the goal…
“The 2% target is receding into the distant future despite €100 billion in special funds, and even necessary procurements in the short term are not progressing,” the Rheinische Post newspaper quoted a study by the IW economic research institute as saying.
According to NATO estimates, German spending on defense this year is around 1.4% of GDP. That compares with 1.9% in France, 2.1% in Britain and 3.5% in the US.
Germany is, by dint of its economic strength and geographic position, a vital part of the West, and there is no sense in pushing it away even if it may not be the most reliable (the dangerous economic dependence it has built on China is something also worth noting) or energetic of allies.
At the same time, there is an obvious case to be made for the U.S. to listen rather more to Warsaw — and rather less to Berlin — than in the past.