Poland is again threatened by a tyrant. This time, Europe must not look away
As all Poles know, the Battle of Warsaw, 104 years ago this August, ended in Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s famous victory over the invading Red Army, which secured their country’s independence. They called it the “Miracle on the Vistula”
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Warsaw’s basic strategy [now] is twofold: convince Vladimir Putin, Russia’s predatory president, that further aggression along Nato’s eastern flank, including against Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, will not prosper; and persuade west European partners that they, too, must urgently up their game.
If unsuccessful in these aims, Poland’s impressive affirmation of confident nationhood in the post-cold war period, and the economic “miracle” it has experienced since joining Nato in 1999 and the EU in 2004, will be at risk. The challenge facing the Polish people is potentially existential. The fear is of 1939 all over again. The idea of Poland taking the lead in Europe is unfamiliar, although it was the norm in the 16th and 17th centuries. Polish energy and ideas, while often misdirected under its previous hard-right government, has put lacklustre politicians in Berlin, Paris and London to shame. Visiting Kyiv last month, Donald Tusk, its newly elected prime minister, issued a bold rallying cry. “It is here, in Ukraine, that the world front between good and evil runs,” he said.
As Tusk, a former EU council president, rebuilds bridges to Brussels dynamited by Eurosceptic predecessors, Europe is getting the message. In meetings last week, he and the leaders of France and Germany revived the so-called Weimar Triangle, a political, defence and security cooperation platform with pan-European applications.
“There is no reason why we should be so clearly militarily weaker than Russia... Increasing [arms] production and intensifying our cooperation are absolutely indisputable priorities,” Tusk said. The EU should become “a military power” in its own right, he insisted. Significantly, Warsaw no longer dismisses French ideas about European strategic autonomy previously deemed harmful to Nato.
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Europe may have less than a year to “get its act together”, as one Polish official put it. Trump in the White House from January 2025 could deliver a lethal 21st-century stab in the back to Ukraine, shatter the transatlantic alliance, and provide his pal Putin with epic, historic revenge for the 1991 Soviet implosion he blames on the west.
To survive such a scenario, Europe may require its own political “miracle on the Vistula” – this time on the Spree, the Seine, the Tiber and the Thames. And who knows? Maybe Poland’s Tusk, having heroically slain the dragons of reaction at home, will emerge as Europe’s new Piłsudski.