The US and the Polish Honey Trap
The US should beware endorsing Poland’s geopolitical agenda in Ukraine
The war in Ukraine has exponentially increased the risk of nuclear confrontation between the US and Russia. It is also obscuring the true geopolitical agenda of some of its major supporters, Poland being the most obvious among them. Indeed, it’s no accident that Poland has become the main backer of the US-sponsored proxy war in Ukraine, since the country is trying to reclaim its mediaeval status of the most powerful state in Europe.
Following the law of unintended consequences, the pursuit of America’s global hegemony agenda has given rise in Warsaw to hopes that Poland could somehow benefit from NATO’s expansion in order to resurrect the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a confederation that at its zenith in the 17th century covered a million square kilometres and encompassed the territories of today’s Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
The First Polish Republic, as the Commonwealth is known in Poland, was in fact a confederal state where the monarch was the ruler of both Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the latter’s territories spanned at one time from the Baltic to the Black Sea). The superstate was not only the largest in Europe, but also the most populous, having Catholicism as its religion and two official languages, Polish and Latin. The Polish-Lithuanian republic started with a personal union at the Krewo agreement in 1385 and was reorganised in 1569 as a two-nation state. This unusual state was dismantled in 1795 through the common action of the monarchs of Prussia, Austria and Russia, after four centuries of existence. As a result, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years. It re-emerged as a national state only in the wake of the First World War.
The existence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth coincided with a period in European history where kingdoms were striving to increase the monarchy’s central authority at the expense of the nobility. By the end of the 18th century, most European kingdoms ended up as absolutist monarchies. In 1789 this ignited the French Revolution, but six years later it also led to the partition of Poland’s Commonwealth among Prussia, Austria and Russia, notwithstanding its adoption of a modern constitution in 1791 (second only to the United States).
However much the Polish like to blame other countries for the disappearance of their state, the truth is more nuanced. The system of government adopted by them after 1569 diminished monarchical authority, giving Polish nobles a major say in the running of state affairs. At the time, this proved a recipe for internal anarchy and social strife. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was deemed a negative model to follow and was therefore considered a dangerous experiment by its neighbouring powers.
In Warsaw’s present-day perspective, the launch of the concept of New Europe by Donald Rumsfeld and especially NATO’s drive to expand eastwards in Ukraine have created an opportunity to bring back to life the defunct two-nation confederation. Already in 2022, the President of Poland started participating in the sessions of the Ukrainian parliament, both Zelensky and Duda’s speeches alluding to the opportunity of the two countries uniting into a confederation, ostensibly as a bulwark against Russia in Europe. Three million Ukrainian refugees in Poland received Polish ID numbers and social security and plans were drawn to completely open up the borders between Poland and Ukraine in preparation for the creation of a confederate state.
As of 2023, a lobbying campaign also started in Washington serving the same Polish-Ukrainian agenda. Although their knowledge of European affairs has long been vitiated by intermediaries like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Americans have slowly started to realise that far from simply serving NATO’s eastern expansion and American hegemony in general, Poland has its own geopolitical agenda to fulfill.
Such an occurrence is not unique in Europe. For instance, it is well-known that Mussolini used his alliance with Nazi Germany and instrumentalized German military power in the 1940’s in order to try and re-create the old Roman Empire in a new form. To this end, he decided to invade Albania and Greece and also started military operations in Libya, all in an effort to make Italy the dominant power in the Mediterranean once again.
Through Radoslaw Sikorski, the current Polish foreign minister, Warsaw is intimately connected to the American neoconservatives, who are highly supportive of NATO’s expansion and are generally affected by Russophobia. The current Biden administration has also upgraded the US’s ties to Poland with the appointment of Ambassador Mark Brzezinski, Zbigniew’s son.
Thus the stage is set for entrapping the US into Warsaw’s geopolitical designs for the region, which make peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine next to impossible and have the potential to prolong the war -bare the unforeseen- for another few years. Needless to mention, none of the above plans are in the geostrategic interest of the United States, nor are they actually feasible in practice, for that matter.
One can only hope, however, that the next US administration will take a more realistic view of Poland’s role in the Ukrainian conflict and of its lobbying activities in Washington and will act accordingly.
Criminally under appreciated writer.
Very knowledgeable of history.