Only Poland Can Save Europe Now

For centuries, Poland was the rampart of Christendom – now, history is repeating as war clouds form over Europe again

The trajectory of European security over the last two decades can be explained, and book-ended, by two speeches in Munich. Both took place at the Munich Security Conference, which has been held since 1963, a five-star opportunity for Transatlantic power brokers and their minions to explicate their views, particularly regarding NATO and European security. This year’s MSC did not disappoint, featuring the new U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance stealing the show with a barn-burning speech which took the European Union to task for its internal crises and democratic shortcomings.

Vance’s speech was greeted with shock and horror by many Eurocrats, while some even detected Hitlerian flourishes in the vice president’s comments. That’s frankly silly, yet there can be no doubt regarding the dismay that followed Vance’s comments in Munich. That said, how we got to Vance’s historic speech, which is causing discomfort and worse between Washington, DC, and many European partners, cannot be properly understood without recalling another MSC headliner, 18 years before.

Munich in February 2007 featured a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin which should have shaken Western security elites out of their post-Cold War hangover and self-reverential torpor, yet mysteriously did not. Some context is in order. When Putin, an obscure former KGB officer, took over the Kremlin in 1999, he bore little resemblance to the West’s nuclear-armed nemesis he has become over the past quarter-century in power. The relatively youthful Putin, a fresh face in Moscow, approached the West with cautious interest. In 2000, Putin even toyed with Russia joining the Atlantic Alliance. Russian anger over NATO’s 78 days of bombing Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War notwithstanding, Putin initially viewed the West as a potential partner as much as a rival.

Al-Qa’ida’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, as Russia was battling its own Islamist insurgency in Chechnya, ushered in a period of unprecedented security cooperation between Moscow and Washington, DC, but it didn’t last. Putin felt that President George W. Bush didn’t reciprocate his overtures and wouldn’t respect Russia’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. Here Ukraine’s pro-Western Orange Revolution in the winter of 2004-05 was viewed by Putin and his retinue, largely composed of old school Chekists like himself, as a hostile act. Moscow’s pushback arrived in KGB fashion with a major rise in 2006 in Russian intelligence operations against the West, reaching a tempo and intensity not seen since the Cold War. However, this clandestine message, excepting the late 2006 polonium-210 assassination in London of the KGB/FSB defector Sasha Litvinenko, was little noticed outside Western counterintelligence circles. The Bush administration, drowning in its self-created Iraq disaster, barely took notice of Putin’s messaging his displeasure with the West.

Therefore, Putin’s MSC speech on Feb. 10, 2007, landed on NATO like a lightning bolt. Gone was the conciliatory young Russian leader, having been replaced by a harsh critic of the West, especially the United States. Putin’s speech was an extended rant against American-led Western hegemony that denounced the “unipolar world” created after the Cold War which “has nothing in common with democracy.” Putin added acidly: “Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves. I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.” He continued:

Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts … We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?

Not Russia, and not Vladimir Putin. Observers in Munich were unsure how to react. Western potentates broadly dismissed Putin’s speech-rant as a Cold War relic that they didn’t know what to do with. Then-NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer encapsulated the Eurocrat response with his description: “disappointing and not helpful.” Putin’s words were better received back in Russia, where his MSC appearance went down in history as simply “the Munich speech.”

Here was a new sheriff, if not in town yet, then lurking on NATO’s Eastern frontier, menacingly. NATO’s collective response to Putin’s Munich shot across the alliance’s bow was to pretend it never happened. Just weeks after MSC in 2007, “somebody” launched a massive cyberattack on Estonia’s critical infrastructure, which happened to coincide with disputes in the capital Tallinn about that little country’s occupation by the Soviets during the Second World War – disputes which Moscow considered impudent.

Blissfully avoiding the obvious, the Bush White House in April 2008 at NATO’s Bucharest summit cajoled the alliance into offering membership to Georgia and Ukraine. Sort of, but not really. This affirmed the aspirations of Tbilisi and Kyiv to join NATO, someday, while providing no roadmap to do so. This added insult to injury in Moscow’s eyes, while offering no actual security to Georgia or Ukraine. That August, Putin executed a lighting war against Georgia that resulted in Moscow de facto occupying 20 percent of Georgian territory. That took Tbilisi off the map as far as NATO membership was concerned.

The lamentable years since 2008 in NATO-Russian relations can be roughly summarized. Refusing to listen to what Putin says openly, President Barack Obama attempted a “reset” with Moscow, while remaining clueless about what the Kremlin desired. As a last-ditch effort, in the eyes of the Putin regime, Moscow’s ambassador to NATO in 2009 floated the concept of Russia united with the EU and the United States against the (in effect, non-white) world. This went nowhere with Obama, for obvious reasons. Thereafter, Moscow treated Obama as hostile, while Obama ignored the rising Russian threat as a joke, something to taunt unhip Mitt Romney about in 2012. Putin got his payback the following year with the Kremlin’s Snowden Operation, while later in 2013, Putin revealed Obama to be the weakling he was over the latter’s “red line” in Syria. A few months later, viewing Obama’s supine nature as an opening, Putin seized Crimea and started Russia’s war against Ukraine. Obama simply never understood Putin and what Russia wanted.

His successor, Donald Trump, ran on getting along with Russia, but that never happened for many reasons, not least the Beltway mania about Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow, which weren’t wholly fictional, yet mattered much less than Democrats imagined. Putin’s hopes that Trump might deliver a genuine “reset” with Moscow proved illusory, though at least the Ukraine war remained frozen during Trump’s rocky first term.

Democrats failed to deter Moscow yet again, despite their stern rhetoric against Russia, and in late February 2022, Putin restarted his aggression against Ukraine on a grand scale, commencing Europe’s biggest and bloodiest war since 1945. Witnessing the collapse of American hegemony with President Joe Biden’s shambolic Kabul retreat of August 2021, Putin seized the moment. NATO logistical and financial support, heavily American, has kept Kyiv in the war but cannot change the fundamental strategic equation, which favors Russia. Ukraine is tracking to lose the war in 2025, from attrition, therefore Trump’s promised “deal” to end represents a distasteful necessity for Kyiv.

Trump is now showing his overt contempt for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, absurdly using him of “starting” the war with Russia. Relations between Moscow and Washington, DC, are already cooling, while a meeting between Putin and Trump appears to be coming soon. There is a real chance that a peace deal for Ukraine will emerge without significant input from Kyiv. It’s likely that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations will be shelved indefinitely as a condition for peace, which means that the war which started in 2014, then got much worse in 2022, never needed to be waged at all. One of the great mysteries surrounding this terrible conflict is why successive American presidents kept Ukraine’s NATO hopes alive, knowing these made Moscow white-hot with rage, without any serious intent of admitting Kyiv to the alliance. This was an act of geostrategic malpractice of terrifying proportions.

Trump is now likely offering Moscow a diplomatic grand bargain, the true reset that Putin wanted two decades ago. Whether this happens remains to be seen. If Trump can deliver a fundamentally changed strategic relationship between the U.S. and Russia, a “deal” that brings European peace for a generation, that will be a remarkable accomplishment. If this deal doesn’t materialize – or worse, Putin uses his parley with Trump as cover for more aggression – this may prove a catastrophic mistake.

Such is the context in which Vice President Vance’s Munich speech must be viewed. As this newsletter recently explained, the second Trump administration is engaged in an overdue defense pivot to Asia, at the expense of Europe and the Middle East. Although the Pentagon isn’t retreating from EUCOM and CENTCOM, a strategic shift in forces is unavoidable now, if China is to be deterred from aggression in East Asia later in this decade. While Vance chided European NATO members about their still too low defense spending, something they’ve grown accustomed to hearing from Washington, DC, he raised their ire with these words:

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

Vance’s critique of the EU’s rising democracy deficit, particularly when it comes to free speech, stunned the MSC audience. Their intemperate reactions to the vice president’s words, which included condemnations of the United States plus calls for Europe to go its own way strategically, outpaced anger over anything Putin has done. Over the last two decades, the Russian strongman has waged various types of war against Europe, ranging from aggressive espionage, cyberattacks, unsubtle subversion, terrorism, and assassinations, plus multiple invasions, but J.D. Vance’s words upset Eurocrats more than any of that.

Something is wrong here and this difficult reality can no longer be deflected. I’ve pleaded with Europeans to take their defense more seriously for a decade and more. The Russian threat is real and rising, yet Putin is an opportunist, not a madman. Effective deterrence in Europe would keep the Kremlin at bay, but Europeans simply refuse to do it. Fifteen years of pleading by Washington, DC, going back to the Obama years, for NATO members to pick up the slack, because the U.S. can’t do everything, have failed to transform European defense spending and habits.

Europe has simply neglected to defend itself. Even the more dutiful NATO members, in terms of defense spending, aren’t doing what’s needed for the alliance to survive. Take Great Britain, our fraternal Five Eyes partner, which used to be a significant middleweight power, yet has declined into near-irrelevance in military terms. All the British armed services are in bad shape, due to unwise spending and a lack of strategic focus, but the condition of the British Army is illustrative. Despite a rise in Britain’s population from 57 million in 1990 to almost 70 million today, the British Army can’t staff its authorized strength of 72,500 active troops, which is less than half the size it was when the Cold War ended. Units are understrength and unready. The British Army deployed a heavy division (minus) to the U.S.-led 1991 Gulf War and did almost the same for the 2003 Iraq War, yet today London’s notional commitment to a similar deployment in Europe is an illusion. In practice, the British Army can only put one heavy brigade in the field, and not for long. Keep in mind that Britain is one of the heavier hitters in NATO.

The rest of the alliance, with few exceptions, has little to offer the United States in terms of collective defense against Russia. There are a handful of NATO outliers. Little Estonia punches well above its weight in defense terms, but there’s only so much a country of 1.3 million citizens can offer NATO. Similarly, Finland is ready to defend its territory, but it only joined the alliance in 2022, moreover Finland’s reserve mobilization-based territorial defense model isn’t applicable to most of NATO. It’s not a coincidence that Estonia and Finland both border Russia and possess long and painful histories of mistreatment by Moscow.

The NATO member that really matters is Poland, which is the only European country of any size that can be termed genuinely serious about national defense. Here, again, history and geography matter. Poland’s bad history with Russia goes back centuries, while it borders the Russian Federation in the Kaliningrad exclave: for Warsaw, the Russian threat looms uncomfortably close in both time and space. While Poland’s domestic politics are bitter, a venerable tradition in Warsaw, there’s considerable agreement regarding national security and the threat emanating from the East. Poland was wiped from the map in 1795 by the great powers of Europe, especially Russia, and didn’t return until 1918. Poles, regardless of politics, are determined that such ugly history never repeat.

It bears noting that Poland got serious about Putin’s malevolent intent towards his neighbors before the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Warsaw’s military buildup to deter Moscow, with eyes on Ukraine, began in 2013, as I told everyone at the time:

Poland’s response here has been significant, as it is the largest and most important NATO frontline state in terms of military, political and economic power. Warsaw of late has been trying to raise Alliance awareness of the rising threat from the East, but this has been met with skepticism by NATO members located farther to the West than Poland. In a typical example, the expression of current Alliance assumptions by NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen that “war among European nations is simply unimaginable,” was countered in May by the statement of Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski: “I’m afraid conflict in Europe is imaginable.”

As usual, the Poles were right, while the Eurocrats were naïve fools. Over the past dozen years, Warsaw has fundamentally transformed its military, Wojsko Polskie or WP, in size, shape, and scope. In 2025, Warsaw will spend 4.7 percent of its GDP on defense, a record sum, allowing the WP to expand to almost 300,000 serving troops. Poland has commenced the biggest arms-buying bonanza in its history, while its forces are growing into the most capable in European NATO.

The Land Forces are the biggest component, with over 100,000 active troops, organized in five divisions (a sixth is currently forming) with a total of 17 maneuver brigades. For comparison, the U.S. Army has a dozen active divisions with 36 maneuver brigades. Moreover, Warsaw is engaged in a massive buy of modern tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery from Germany, the U.S. and South Korea, while increasing domestic production of weapons and munitions to meet wartime needs. Poland’s army is already the most powerful between Russia and the Atlantic and it will only become more so in this decade.

Poland’s Air Force is engaged in similar growth, with two fighter wings and a transportation wing, all equipped with modern aircraft. The last Cold War, Soviet-derived combat aircraft are being phased out, while the core of the force is 48 F-16 fighters from the U.S., bolstered by an order for 32 F-35 Lightning II fifth generation strike fighters. Poland’s Navy is small, essentially a coastal force given the country’s limited Baltic Sea coastline, built around two U.S.-provided FFG-7 frigates, but it’s sufficient to play a noteworthy role in Baltic security for NATO.

Even smaller is Poland’s Special Forces, consisting of a few hush-hush units possessing extensive experience in shadowy operations with NATO in several countries. Its best-known unit, called GROM (an acronym meaning “thunder” in Polish), is highly regarded by American snake-eating counterparts, and GROM ranks among the world’s top special operators. The newest addition to WP is its fifth branch, established in 2016 as the Territorial Defense Force (WOT in Polish). Roughly analogous to the U.S. National Guard, WOT is a force of part-time volunteers trained to defend their local area. Organized in 20 light infantry brigades spread across Poland, WOT’s mission is to defend against Russian hybrid threats such as the GRU Little Green Men who seized Crimea in 2014. WOT claims the heritage of the Home Army of the Second World War, the underground force which gallantly resisted Nazi and Soviet occupation, and if Russia manages to occupy any Polish territory again, WOT will form the cadres for stay-behind guerrilla resistance.

If Europe wants to survive, it must take defense as seriously as Poland does. In response to European anger at Vance’s MSC speech, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk pleaded with fellow EU members to stop blaming the Trump administration and get serious about defense: “I will ask the prime ministers gathered in Paris today directly, are they ready to make a serious decision? Poland is unfortunately an exception to the rule in Europe at the moment. This absolutely has to change.”

Tusk amplified his concerns on X (formerly Twitter) this week, using direct language: “If we, Europeans, fail to spend big on defense now, we will be forced to spend 10 times more if we don’t prevent a wider war. As the Polish PM I’m entitled to say it loud and clear, since Poland already spends almost 5% of its GDP on defense. And we will continue to do so.”

The choice is Europe’s. Poland is reverting to a role it knows well from history. Its army saved Europe from Bolshevism at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, stopping the Reds’ westward invasion. In September 1683, King John III Sobieski’s relief force rescued Vienna from Ottoman siege, pushing the Turks out of Central Europe for good while saving Christendom from Islam. Today, the badge of the Polish 11^th Armored Cavalry Division is a winged hussar’s helmet of the kind worn by Sobieski as he personally lead his cavalry against the Ottomans at Vienna.

For Western Christians, Poland was the historic antemurale christianitatis, “the rampart of Christendom” for its saving Europe from the Russians to the East and the Ottomans to the south. Here history repeats. Poland stands ready to resist the Russians, yet again, alone if necessary. Unlike Western Europe, Poland hasn’t flooded itself with Muslim migrants and therefore lacks the internal jihadist threat which currently plagues France, Germany, and many other NATO members. We can keep Russia and radical Islam out of Europe if the rest of NATO decides to get serious about defense and security as Poland has done. This has nothing to do with Donald Trump or J.D. Vance, rather Europe’s willingness to defend its civilization against ancient threats which have returned.