ISSUE BRIEF Poland and the United States: What’s Right, What’s Not, and What’s Next JULY 2021 DANIEL FRIED AND JAKUB WIŚNIEWSKI round the time of President Joe Biden’s first trip to Europe in June 2021, US-Polish relations experienced a short, but intense, rough patch. Missteps on both sides caused the problems, including fears on the Polish side of a high-handed US attitude and a general lack Aof consultation on issues (like Nord Stream 2) that Poland regards as critical. Some Poles started questioning the good faith of their biggest ally. The US side, for its part, thought Poland was ignoring US overtures and assuming the worst of the United States. Draft legislation that would target the largest US investment in Poland (the TVN television network) generated US concerns about both the investment climate in Poland and political pressure on inde- pendent media. In short order, wiser counsel emerged on both sides, and top-level discussions may have eased the sense of tension.1 But, the episode suggests that problems have developed in what has been (and should re- main) one of the closest transatlantic relations. Both the United States and Poland need to look hard at what this relationship can do for both countries and for the transatlantic relationship, and at the sources of problems. Sources of Common Strategy At their best, US-Polish relations have been driven by profound strategic commonality. Both countries developed strategic cultures that—despite inconsistencies—link national interests with universal values, including democracy and the rule of law. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski fought for US independence out of commitment to the cause of national Driven by our mission of “shaping the freedom linked to Enlightenment values. From President Woodrow Wilson global future together,” the Atlantic through Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, US grand Council is a nonpartisan organization that galvanizes US leadership strategy was based on a premise that a rules-based world that favors and engagement in the world, in democracy would advance US national interests better than a spheres- partnership with allies and partners, to of-influence arrangement. Wilson supported Polish independence in 1918 shape solutions to global challenges. because it fit his emerging grand strategy (and because he had been lobbied by the great Polish pianist and later Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski, GLOBSEC is a global think-tank based in Bratislava committed to enhancing security, prosperity and sustainability in Europe and throughout the world. Its mission is to influence the future by generating new ideas and solutions for a better and safer world. We believe 1 Draft legislation in Poland introduced by members of the ruling Law and Justice Party, aimed we can change the world by putting against the private television network TVN, owned by Discovery and one of the largest US together the right stakeholders at the investments in Poland, may be revised to allow for majority media ownership from European and right time for a free exchange of ideas. NATO member countries, a move that could resolve the issue and make clear that the intent is to protect media from control by autocratic state like Russia, not democracies like the United States. ISSUE BRIEF Poland and the United States: What’s Right, What’s Not, and What’s Next not the last time Poles would successfully make their Adolf Hitler and Stalin simultaneously. In that same period, country’s case to sympathetic Americans).2 Poland’s governments sometimes sought to strengthen the democracies’ resistance to Hitler and Stalin, but also spent Poland, caught between Germany and Russia, had its time and energy in fights with their neighbors Czechoslovakia own sound reasons to support a rules-based world rather and Lithuania, and sometimes failed to address the needs of than spheres of influence. Power politics would leave minorities such as Jews or Ukrainians. During World War II, Poland at peril; international politics rooted in principle Walter Lippmann, the United States’ most influential foreign as well as strength were a matter of national survival. The policy journalist, argued essentially that the Atlantic Charter Polish government (which had fled to London with a large should only apply to Western Europe; that realism demanded contingent of the Polish military after the Nazi and Soviet that the United States accept a sphere-of-influence attacks at the beginning of World War II) embraced FDR’s arrangement with Stalin, allowing Eastern Europe to come Atlantic Charter that promised a liberated Europe of free under Soviet control.4 Truman did not accept this argument, nations backed by the United States. It saw this as the but some later presidents did. President Richard Nixon’s country’s only hope. Poles denounced the Yalta Summit détente tacitly acknowledged the division of Europe and arrangements of 1945 that seemed to them to abrogate the the Iron Curtain as the price of peace, and such arguments promise of the Atlantic Charter, but welcomed Truman’s and persist to this day. subsequent US resistance to Joseph Stalin’s aggression against Poland and Europe generally. Nevertheless, during the critical early period of post-Cold War policy setting, the United States and Poland, joined The Polish democratic opposition, which grew after 1968 by key allies (including Germany, which supported NATO and joined with mass workers’ protests in 1980 to form the enlargement early) invested in applying a democratic- Solidarity movement, held that patriotism in democratic values strategy—the Atlantic Charter axioms—to as much form, not nationalism, was the best answer to communist of Europe as possible. George H.W. Bush was key in domination. Poland’s democratic breakthrough in 1989 setting the parameters of the German reunification that led the way for communism’s fall throughout Central and kept Germany inside Western institutions and gave final Eastern Europe and the end of divided “Yalta Europe.” By confirmation of Germany’s eastern borders (addressing the early 1990s, democratic Polish governments started one of Poland’s chief concerns). Bill Clinton led the way appealing to the United States to put its weight behind on NATO enlargement, with Poland invited in the first NATO enlargement, often making their case in terms of group of former Warsaw Pact countries in 1997. For nearly democratic universalism, the Atlantic Charter, and the twenty years after 1989, democratic and free-market rules-and-democratic-values system that the United States transformation advanced across the continent, and NATO had successfully advanced in Western Europe after 1945.3 and EU enlargement followed. Those arguments fit with the emerging post-Cold War strategies of the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George Subsequent Russian claims notwithstanding, the United W. Bush administrations, all of which supported NATO and States never promised that NATO would not enlarge, European Union (EU) enlargement. nor that the United States would otherwise respect the former line of the Iron Curtain as the border of Kremlin Neither Poland nor the United States always adhered to domination.5 Indeed, rather than a punitive settlement these approaches. In the 1920s and 1930s, the United (as was the case of the Versailles Treaty’s treatment of States abandoned leadership in Europe, leaving the Germany after World War I), the United States embraced weakened British and French democracies to handle both post-Soviet Russia, offering it assistance, though perhaps 2 The piano as the background to a larger geopolitical game returned almost three decades later. “[F]or reasons of Cold War intrigue, Poland did not take part in the UN’s founding deliberations in San Francisco in 1945. Poland was there in spirit, however. At the UN’s 1945 jubilee concert, the legendary Polish pianist Artur Rubinstein angrily observed that the flag of Poland was not present in the hall. So he played the Polish national anthem. Very loudly. And won a tumultuous ovation.” “Speech by Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, UN Human Rights Council (25 Feb 2013),” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, April 20, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160420031240/http://mfa.gov.pl/resource/7454faea-fc21-42ed-bd06- 76b677d1a79d:JCR. 3 Dan Fried, working in the US embassy in Warsaw from 1990–1993 and on the National Security Council (NSC) staff from 1993–1997, was the frequent recipient of these arguments. Fear of a revanchist Russia was only part of the Polish argument. 4 This is especially interesting given that Walter Lippmann had been one of the foreign policy specialists who had helped draft Wilson’s Fourteen Points. 5 Robert Kupiecki, “Through the Eyes of a Strategist and Diplomat: The Polish-American Relations Post-1918,” Brookings, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/. 2 ATLANTIC COUNCIL ISSUE BRIEF Poland and the United States: What’s Right, What’s Not, and What’s Next US President Joe Biden stands next to Poland’s President Andrzej Duda during a plenary session at a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, June 14, 2021. Olivier Matthys/Pool via REUTERS (14 June 2021). not enough, and an honorable place in the post-Cold War Convinced that the United States and the democratic order (e.g., membership in the Group of Eight (G8)). Neither West threaten Kremlin control over its claimed sphere of Poland nor any of the countries