Upset Poles set to drive a harder bargain over US missile shield
The new message from Poland is that it is going to extract a high price for agreeing to host the controversial US missile shield — and it may delay its decision until it knows the name of the next American president.
The past four days have brought a rash of comments from Donald Tusk’s new Government that it is more wary of the US than its predecessor and in no mood to treat the missile shield as a done deal. They reveal how much Poland feels underappreciated by the US, not least over Iraq. Warsaw has a point that the US took for granted the enthusiasm for things American in Central and Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union fell apart.
All this is trouble, in a small way, for the US, although Poland has signalled that it will be mollified for the right price. But the bracing new talk from Warsaw points to the bigger problem of Russia, quickly becoming the common factor in apparently separate problems for the US abroad.
The shift in mood is partly a change of government. The conservative Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, who as President and Prime Minister brought an unpredictable surliness to two years of foreign policy, were by reflex prickly towards the European Union, hostile towards Russia and adoring towards the US. They had agreed in principle to host the shield but not signed the deal. The shield, which the US says will protect itself and its allies from missiles from Iran and North Korea, requires ten interceptor missile bases in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic.
Bogdan Kilch, the Polish Defence Minister, for the first time set out yesterday at least part of the price that Poland will demand: an extensive (and expensive) overhaul of its air defences, probably by adding Patriot and THAAD rockets. Kilch, who will meet Robert Gates, his US counterpart, in Washington on Monday, said that Poland’s final decision would depend only on the “national interest”.
Tusk will meet Mirek Topolánek, his Czech counterpart, today to talk about the shield. Russia and Poland will have their first direct talks about it this month. In comments published on Monday, Tusk said that Poland “definitely shouldn’t hurry” in its decision, adding: “Remember, the shield is supposed to defend America, not Poland.”
At the weekend Radek Sikorski, the Foreign Minister, in a signal that Poland may wait until next year, said: “The worst scenario is a situation in which Poland would agree to the shield, will incur the political costs and then the base is not built because of a change of government in the US.”
It is clear that Tusk, for all his deliberate amiability, is prepared to overturn Poland’s close relationship with the US if he cannot garner rewards. The project is vulnerable to the public sense of grievance that Poland did not get the privileged partnership it expected from the US in return for sending soldiers to Iraq. In his inaugural speech Tusk said that he would pull Poland’s 900 troops out of Iraq by the end of this year, although he would send more to Afghanistan to demonstrate commitment to Nato.
Public expectations of a relationship were fanned very high by its advocates, saying that Poland would be “a second Israel” or “a US aircraft carrier sailing on Eastern European waters”. But Russia is the beneficiary of the sense of disappointment and Tusk has caught the public mood in talking of “normalising relations” with Moscow.
Even though hard bargaining was inevitable when plans for the missile shield got real, the US should not neglect the dissatisfaction that drives it.
Comment:
I ronically giving the Poles what they want would probably fuel the Russians' paranoia over this shield. All this for a shield that may not even work. . .
Michael, Pueblo, Colorado, US
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