America Is an Expensive Guest
The Polish president has been played by Donald Trump, says Paweł Wronski. Andrzej Duda touted
his recent trip to the White House as a near-total success. The US, he declared, has agreed to add
1,000 troops to the 4,500 already deployed here. Poland will also host a new US divisional HQ, a
joint US-Polish training centre and a squadron of drones. All this, he said, will guarantee our security
by deterring Russian aggression. But it turns out that the $2bn bill will be paid by Poland, not the
US. And though Duda tried to stroke Trump’s ego by saying that a mooted larger-scale facility could
be named “Fort Trump”, the US president crucially declined to commit to an official US base in
Poland – instead holding to the 1997 Nato-Russia agreement that implies Nato can’t build permanent
bases in the territory of the old Warsaw Pact. The upshot is that the US “will gain a new training
area for free, using facilities built by Poles”. And in return, Poland has agreed to buy 32 F-35s –
a super-modern fighter jet we have no foreseeable use for – for some $4bn. It would have made far
more sense to buy Patriot anti-ballistic missiles to defend against a Russian strike. When Duda
gets home, “he will look into his empty wallet and wonder if he has bought what he really needs”.
