Undoubtedly, US President Donald Trump’s announcement of the deployment of “5,000 additional troops” to Poland is good news.
Undoubtedly, that announcement, made on a dry post on Truth Social, still holds doubts through the word “additional”.
Will there be an additional 5,000 on top of the 4,000 recently stopped by the Pentagon from their routine deployment, because that rotation has expired? And if so, could it be the 5,000 are those that the US leader had threatened to withdraw from Germany, as punishment for the Berlin chancellor’s criticism of Washington’s war against Tehran?
Or, on the contrary, was that “extra” in Trump’s post just a typo by the American president, in which case it would be only 5,000 instead of 4,000?
Be that as it may, it is worth remembering that Donald Trump has finally started to repair the injustice done to a model ally, as he considers Poland is for the US.
But as welcome as this is, it is worth noting that, simultaneously, the current White House administration is regressing in its already deeply inadequate way of relating to NATO and even to the promotion and protection of America’s own national interests (for which the advanced and consistent military presence in Europe is essential both from the perspective of deterrence and the ability to project US force abroad).
The essence of the problem with the White House’s change of mind about Poland lies in Trump’s publicly justified last-minute generosity: “the successful election of the current President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, whom I have been proud to support, as well as our relationship with him.”
In other words, it was not the commitments made by the US to its allies, nor the strategic and military considerations that led Trump to approve the deployment of the “5000 additional troops”, but the electoral success of a candidate that MAGA likes and his own personal relationship with him.
On the one hand, it’s bizarre, because Trump thus leaves the impression that he had been sleeping for a year, suddenly woke up and had a revelation – given that the Polish president won almost 12 months ago, not a day ago, not even 30 days ago.
On the other hand, it is a terrible thing for way NATO functions–the fact that an alliance of such complexity and significance is reduced to a matter of personal whim and political preferences by an individual who had is constantly chaotic: today he says one thing, tomorrow another; Today he does one thing, tomorrow the opposite.
And how else can Moscow and Beijing regard this (unprecedentedly primitive and harmful) modus operandi of Washington within NATO as something encouraging for them? Trump had already sown doubts that NATO and the US gave two cents on Article 5.
Now, with threats to punish Chancellor Merz by withdrawing thousands of troops from Germany and the gesture of rewarding President Nawrocki for his election and warm relationship with him, Trump is hammering another nail in NATO’s coffin: by connecting the alliance’s troops to the momentary feelings that the US president has towards Mr. X, Mr Y or Mr Z.
In such circumstances, the NATO general in charge of planning is in an unenviable position right now because the absurd variables that the most influential of all NATO allies injects which compete with those that NATO planners normally face from potential enemies of the alliance.
Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev would have envied their successor, Putin: they heroically struggled to undermine NATO from the outside, and now, lo and behold, the dirty job is being executed infinitely more efficiently by an eccentric pawn from the inside.
