One U.S. Ally’s Formula for Dealing With Trump: Pull Closer to America

WARSAW—Donald Trump’s recent comments that he would encourage Moscow to attack NATO members that “don’t pay” has sent shock waves through Europe, leaving leaders fearing they could be stuck alone to defend against a Russian assault.

But Poland, a victim of repeated Russian aggression in the past century, has a response: Get closer to the U.S.

For countries seeking ways to anticipate a Trump administration, Poland could offer something of an example. It has worked to ensure that Americans have skin in the game of defending against Russia—whoever inhabits the White House—by spending lavishly on American weapons systems and commercial technology.

For Warsaw, it is the sort of dealmaking that could resonate with Trump.

“He wants Europe to be the area dominated by American interests,” said President Andrzej Duda in an interview. “Because he is a businessman, he wants to spread American business.”

Poland over the past two years has agreed to buy as much as $50 billion in military equipment from the U.S., including Apache helicopters, advanced Himars rocket launchers and a new generation of airborne radar that operates from tethered blimps. It had already agreed to buy F-35 jet fighters.

Warsaw’s arms deals signed in the last fiscal year alone accounted for half of U.S. foreign military sales, according to State Department data, making it the world’s largest buyer of U.S. arms in the period.

Poland has also signed big business deals with leading U.S. companies, including chip maker Intel, which plans to build a $4.6 billion semiconductor plant in the Eastern European country. Most prominent among the deals is a planned nuclear-power plant, a project Poland has been negotiating with Westinghouse Electric since Trump was president.

Poles see the choice as a coldly rational decision that aligns their security interests with American economic interests.

“Let’s be honest, one of the reasons we consciously selected an American partner was…because this type of investment instantly generates much broader business development,” Duda said.

The reactor project “represents a 100-year partnership between the United States and Poland on energy security,” said Westinghouse Electric Chief Executive Patrick Fragman.

Polish officials fear that shrinking U.S. support could leave NATO’s eastern front vulnerable, with their country the biggest target. Long wary of Russia, Poland has for years invested heavily in defense. This year the country will spend roughly double the level North Atlantic Treaty Organization members a decade ago agreed to be spending now.

Poles think history shows they need strong allies—and that diplomatic pacts aren’t sufficient. After Germany and the Soviet Union invaded in 1939, defense pledges from Britain and France proved worthless. In 1945, the Allies let Stalin put Poland under Soviet domination. So Poland is appealing to American self-interest.

Most of Poland’s U.S. contracts were signed under the previous nationalist government, which sought to foster what it called a privileged partnership with the Trump administration alongside other European countries and in 2018 even proposed naming a local U.S. base Fort Trump.

That government left power in December. The new centrist government has maintained strong U.S. ties while moving fast to rebuild bridges with the European Union after years of tensions. The EU on Thursday unlocked Poland’s access to more than $145 billion in budget funds that Brussels had blocked over concerns about the rule of law in the country.

The new government plans to maintain Poland’s large U.S. arms orders despite long delivery delays, said Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

“It would be helpful to speed up delivery times,” Sikorski said in an interview. Poland is meanwhile giving priority to developing drones, based on lessons from Ukraine, he said.

Duda, a self-described conservative who is aligned with the former government, said that Trump’s argument that European NATO members should spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, as agreed at a NATO summit in 2014, “makes sense.”

“For me, this is obvious,” he said, noting that Poland is spending roughly 4% of its GDP on defense—due to fear of what he termed “the threat of resurgent Russian imperialism,” and not because of threats from Trump.

“Of course, we count on our NATO allies, primarily the U.S.A., but we know that this will be [just] support,” he said. Poles must “be able to defend ourselves, hence the sacrifices of the entire Polish society.”

The conflict in Ukraine came at a vulnerable time for Poland. The country was in the middle of military modernization, trying to upgrade from decades of using Soviet armaments. The transformation process made it easier for Warsaw to find the planes and tanks it sent to Ukraine, making it one of the biggest donors to Ukraine early in the war.

But those handouts also added to the urgency of ramping up procurement.

While Poland has also signed deals with South Korea and Germany, its overwhelming preference for U.S. hardware is meant to tie Washington into a long-term relationship with Warsaw. But it also aims to provide maximum capability with U.S. forces in a crisis situation.

“All of Poland’s defense planners, from people with stars on their shoulders to military procurement people—everything is being done for maximum compatibility and interoperability” with U.S. armed forces, said Tony Housh, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Poland and a former country representative for Northrop Grumman. He said the goal is that any U.S. forces sent from America “would fit seamlessly right into the eastern flank” with F-35s, Himars and Patriot air-defense systems.

Investing in advanced U.S. military technology has been central to Warsaw’s two-pronged defensive strategy for a quarter-century. The deals give Poland some of the world’s most advanced military equipment, but they also give the U.S., which has a large and nationalistic Polish-American voting bloc, a vested interest in protecting Poland.

In 2002, the U.S. approved Poland’s purchase of F-16 jet fighters, days after Christmas that year, amplifying the holiday mood. A push by Warsaw in 2008 for the U.S. to station Patriots in Poland was only partly about fear of missile strikes. Warsaw wanted the systems because they would be operated by U.S. troops stationed in the country, putting Americans in harm’s way in any Russian attack.

Poland has viewed attracting U.S. investors as similarly cementing American interests in the fiercely pro-American country.

The U.S. is the second-biggest investor in Poland, behind only Germany, with which Poland shares a border. The deal with Intel to build a new plant in the western city of Wroclaw brings Poland into the U.S. company’s European supply chain, which includes another plant in Ireland and a planned one in Germany.

In 2021, Google chose Poland as the first site in Eastern Europe for its cloud storage system, from where it would be serving the rest of the region.

The nuclear-power plant would hold significance beyond business and defense. In late 1990, less than one year after Poland formed the Soviet bloc’s first democratically elected government and helped spark the Berlin Wall’s collapse, Poland canceled a half-built Soviet reactor project. Rejecting the Russian-designed reactor represented a beacon of Poland’s swing to the West.

Today, an American reactor represents a beacon of Poland’s allegiance to the U.S. Westinghouse’s Fragman said the project would have a profound impact on Poland through economic growth, job creation and clean-energy production. Westinghouse is also establishing a regional engineering hub and engaging hundreds of Polish suppliers, “which will be critical to support additional projects across the region,” he said.

Duda said he isn’t worried that Trump would pull the U.S. from NATO or by his repeated comments praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump “looks at politics through the prism of business,” he said, speaking before some of Trump’s most inflammatory recent comments on NATO.

“I think he knows that Russia’s domination in Europe isn’t in the United States’s best interest,” said Duda. “It is not good business.”

Laurence Norman and Sharon Weinberger contributed to this article.

Write to Daniel Michaels at [email protected] and Thomas Grove at [email protected]