It is difficult to say anything with certainty about the second Trump administration, because Donald Trump himself does not know what is about to come his way. What is clear is that, unlike during his first term, he will not be surrounded by many sensible advisers and politicians, with a few exceptions. Fortunately, both Marco Rubio as incoming Secretary of State and Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor are reasonably predictable politicians who are astute toward Russia. Except that this is not why they were nominated. They were primarily chosen to tighten policy toward China.
In general, however, there is little left of the old Republican Party. Today, the Republicans are almost as much the property of their leader as Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland or Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary. One gets the impression that the US is becoming “Eastern Europeanized.” This is something of a reversal, as post-communist Eastern Europe became strongly Americanized, taking over both the economic model and the ideological foundations at the apogee of US economic and ideological hegemony in 1989.
In Eastern Europe, too, the division into metropolises and provinces, coinciding with the division into winners and losers of the economic transformation, is much more reminiscent of the United States than of Western Europe. It was in Eastern Europe that a radical deindustrialization similar to that in the US took place, although the chronology and circumstances were quite different, but the ideological foundation was similar.
An Americanized “New Europe”
The US neoliberalism that became the basis of economic policy in Eastern Europe for at least two decades had a harsher face even than in the US itself, let alone Western Europe. In Poland, economics-professor-turned–finance-minister Leszek Balcerowicz, supported by American advisers headed by Jeffrey Sachs, announced a “shock therapy” that sent three million people into unemployment almost overnight. And every subsequent minister up to 2015 wanted to be the "new Balcerowicz."
At a turning point in US politics, i.e., after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, post-communist Europe (and even Russia) unequivocally sided with the US when France and Germany opposed the war in Iraq. It was then that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the comparison between “Old Europe” and “New Europe.” Poland and Ukraine sent their soldiers and even had their own occupation zone in Iraq. French President Jacques Chirac said at the time that Poland had missed an opportunity to stay silent.
Back then, Poland was poor and an upstart in Europe. That is not the case today. At the time, objectively speaking, the Germans and the French were right, but politically the alliance with the US was too important for Poland and Eastern Europe, which unlike the countries in Western Europe borders Russia.
Trump is ambivalent and hostile toward Europe, but mostly Western Europe. For it is Germany and France that are the economic competitors of the US, not Poland or the Baltic states. On the American right, “New Europe” has much better ratings than “Old Europe.” Of course, this is also because many of its political leaders are much more right-wing and populist. Trump likes them to suck up, just as Kaczyński and Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, a former member of the PiS, like to suck up. It was Duda who proposed to Trump during one of his visits to Warsaw that Fort Trump be built in Poland. Duda, while proving to be a disaster for Poland in domestic politics, may be unexpectedly useful to both Poland and Ukraine in foreign policy, as both he and his entourage have very good contacts with Trump and his entourage. In Trump’s case, personal relationships mean more than the interests of the state.
Above all, however, the leadership crises in Germany, France, and Spain—the government of Olaf Scholz has imploded and faces early elections on February 23, the government of Michel Barnier has been felled by a no-confidence vote, and Pedro Sánchez runs a wobbly minority government—elevates the faster-growing and faster-arming Poland (spending almost 5 percent of GDP on defense, making it number one in NATO, by far) and the most experienced European politician, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to the forefront of European politics. The recent summit of the Baltic and Nordic states, to which Donald Tusk was invited, shows the mobilization and integration of the countries immediately neighboring Russia.
Tusk openly said that we should no longer count on the US, but on ourselves. There will probably be more such initiatives. One can already see the activity of European leaders in the direction of a stronger European defense posture. An axis stretching from Finland and Sweden through the Baltic States and Poland to Italy could activate the rest of Europe to act faster.
A Breakthrough in Ukraine?
A second effective intermediary with Trump could be Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has a very good relationship with him. Meloni is openly pro-Ukrainian and is actively involved in organizing military aid to Ukraine. Like Tusk, Meloni also has a good relationship with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The likely prospects of Friedrich Merz and his center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) taking over the leadership of Germany after the February elections could also be an opportunity. Merz is prepared to do much more, and his party is a member of the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament, just like Donald Tusk’s center-right Civic Platform.
The Biden administration has done a lot on Ukraine, but one thing is certain: continuing with the current US policy toward Ukraine will not help it to secure victory. Trump’s unpredictability may therefore be an opportunity. It is no secret that Trump does not like to lose, and he is also counting on a Nobel Peace Prize to repeat or even surpass former US President Barack Obama’s success (it is said in Washington that Trump is even hoping for two prizes: one for solving the Middle East crisis and another for bringing peace to Ukraine). Trump can choose a strategy: Escalate or de-escalate. He may also that offer Russian President Vladimir Putin some kind of deal. Unfortunately, he may do so in the name of what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called illiberalism.
Recall that it was Trump during his first presidency who sent the first significant stockpile of weapons to Ukraine, with which it was able to defend itself when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Obama administration refused to help when Ukraine asked for arms sales in 2014 after the initial Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbass, although a non-military aid program was approved. From 2016 to 2019, $850 million in military aid was delivered to Ukraine with Congressional approval, most of which took place during the Trump presidency.
The Biden administration woke up in March 2021, when Putin first gathered hundreds of thousands of Russian troops near Ukraine’s borders. At the time, $125 million in aid was approved (and another $60 million in May), but this was more of a fig leaf. It is true that in 2019, Trump tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accuse Joe Biden of corruption in order to hinder his bid for the presidency. He suspended $400 million in aid at the time, but got severely burned for doing so, as the House of Representatives voted for impeachment, which was not supported by the Senate.
Putin Has Nothing to Offer
Trump has a big ego and it is rather hard to imagine him simply handing Ukraine over to Putin. After all, Putin has nothing to offer in return. Furthermore, Russia is a serious competitor to the US mining industry. The main argument is that Russia’s entanglement with China puts Russia on a collision course with America. Why should America help Russia today if Putin is increasingly close to Chinese President Xi Jinping?
The partial or total withdrawal of the security umbrella from Europe, which will happen sooner or later anyway (and has been dragging on since the Obama presidency), may finally be the impetus that the European Union needs. It cannot drag on forever with the rebuilding of the arms industry and defense outlays of the kind that every serious player on the global stage allocates. If South Korea can afford it, why can’t Germany and the EU as a whole? If poorer Poland is able to increase its expenditure by half in a flash and almost reach 5 percent of GDP, it seems completely incomprehensible to many of its NATO partners that Germany is taking so long to exceed 2 percent and reach at least 3 percent of GDP.
The pandemic shock reformed the EU significantly. It finally showed that it was possible to incur a common debt for post-pandemic reconstruction and necessary investments. And the EU’s reaction to Russia’s war against Ukraine showed that it could also have a defense policy. Now it will finally have to do develop one in earnest. Unfortunately, on this issue, Germany (along with the Netherlands) is again proving to be a brake and opposing the incurring of EU debt. Western Europe used to be able to afford to maintain bigger armies and bigger arms industries and there is no reason why someone else should pay for it. There will be no better opportunity to build up Europe’s military strength. The important thing is that it finally happens.
Yes, this is primarily in the interests of the EU’s and NATO’s eastern flank states. For Poland and the Baltic states, this does not require any more sacrifices, as they have already secured the appropriate level of funding and contracts. However, the region will gain the most in terms of security when others get down to business. A properly armed Europe will be the first to defend its eastern flank. Admittedly, the risks are unevenly distributed, although even this is uncertain, since experts—including German ones—are increasingly saying that Russia could attack the entire West. For the time being, however, Poland, by virtue of its location in the vicinity of both Russia and Belarus, bears a greater risk, and the increased budget and possible debt would be shared.
In short, if Germany and “Old Europe” finally get on with it, we will manage. Together we have nine times the budget of Russia and numerous allies. There is no reason to look to others when it comes to solving our own problems, which we can and should have solved long ago.
Slawomir Sierakowski is a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relation’s (DGAP) Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology, and president of the program board of the “Impact CEE” conference in Poznan.
