Poland Playing with Fire

Learning nothing from history — is Poland triggering the next world war?

History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rearranges familiar elements in striking ways. Poland’s role as a fire accelerant in European politics is such a case. It seems particularly tragic because historical experience suggests a terrible end.

In the twentieth century, Poland should have learned a lesson that would be enough for generations to avoid making the same mistakes twice. It was founded as a sovereign state by the German and Austrian general staff during World War One, but it quickly alienated itself from all its neighbours. From the outset, it harassed the ethnic German minority on its territory and repeatedly tried to incite France and England to war against Germany. Russia turned against it when Poland annexed large parts of Ukraine and Belarus in the Treaty of Riga (1921). Nowhere in the newly acquired territories did Poles constitute the ethnic majority.

Inevitably, the reckoning came in 1939. After the British government issued the infamous ‘blank cheque’ to Warsaw, promising to support Poland in the event of a military conflict, any remaining restraint disappeared. Terror against the German minority increased, war against Germany was decided, and Warsaw, as instructed by the Western powers, was not interested in negotiations. The Wehrmacht ended the nightmare in just under three weeks, and the Soviet Union reclaimed its lost territories from 1921. Poland ceased to exist and became a Soviet satellite state for decades after 1945.

We are currently witnessing a re-enactment of these events. Even the main actors are essentially the same. And once again, a mixture of blindness and national megalomania reigns in Warsaw, which can best be described as brazenly foolish. Of course, in recent decades, it has been deliberately installed by transatlantic elites to make Poland the new continental dagger of the US in Europe, and thus once again the predictable victim of Western power politics.

Poland is playing its role with fervour. Under the government of the national conservative PiS (Law and Justice) party, it is obsessed with the idea of becoming the strongest military power in Europe. In the summer of 2022, Poland bought 48 fighter jets, 648 tank howitzers, and an incredible 1,000 K-2 Black Panther main battle tanks from South Korea (!). For years, Warsaw has been persistently trying to revive the old Intermarium great power project from the interwar period, naturally with discreet US support. At the same time, it never misses an opportunity to rebuff Germany and provoke Russia. And, of course, Poland is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the destruction of the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines – not for nothing did former Defense Minister Sikorski thank the US with a demonstrative tweet two days after the attacks.

These days, the next big bang… It has not come unexpectedly and is part of the larger geopolitical game for which Warsaw is willingly instrumentalised. In the last days of March, the US opened its first permanent military base in Poland. Observers rightly speak of a ‘historic event’. It strengthens NATO’s presence in the immediate vicinity of Russia and cements the breach of the promise given to Russia in 1990 that the Western military alliance would not expand eastward beyond the former German Democratic Republic.

In Warsaw, people are triumphant. ‘This is a historic moment, a sign that the United States is committed to Poland and NATO and that we are united in the face of Russian aggression’, hallucinated Polish Defense Minister Błaszczak. However, Poland is already a staging area and logistical hub for NATO’s war in Ukraine. Rzeszów-Jasionka Regional Airport near the Carpathians has developed into a logistics center for all kinds of supply deliveries to Ukraine. Experts are referring to it as a ‘new Ramstein’ – an allusion to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which has been one of the most important US sites in Europe for decades. Poland would like to play this role in the future.

Considering Poland’s traditional megalomania, one can only describe its course as hara-kiri. Warsaw believes it is safe due to the US presence, ignoring the fact that Washington has always coldly abandoned its allies. This time, the US will not only sacrifice Ukraine but also Poland if necessary before putting themselves in danger.

The Polish government does not see this. They are in a war fever like in 1939. They were the driving force behind the so-called ‘tank alliance’, which plans to deliver battle tanks to Ukraine in the coming weeks and months. Recently, they have also been advocating for the delivery of fighter jets to Kiev. For months, there have been reports that the Polish army is preparing to intervene militarily in western Ukraine with or without a NATO mandate, aiming to reclaim the old Polish eastern territories. According to Russian sources, more than 20,000 Poles are already serving as ‘volunteers’ in the Ukrainian armed forces. Images and videos of killed Polish soldiers keep appearing on Russian Telegram channels.

Now, with the Americans backing them, things could heat up soon. As the first high-ranking NATO politician, the Polish Ambassador to France, Jan Emeryk Rościszewski, openly called for an entry into the war in Ukraine. ‘Either Ukraine can defend itself, or we have to intervene in the conflict’, Rościszewski said in an interview with French news channel LCI. Everyone sees that Ukraine cannot hold out much longer. Even Zelensky admits that the situation is dire.

NATO would then instantly become a war party. And Poland would have triggered another world war once again.