Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski gave an insightful interview to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday where he shared what Poland learned about US strategy from its engagements with Trump 2.0. Sikorski just met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz while President Andrzej Duda had a brief but arguably significant 10-minute meeting with Trump. The latter’s chat represented the first in-person meeting between a European leader and Trump during his second term.
Prior to that, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paid his first foreign visit to Warsaw, where he lauded Poland as “the model ally on the continent”. Special Envoy Keith Kellogg was also just in Warsaw too. This spree of meetings is the most face-to-face engagement that any European country’s government has had with Trump 2.0 and is why it’s important to listen to what Sikorski revealed about US strategy since no one else outside the US has as much experiencing interacting with his team.
Sikorski started off by dodging Zakaria’s question about whether he learned about the US’ interest in providing security guarantees to Ukraine of the sort that Zelensky has demanded. Instead, he declared that “The best guarantee for Ukraine is the almost million-man army”, thus suggesting that an alternative to Zelensky’s demands could be continued promises of military support. That was never in doubt, however, given the bilateral security agreement that was reached last year and critiqued here.
He then reaffirmed Poland’s position that “it’s Ukraine that decides whether she wants to fight or not”, which is why “We in Europe have said that we will continue to support Ukraine come what may”, though he left unaddressed his interlocutor’s question about what exactly the US’ strategy is. Nevertheless, this still revealed a lot in the sense that it hints that the US won’t object to the EU continuing to militarily support Ukraine throughout the course of talks with Russia, which can keep some pressure on Moscow.
Sikorski was similarly coy about whether the EU can provide Ukraine with security guarantees, though observers should remember that Poland, Germany, and even non-EU-member Britain all reached bilateral pacts with it last year along the lines of the US’ that can be read from each of the preceding hyperlinks. They don’t allow for dispatching troops to Ukraine but instead importantly promise to restore the level of military support that Ukraine presently receives in the event that another conflict breaks out.
Once again, the innuendo is that the EU and the UK will comply with Trump’s demand that they bear more of the burden for supporting Ukraine, but this will be limited by what Hegseth earlier said regarding the US’ refusal to extend Article 5 guarantees to NATO countries’ troops in Ukraine. The modus vivendi that’s emerging upon reading between the lines of Sikorski’s interview is that Trump’s plan for NATO, whereby the EU replaces the US’ decreased role as the latter “Pivots (back) to Asia”, is in effect.
Sikorski also confirmed what was assessed here the day prior to his interview about the US’ continued commitment to Article 5 with respect to defending allies from any Russian attack as well as the part about urging the bloc’s members to ramp up their military spending exactly as Trump demanded. On the topic of Trump trying to pull a “Reverse Kissinger” by splitting Russia from China through a ‘New Détente’, Sikorski implied that it might succeed, but he still urged continued support for Ukraine.
In connection with that, he concluded by telling Zakaria that “The Trans-Atlantic bargain is that the U.S. helps us to deter Putin. In return, we buy American and we express our solidarity with the U.S. on many international issues, including its competition with China. And the deal obviously works both ways.” Sikorski’s words insinuate that the EU might leverage its role vis-à-vis China as pressure for ensuring more US support vis-à-vis Russia, but his prior remarks indicate that it probably won’t play hardball.
To summarize the insight that Sikorski just shared about US strategy from Poland’s engagements with Trump 2.0, which are more than any other European government’s, a modus vivendi is already emerging in US-EU relations so speculation about an irreconcilable rift between them is premature. Differences in vision remain when it comes to the Ukrainian endgame, but the US will still let the EU support Kiev within certain limits, which could lead to a good cop-bad cop dynamic for getting Russia to cut a deal.
