The Polish poet and playwright Jan Kochanowski penned and
presented The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys
to the court of King Stefan Batory in 1578, during a period
of rising tensions between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and
the Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible. In the fifth
epeisodion of this undisputed masterpiece
of Baroque drama, the Trojan counselor Antenor warns Priam, his
king, that Greek saber rattling over the abducted Helen meant
that “now is the time to fear,” and that “from such anxiety grows
foresight and readiness.” Though the play was outwardly classical
in nature, it contained a contemporary message from Kochanowski
to his own monarch: never treat external threats as “lightly as a
mindless fable.”
Kochanowski had long been sounding the alarm.
Even during the Renaissance, with Poland at the historical height
of its power, the aphorism mądry Polak po
szkodzie (“the Pole is a wise man after
disaster”) had already achieved widespread currency. Yet
Kochanowski, fearful of the Tartar and Muscovite threats from the
east, spat in response that “if that saying’s true, then here’s
one more: afterwards, he’s as stupid as before.” As the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — increasingly as “tasty and
weak” as the ruminant victim in Ignacy Krasicki’s 1779 fable “The
Lamb and the Wolves” — was gradually devoured by its ravening
neighbors, Kochanowski’s warnings were thoroughly
internalized.
To this day, every hour on the hour in the
Polish cultural capital of Kraków a bugler mounts the steps of
the highest tower in the Church of Saint Mary to play a
five-note tune called the
hejnał. Each time this
hejnał is played, the tune mournfully drops
off before completion, in honor of the (possibly legendary) guard
in the Mariacki tower who sounded the alarm during the 1241
Mongol invasion of Poland, only to be struck in the gullet by an
arrow in medias res. This quotidian
reminder of geopolitical uncertainty is but one of many in modern
Poland, and in modern Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. The
poet Zbigniew Herbert perhaps put it best when he wrote: “the
siege continues for so long a time the enemies have to
change/they have nothing in common but the desire to annihilate
us/when some hordes depart others immediately appear/Goths Tatars
Swedes imperial legions.”
To some, this sentiment seems out of place in a purportedly
postmodern Europe. After all, Poland is a member of the EU and
NATO, and has been lauded as an important player in the
transatlantic alliance. Described in the international security
literature as “America’s protégé in the east” and “America’s new
model ally,” or less charitably as a “stalking horse for U.S.
interests within the EU,” Poland was, until recently, reveling in
its role as “a new power in transatlantic security.” This was
before last week’s shift on missile defense by the Obama
administration. Now Poland’s president Lech Kaczyński is left in
the unenviable position of wondering whether his country once
again exists in that tenebrous “gray zone,” as he put it, between
west and east, between relevance and isolation, between security
and peril.
Poland’s liminal status in Europe has always been an
overriding strategic concern. The historical basis for this
preoccupation is apparent enough, but even in the halcyon days of
the post-communist “return to Europe,” Polish policymakers
fretted about ongoing geopolitical insecurity. During the
break-up of Yugoslavia, Poland’s former Prime Minister and
then-UN Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki lamented NATO
efforts in the Balkans, asking: “If NATO cannot even protect
Srebrenica, what can it do? Can I, in Poland, feel secure in the
wake of these events?”
“The towns of Srebrenica and Zepa have been abandoned,”
Mazowiecki continued. “Who says Poland won’t also be abandoned
one day?”
Echoing such sentiments, David Warszawski, editor of the
Gazeta Wyborcza, saw “Bosnia as a test-case
for the functioning of the international community” and claimed
that the pre-NATO membership Partnership for Peace agreement
provided Poland with “far weaker guarantees than those which the
UN promised the inhabitants of Sarajevo, Zepa, Srebrenica and
Bihac.” Even after Poland achieved NATO membership, the Polish
daily Rzeczpospolita opined that “Poland
has a tragic historic experience behind it, and it needs to have
an ally on which it can depend.” That ally, Polish elites
decided, would be the United States.
It seemed to be a good fit. Poland, after all,
traditionally maintains a strategic posture somewhat more in
keeping with Washington than Brussels. As Olaf Osica has noted,
“Poland has a continued interest in preserving the traditional
understanding of collective defence, that is, defence of the
territory of the allied states. The mistrust of Russia, which
from the outset treated NATO enlargement as a political attack on
its sphere of influence, has continued.” Thus there has been
little “change in the Polish perception of security, which the
elites still perceive through the prism of military force.” The
EU, with its chimerical Rapid Reaction Force, its de
minimis military spending, and the Russophilia
of some of its more prominent member states, is hardly in a
position to satisfy Poland in this regard.
Instead, ideological and pragmatic factors combined to make
the U.S.-Polish strategic partnership particularly strong. The
former of these factors was evident in the famous October 5, 2004
speech by Paul Wolfowitz at the University of Warsaw on the
“theme of courage and freedom,” wherein the quondam Deputy
Secretary of Defense cited the Polish patriot Kazimierz Pułaski,
who in 1777 informed Benjamin Franklin that “We Poles have a
hatred for all forms of tyranny, especially foreign tyranny; so
no matter where in this world someone is fighting for freedom, we
feel it is a personal matter for us as well.” Cooperation in the
War on Terror, given this ideological affinity, was natural. As
for the second factor, the Bush administration made sure to
allocate increased military aid to Poland, despite overall cuts
to similar aid for much of the rest of Europe. The Bush-era
missile defense shield was intended to be the next step in the
strengthening of this relationship. Such hopes are now dashed,
and Poland and the Czech Republic are left with the worst of both
worlds, having antagonized Russia without gaining any security
advantage.
There are numerous practical problems created by the
present administration’s decision to cancel the missile defense
shield initiative, all of which have been explored in detail
elsewhere, ranging from the Panglossian approach to the Iranian
threat (treated as “lightly as a mindless fable,” to quote
Kochanowski); a naïve approach to a Russia whose General Staff
Academy wall still bears Czar Alexander III’s dictum, “Russia has
only two true friends in the world, its army and its navy;” the
danger of the sort of strategic “understretch” of which the
economist Niall Ferguson has warned; and, most relevant to this
particular essay, the unfortunate impression made upon staunch
allies that, as Lech Wałęsa recently posited, “Americans have
always cared only about their interests, and all other
[countries] have been used for their purpose.” (And given
Madeleine Albright’s recent speech in Moscow, during which the
former Secretary of State claimed that “We have been talking
about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an
average American wants to stay at home — they do not need any
overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” who could blame
the former Solidarność leader?)
Wałęsa’s rhetoric is a long way from that of the 2003 “new
European” Vilnius Group letter, which described a “special
responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values,” and
the need of the “trans-Atlantic community” to “stand together to
face the threat” posed by the nexus between terrorists and
dictators. The shared ideologies of the past have, to many
observers in Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere, given way
to the cynical bargaining chips of the present. In the eyes of
the editorialists of the Czech daily Mlada fronta
Dnes, the “Munich syndrome has been resurrected
and, unfortunately, it is still alive among some allies.” The
fact that the announcement was made on the 70th anniversary of
the Soviet invasion of Poland (following right on the heels of
American diplomatic indifference of the Gdańsk commemoration of
the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland) shows the
extent to which Polish and Czech sensibilities — attuned as they
are to the historical and symbolic aspect of international
relations — have been utterly discounted by current American
policymakers.
The Obama administration’s decision on the missile defense
shield, predicated as it was on a downgrading of the Iranian
threat and an impulse towards defense cost-cutting, will have
untold implications for the transatlantic alliance and for
overall international security. But there is, to my mind, an even
broader consideration to be made. Primo Levi’s final book,
The Drowned and the Saved (1987), made the
case that “to keep good faith and bad faith distinct costs a lot;
it requires a decent sincerity and truthfulness with oneself, it
demands a continuous intellectual and moral effort.” This is
particularly true in the international sphere. Poland, the Czech
Republic, and the other Central and Eastern European states that
languished for so long as captive nations, and have worked so
hard on their own behalf and with their American ally in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, have provided ample evidence of
their good faith. Indeed Poland, the historian Norman Davies has
maintained, “stands as a symbol of moral purpose in European
life, and a warning of the dangers which beset the whole world.”
(The same could be said of the Czech Republic, it should be
added). It would be callous, and foolish, to forget this.
In the world of the Feiler Faster thesis, the recent
repudiation of our model allies by way of unilateral abrogation
of a negotiated agreement will gradually be forgotten by all too
many, just as the lessons of the Ukrainian gas crises of 2005, or
the Georgian conflict of 2008, seem to be well beyond the reach
of most policymakers and mandarins. What will remain in the
affected regions, however, is a creeping sense of American
diplomatic bad faith, which will hinder current efforts and will
doubtless hamstring future administrations. The historical
experiences of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Central and
Eastern Europe generally, provide useful lessons about “foresight
and readiness,” not to mention “mindless fables.” It would be
altogether lamentable if we were to become deaf to such lessons,
and even more lamentable if our diplomacy, after so many
successes in the post-Soviet sphere, ultimately failed “to keep
good faith and bad faith distinct.”
