Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, has said Poland will do whatever it takes to not become a Russian colony again, urging closer ties between the U.S. and Europe.
Speaking during the Zbigniew Brzezinski Lectures series at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Sikorski also said Europe was prepared to take responsibility for its own security.
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In this context, he stressed Poland’s defense expenditure of 4.3% of GDP, which he said would increase next year to 4.7% and may go higher in the future. He said Poland had no desire for a military confrontation with Russia but had been a victim of Moscow’s imperialism too many times in the past. He said Poland knew what it is to live under tyranny and had no wish to return to it.
“We, Poland, will do whatever it takes not to become a Russian colony again, whatever anybody else does,” he said.
Describing Russia as an existential threat to global stability, especially in Europe, Sikorski compared its credibility with North Korea’s.
He said it would remain a danger to the world for a long time and was collaborating with China to undermine the global rules-based order, highlighting in this regard Moscow’s coordinated sabotage and hybrid war campaign in Europe. Calling for closer transatlantic ties, the foreign minister alluded to the ideas of Brzezinski, a Polish-American diplomat and presidential advisor who served as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.
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A ‘pivot to Asia’
He said if Washington considered China a threat, it needed Europe more, not less. In this regard, he argued that as part of its “pivot to Asia,” the U.S. should not leave Europe behind.
“In an increasingly unstable world, the U.S.- EU efforts should complement each other,” he said. “You've told us openly that the U.S. strategic focus is shifting eastward. We get it, but we also believe that the pivot to Asia should be a pivot with Europe, not apart from it.”
Sikorski argued that contrary to perceptions in Washington, Europe is not disorganized and chaotic, in need of constant charitable support from the U.S. In this respect he pointed to increased defense expenditures by European countries, which he said should increase further, and highlighted that Europe has granted more aid to Ukraine than the U.S.
“In transatlantic relations, the era of free riders is inevitably coming to an end,” he said.
He said that in the event of the West giving Kyiv permission to use its weapons for deep strikes into Russia, he believed Putin would not attack NATO countries in retaliation as he “may be a criminal, but he is rational” and knows he would lose. On the topic of the Russian president’s repeated nuclear threats, Sikorski said he was bluffing.
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