Just a brief encounter: Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and Joe Biden during the NATO summit in Brussels on June 14, 2021
Image: Reuters
Poland isn’t the only country where Washington’s U-turn on the gas pipeline has been badly received. But Warsaw has homemade reasons to feel especially hit.
Joe Biden’s concession to Germany in the dispute over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has been received equally badly in Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. The reason for this is not only that the hope that the Russian project, in which these countries rightly see a threat to their own security and that of Europe as a whole, will ultimately fail due to resistance from the United States has been destroyed. The fact that they were not involved in these talks and, as Poland’s foreign minister claims, allegedly even found out about them from the media, has raised fear in the Eastern European capitals of compromises that will be forged over them and at their expense.
In Warsaw there is another concern that the national-conservative government is now trying to dispel with unconvincing arguments: that the country’s position has been weakened by the fact that the government in Warsaw was still looking for proximity even after Donald Trump’s electoral defeat – and that In contrast to his predecessor, Biden also pays attention to how democracy is going with the allies. In Poland it has been precisely recorded that Biden had a meeting with the presidents of the Baltic states in Brussels, who gave no cause for doubt, while Poland’s President Duda was only worth a few minutes in the corridors.
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