US President Joe Biden yesterday hosted Poland’s president and prime minister for White House talks, with the Polish leaders looking to press Washington to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war in Europe.
Ahead of the visit, Polish President Andrzej Duda called on other members of NATO to raise their spending on defense to 3 percent of their GDP as Russia puts its own economy on a war footing and pushes forward with its plans to conquer Ukraine.
Poland already spends 4 percent of its own economic output on defense, double the target of 2 percent in NATO.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The war in Ukraine has clearly shown that the United States is and should remain the leader in security issues in Europe and the world,” Duda said in an address to Poland on Monday. “However, other NATO countries must also take greater responsibility for the security of the entire alliance, and intensively modernize and strengthen their troops.”
In a Washington Post opinion piece to spotlight his call for greater NATO spending, Duda argued that Russia was switching its economy to “war mode,” allocating close to 30 percent of its annual budget to arm itself.
“This figure and other data coming out of Russia are alarming,” Duda wrote. “[Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s regime poses the biggest threat to global peace since the end of the Cold War.”
The Biden administration suggested Duda’s call to raise the defense spending target for NATO nations might be, at least for the time being, overly ambitious.
”I think the first step is to get every country meeting the 2 percent threshold, and we’ve seen improvement of that, but I think that’s the first step before we start talking about an additional proposal,” US Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Biden invited Duda and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk for meetings to mark the 25th anniversary of Poland’s accession to NATO, a historic step Poland took into the West after breaking free from Moscow’s sphere of influence after decades of communist rule.
The visit also comes amid a standoff in Washington between Biden and Republicans in the US House of Representatives on Ukraine funding. House Republicans have blocked a US$118 billion bipartisan package that includes US$60 billion of Ukraine funding, as well as funds for Taiwan, Israel and US border security.
Speaking to reporters before boarding his plane in Warsaw, Duda said while the talks in Washington would celebrate an anniversary, they would above all focus on European security going forward and “about Russian imperial policy, which has returned.”
The visit also gives Biden another opportunity to showcase how his view of NATO contrasts with that of likely Republican presidential candidate former US president Donald Trump.
Trump has said that when he was president, he warned NATO allies that he “would encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to nations that are “delinquent” in meeting the alliance’s defense spending target.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the visit by the Polish leaders was an opportunity to reflect on the nations’ shared “ironclad commitment to the NATO alliance, which makes us all safer.”
Fear is deepening across Europe about Ukraine’s fate as its ammunition stocks run low and as Russia makes gains on the battlefield in Ukraine, reversing its weak military performance at the start of a war it launched in February 2022.
“The situation is really dire on the front line,” said Michal Baranowski, managing director of Warsaw-based GMF East, part of the German Marshall Fund think tank. “We are not talking about something that can be fixed by June or July, but needs to be fixed in March or April.”
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