WARSAW — Poland is building one of the West’s most muscle-bound militaries, on course to deploy more battle tanks than Britain, France, Germany and Italy – combined.
Opinion
Why Europe is rearming: It isn’t just about Russia
November 20, 2023
And another: How will leaders in Poland — and, to varying degrees, others across Europe — manage the inevitable economic and political fallout of major military buildups in the face of Moscow’s aggression and Washington’s distraction?
Credit Warsaw with a baseline of strategic sanity. It faces a revanchist enemy in Russia, which invaded Poland in 1939 and subjugated it for decades after World War II. This month, a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to eliminate “Polish statehood in its entirety.”
And don’t forget, Poland lives in a hostile neighborhood. It is bordered in part by Belarus, a Russian puppet; by Ukraine, which Putin is determined to subjugate; and by Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost bristling with weapons. Defense was one of the few major policies that was not a subject of debate in Poland’s bitterly contested elections last month.
“There will be no revolution in terms of military spending,” Wojciech Szacki, a political analyst in Warsaw, told me.
Yet Poland is also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, covered by the United States and 29 other Western allies’ commitment to its defense if attacked. More than 10,000 American troops are stationed in Poland, and 80 percent of military hardware heading for Ukraine passes through Polish transit points.
So what’s it worried about?
Beyond Russia’s snarling, there is a simple explanation: Donald Trump.
As the New York Times reported, Trump repeatedly told White House aides in 2018 that he wanted to pull the United States out of NATO, a move that would leave the bloc leaderless and neutered.
“It would be extremely stressful if America pivoted away from Europe, and that’s the worry with Trump,” a top European diplomat told me. “Every foreign ministry is thinking about this.”
When Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO, Poland was spending roughly 2 percent of annual economic output on defense. It is on track to double that next year, and Warsaw looks likely to increase military outlays further, especially if the war in Ukraine drags on.
Almost no other NATO country, including the United States, spends as much on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product. Poland is approaching a rarefied, Israeli level of defense spending (about 4.5 percent of GDP).
Poland’s spending binge — for top-shelf fighter jets, attack helicopters, rocket launchers, air defense systems and artillery, as well as tanks — is impelled by the rising threat from Russia, which has shifted its own economy onto a wartime footing. But Warsaw’s buildup is also a hedge against Trump’s return to the White House and the chance that he will set NATO adrift.
That prospect has set alarm bells ringing across Europe.
In Germany, for years a defense-spending laggard, Chancellor Olaf Scholz last week committed the government to a long-term military expansion, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars annually through the 2030s. But the German economy is limping through a recession, the budget is constrained by a constitutional debt limit, and the hollowed-out army has struggled to fill its ranks with recruits. Which social programs will Berlin raid to pay for a beefier new military?
President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on France’s biggest military spending increase in a half-century, earmarking nearly $450 billion to boost outlays through the end of the decade by a third. His parallel effort to push Europe to take ownership of its security through better military and industrial coordination — and less reliance on Washington’s weaponry and leadership — springs from a clear-eyed assessment: The United States, distracted by China and entertaining the possibility of Trump’s return, is an unpredictable ally. But Macron’s vision of European “strategic autonomy” has borne little fruit so far.
Then there’s Britain, whose army, shrinking for decades, was rated “barely tier two” in a top U.S. general’s judgment. British officials echoed that assessment — they say ammunition stockpiles would run dry after days in a war — but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak omitted the military from his list of top priorities this year.
An enduring defense buildup in Europe depends partly on robust economies and healthy demographics. Both look anemic these days. Birthrates are low across the continent — Poland’s population is projected to shrink by a tenth by 2050 — and Europe’s post-pandemic economic rebound trails the United States’.
Russia has shifted to a wartime economy to finance its aggression in Ukraine and very possibly elsewhere. As an autocracy, it is less susceptible to the mounting pressures that will result. Europe’s ability to respond will shape the West’s new security posture as much as or more than anything Washington devises. That challenge looms right now.
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