Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,
Polish President Karol Nawrocki told French media during his trip to Paris that “I believe that Poland should be part of the nuclear sharing program, it should have its own nuclear capabilities: energy and military. This is what the Polish-French partnership is all about…(but) it may be too early to talk about [developing Poland’s own nukes].”
This comes half a year after Prime Minister Donald Tusk, his liberal-globalist rival, told parliament that Poland is “talking seriously with France” about hosting its nukes.
Their agreement raises the chances that progress might indeed be made since Polish foreign policy is formulated through collaboration between the President, Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister, the latter of whom is nowadays Tusk’s close ally Radek Sikorski. All three apparently concluded that Trump’s reluctance to do anything that could spook Putin into ending talks on Ukraine, let alone significantly escalate NATO-Russian tensions, reduces the chances that the US transfers some of its nukes to Poland.
For historical reasons, Poland’s ruling duopoly as represented by Nawrocki’s (admittedly imperfect) conservative-nationalists and Tusk’s liberal-globalists pathologically fears Russia, as does most of the population. Neither the elite nor the people will therefore “feel safe” as they see it unless Poland can “deter” Russia and “protect itself” without relying on others in the far-fetched scenario of an attack. Article 5 is considered sacred, however, doubts informally exist about the US’ actual commitment to it.
Hosting French nukes and potentially one day developing its own are thus seen by Poland as the means to this end, with Paris’ interests in this arrangement (including perhaps the second part that would violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty) being to compete with Germany for regional influence. It was this motivation, after all, which drove President Emmanuel Macron to flirt with extending his country’s nuclear umbrella over Europe earlier this year. Basing nukes in Poland is the quickest way to do that.
From the US’ perspective, the resultant exacerbation of EU-Russian tensions would further its divide-and-rule strategy, while turning a blind eye towards Poland’s possible plans to develop its own nukes just like it earlier did Pakistan’s would shift the regional balance of power in the US’ favor. Despite Polish fears about the US’ commitment to Article 5, the US isn’t expected to stand down if Russia launched a preventive strike against Polish nuclear facilities along the lines of Israel’s one against Iraq’s in 1981.
The European application of the US’ “Lead From Behind” strategy is to support Poland’s revival as a Great Power that would then shoulder more of the burden for containing Russia in Central & Eastern Europe via its leadership of the “Three Seas Initiative” across this broad space. This would enable the US to redeploy some of its troops in Europe to Asia for more muscularly containing China. The US is therefore expected to tacitly back Poland’s nuclear weapons plans in pursuit of these grand strategic goals.
Accusations of hypocrisy will abound due to its opposition to others’ reported such plans, which recently saw the US bombing Iranian nuclear facilities on this pretext, but negative media coverage is the only consequence that’ll likely follow since Russia probably won’t risk war with NATO over this.
Nevertheless, the scenarios of France deploying nukes to Poland and Poland potentially one day developing its own would spike the risk of World War III by miscalculation, but they and the US don’t seem to care much.