The Conditional Guarantee: Poland and the Transactional Turn in American Strategy
The November 2025 National Security Strategy: A Polish Perspective
Zbigniew Brzeziński understood, with the clarity that exile confers, that Ukraine’s independence had redrawn the strategic map of Europe. Without Ukraine, he wrote, Russia ceases to be an empire; with it, Russia becomes automatically an empire. What held for Moscow held equally for Warsaw: a sovereign Ukraine meant a Poland no longer pinned between German economic gravity and Russian imperial ambition, but anchored instead within a belt of independent states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The November 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States compels us to revisit that understanding. Not because it repudiates American commitments outright—the language of alliance survives, the troops remain, the installations operate. Rather because it subordinates those commitments to a calculus Poland has not confronted since the anxious months before the Madrid Summit of 1997, when NATO membership remained a hope rather than a fact, and the future shape of European security was genuinely in doubt.
The document arrives at a moment of apparent Polish triumph. Warsaw hosts 10,000 American troops, the largest deployment on NATO’s eastern flank. Camp Kościuszko in Poznań houses the first permanent U.S. Army headquarters east of Germany. The Aegis Ashore installation at Redzikowo—a $900 million testament to bilateral trust—stands operational, its SM-3 interceptors guarding Polish skies and much of Central Europe besides. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called Poland “a model ally on the continent.” By every conventional metric, the relationship has never been stronger.
And yet the strategy document that ostensibly governs American foreign policy reads as if drafted for a different era, or perhaps for a future Warsaw would prefer not to contemplate.
From Covenant to Commerce
There exists a category error at the heart of the new American approach, one that conflates two fundamentally distinct modes of international relationship. Trade agreements operate on the logic of mutual benefit, comparative advantage, reciprocal concession. What I gain, you may also gain; the relationship persists so long as the ledger balances. Political alliances—particularly those forged in the shadow of existential threat—operate on different principles entirely. They rest on shared values, historical solidarity, and the understanding that some commitments transcend quarterly calculations of profit and loss.
The November 2025 strategy collapses this distinction. It promises favorable treatment in commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement to nations that “willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.” The formulation is precise, contractual, and notably devoid of the vocabulary that once animated Atlantic solidarity. Poland’s value to the alliance derives not from what it symbolizes—the vindication of self-determination, the repudiation of Yalta, the democratic transformation of a civilization—but from what it delivers: forward-deployed infrastructure, defense expenditure approaching the new 5 percent threshold, political alignment with an administration suspicious of Brussels and comfortable with Budapest.
Let us be clear about what is not objectionable here. That NATO members should honor their commitments admits no serious dispute. For decades, the spectacle of wealthy European democracies sheltering beneath American protection while investing pittances in their own defense has corroded alliance solidarity and strained American patience across partisan lines. Poland, spending 4.5 percent of GDP on defense in 2025—projected to reach 4.8 percent in 2026—has earned the right to demand more from allies who have treated the 2 percent target as an aspiration rather than a floor. The Hague Commitment’s 5 percent standard may prove difficult for some to meet, but the principle that security requires sacrifice commands respect.
What troubles is not the insistence on burden-sharing but the transmutation of alliance itself into a species of transaction. Here the German jurist Carl Schmitt—a thinker whose legacy remains contested but whose analytical categories retain their cutting edge—proves unexpectedly illuminating. Schmitt argued that the fundamental political distinction is that between friend and enemy: not the private adversary one might hate, but the public enemy against whom a community defines itself and for whose confrontation it must prepare. This distinction, he insisted, cannot be reduced to economic competition, moral disapproval, or aesthetic distaste. It is existential, concrete, and admits no perpetual postponement.
Alliances, in this framework, exist precisely to clarify the friend-enemy distinction in advance of crisis—to establish, before the shells begin falling, who stands with whom when the correlation of forces must be calculated. A confederation that affects what Schmitt called the jus belli, the right to make war, constitutes a political declaration of the highest order: a statement that these peoples share a common fate and will face common enemies together. Such a declaration cannot be perpetually contingent without ceasing to be political at all.
Schmitt diagnosed liberalism’s deepest impulse as the desire to replace political decision with endless negotiation—”a cautious half-measure,” he wrote, “in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate which permits the decision to be postponed forever in an unending discussion.” An alliance conceived as ongoing negotiation, subject to continuous renegotiation based on performance metrics, enacts precisely this liberal fantasy. It offers a relationship whose terms remain perpetually uncertain, whose commitments await quarterly review, whose fundamental question—will you fight beside us when the moment comes?—receives only provisional answers subject to revision.
Poland, which has spent five centuries navigating the space between larger powers, understands in its bones what such contingency means.
The Russian Aperture
Careful readers will note the strategy’s treatment of European security through a distinctly accommodationist lens. The document commits to “reestablishing strategic stability with Russia” and to preventing “the perception, and reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” It characterizes current European policy toward Ukraine as the product of “unstable minority governments” imposing elite preferences upon populations that desire peace. The war itself merits attention primarily as something to be concluded—”an expeditious cessation of hostilities”—rather than as an ongoing crime requiring sustained resistance.
Such language carries weight. It suggests Washington’s patience for the present configuration of European security may prove finite. More troubling still, it provides intellectual scaffolding for pressuring Warsaw and other frontline states to accept arrangements they would consider dangerous—demilitarized zones, neutralization schemes, spheres of influence dressed in the vocabulary of strategic stability.
The document’s silences amplify these concerns. Article 5 goes unmentioned. The enhanced forward presence in Poland and the Baltics receives no acknowledgment. The security of the Suwałki corridor—that narrow strip of territory connecting Poland to Lithuania, whose defense would require precisely the kind of automatic commitment Washington appears to be qualifying—merits not a single line. The POLLOGHUB logistics center at Rzeszów-Jasionka, through which 95 percent of Western military assistance to Ukraine has flowed, exists in a strategic document that seems to regard such assistance as a burden to be shed rather than a commitment to be sustained.
One need not attribute malign intent to find these omissions significant. A strategy document that details American interests in the Western Hemisphere down to specific port facilities but cannot bring itself to mention the Baltic states suggests, at minimum, a reordering of attention that should concentrate minds in Warsaw.
A Continent Demoted
The strategy establishes an explicit hierarchy of American attention: the Western Hemisphere first, reinvigorated under something called the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine“; then Asia, where economic competition with China commands sustained focus; Europe third, ahead only of the Middle East and Africa. To speak of demotion may overstate the case—Europe has not been abandoned—but the relative weighting leaves little room for ambiguity.
Within this diminished European portfolio, however, a curious distinction emerges. The document differentiates between “the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe”—to be cultivated through commercial ties, weapons sales, and cultural exchanges—and an implicitly ailing West, beset by regulatory sclerosis, demographic collapse, and what the strategy terms “civilizational erasure.” Western Europe stands accused of “sovereignty-sapping” submission to transnational organizations, censorship of free speech, suppression of political opposition, and a general failure of nerve that renders its future uncertain.
Poland finds itself on the favored side of this ledger, grouped with nations whose nationalist governance and traditional values align with the current administration’s cultural preferences. Yet the theater in which it operates has been relegated. One cannot escape the impression that Washington views the continent with a mixture of exasperation and diminished expectation—a civilization to be stabilized rather than championed, managed rather than led.
The paradox deserves emphasis. Poland is praised precisely for those qualities—robust defense spending, skepticism of Brussels, cultural conservatism—that place it at odds with many Western European allies. But Polish security depends not merely on American approval but on the broader architecture of European defense, an architecture the strategy document seems almost eager to see weakened. A Poland favored by Washington but surrounded by an enfeebled Europe finds itself in an exposed position, however warm the bilateral relationship.
The Intermarium Revisited
Poland’s contemporary geopolitical imagination draws on deep wells. Józef Piłsudski’s interwar Intermarium concept envisioned a federation of states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, capable of resisting pressure from both Germany and Russia. The Three Seas Initiative, the Bucharest Nine, the nascent “Warsaw Thirteen”—these modern iterations represent efforts to overcome Central Europe’s historical peripherality by creating a North-South axis that counterbalances traditional great power influence.
The American strategy document offers mixed signals regarding such aspirations. On one hand, it explicitly supports “building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges.” This language suggests receptivity to Polish regional leadership. On the other hand, the document’s skepticism toward multilateral institutions, its preference for bilateral arrangements, and its evident desire to reduce American commitments in Europe complicate any straightforward endorsement of Polish ambitions.
Poland views its security as fundamentally dependent on sustained American presence. As one analyst has observed, “Poland is secure when the United States is present, and it gains influence when it can translate that presence into the growth of its own defense capabilities.” The strategy document does not reject this presence—10,000 troops remain, Camp Kościuszko endures, the Aegis site operates—but it frames that presence in transactional terms that leave its permanence uncertain.
The historical parallel that suggests itself is not encouraging. In the 1930s, Poland sought security through bilateral arrangements with both France and Germany, believing that astute diplomacy could navigate between great powers. The failure of that strategy—France’s unwillingness to honor its commitments, Germany’s fundamental hostility—left Poland exposed when crisis came. Today’s circumstances differ in crucial respects: NATO exists, nuclear weapons impose caution, and Poland’s own capabilities far exceed those of the interwar republic. But the underlying lesson—that security guarantees are worth only as much as the political will behind them—retains its force.
The Burden of Self-Reliance
The phrase “enabling Europe to stand on its own feet” recurs throughout the document’s treatment of transatlantic relations. Paired with admonitions about European “external dependencies” and “unrealistic expectations,” it signals something consequential: Poland cannot assume American forces will remain indefinitely, respond automatically, or prioritize Baltic contingencies over other demands on an overstretched military.
This does not mean abandonment. It means conditionality. It means that the security guarantee Poland has treated as axiomatic since 1999 now depends on ongoing performance in a relationship whose terms Washington reserves the right to renegotiate. For a country that has organized its entire strategic posture around the American alliance, this represents a fundamental challenge.
Yet Poland is not without resources. Its geography remains enviable—the hinge between Western Europe and the post-Soviet space, the logistical corridor through which any serious defense of the Baltics must pass. Its defense expenditure, already among NATO’s highest as a percentage of GDP, positions it favorably under the new dispensation. The East Shield initiative, a $2.5 billion program targeting Poland’s borders with Belarus and the Kaliningrad exclave, demonstrates both capability and will. The political relationship with Washington, whatever its transactional character, remains robust across partisan lines—a rare achievement in an era of polarization.
The question is whether these assets suffice in a world where the American commitment has become conditional and the European architecture has weakened. Poland has bet heavily on the Atlantic orientation since 1989, and that bet has paid extraordinary dividends: NATO membership, EU accession, economic transformation, the largest American military presence in the region. To suggest that Warsaw should now hedge that bet is to ask it to reconsider the foundational assumption of its post-Cold War strategy.
What Warsaw Must Do
Strategic adjustment need not mean strategic reversal. Poland can maintain its Atlantic orientation while building redundancy against the possibility of American distraction or delay. Several imperatives suggest themselves.
First, Warsaw should accelerate development of its indigenous defense industrial capacity. The massive procurement programs currently underway—K2 tanks from South Korea, HIMARS systems from the United States, F-35 aircraft—strengthen Polish capabilities but deepen dependence on supply chains that may prove unreliable in extremis. Domestic production capacity, even at higher cost, provides insurance against scenarios in which foreign suppliers prove unwilling or unable to deliver.
Second, Poland should deepen bilateral security arrangements with like-minded states—the Baltics, Romania, the Nordic countries—creating overlapping commitments that do not depend solely on the Atlantic guarantee. The Bucharest Nine provides a framework; the challenge is to give it operational substance. Joint exercises, integrated air defense, coordinated procurement, shared logistics—these practical measures build the habits of cooperation that prove decisive when crisis comes.
Third, Warsaw must invest in the unglamorous work of resilience: hardened infrastructure, distributed command networks, civil defense capabilities that assume the worst. A society that can absorb punishment and continue functioning presents a less attractive target than one whose collapse follows quickly from initial strikes. Finland’s example—decades of preparation for a contingency that may never come—offers a model.
Fourth, Poland should leverage its position as the primary logistics hub for Ukraine’s reconstruction to build lasting economic and strategic ties with Kyiv. The Sławków facility, designed to handle 500,000 containers annually, represents more than commercial infrastructure; it constitutes a physical embodiment of Polish-Ukrainian interdependence. A Ukraine successfully integrated into European structures strengthens Poland’s position; a Ukraine abandoned or partitioned would leave Poland on the frontier once again.
Finally, and most delicately, Warsaw must think carefully about the European dimension of its security. The strategy document’s hostility toward Brussels and Western European institutions presents Poland with a temptation—to position itself as Washington’s preferred partner against a sclerotic West. This temptation should be resisted. Polish security ultimately depends on a capable European pillar within NATO, not on the degradation of European institutions. A Poland that assists in weakening the European Union may find itself isolated when American attention wanders elsewhere.
The Permanent Things
The November 2025 National Security Strategy reveals an America uncertain of its purposes, retreating from the commitments that structured the post-Cold War order, casting about for a new framework that honors both its interests and its fatigue. For Poland, which has anchored its security in American power and presence, this uncertainty poses challenges that no amount of defense spending can entirely resolve.
Yet one should not conclude on a note of despair. Poland has survived partitions, occupations, and abandonments before. Its recovery of independence in 1918, its transformation after 1989, its emergence as a regional power in the 2020s—these achievements testify to reserves of national capacity that strategic documents cannot measure. The country that rebuilt itself from the rubble of 1945, that maintained its identity through decades of Soviet domination, that produced Solidarity and John Paul II, possesses resources that transcend the calculus of tanks and treaties.
The strategy document rewards nations that help themselves. Poland has always understood, better than its Western neighbors, that geography imposes obligations history cannot discharge. That understanding served it poorly in 1939, when neither Britain nor France proved willing to honor their guarantees. It has served it well since 1989, driving the relentless pursuit of NATO membership, the massive investments in defense, the cultivation of the American relationship across administrations and parties.
The task now is to apply that understanding to circumstances that have shifted. The American commitment has become conditional; Poland must ensure it meets the conditions. The European architecture has weakened; Poland must strengthen what can be strengthened while building alternatives. The regional environment has grown more dangerous; Poland must invest in the capabilities that deter aggression and the resilience that survives it.
None of this is beyond Polish capacity. But it requires clear sight about what has changed, and what has not. The strategy document should be read not as betrayal but as clarification—a reminder that in international politics, as in life, nothing is guaranteed, everything must be earned, and the nations that thrive are those that face reality without flinching.
Poland has done so before. It must do so again.
Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 18 500 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.
