source: Politico

published: 21 February 2023

Image Credit: James Barker at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Joe Biden's double bill in Kyiv and Warsaw this week is good political optics on the first anniversary of the worst war in Europe in 80 years. Presumably not by anyone’s design, this scenic coupling also usefully clarifies the stakes for the region and the hard choices before the U.S. and its allies in the coming months.

For nearly the entirety of the previous two centuries, Poland sat precisely where Ukraine does now — on the front line of Europe’s defining clash between autocracy and liberalism, waged with the force of ideas and, as often, troops and armor. Poland was on the losing side most of that time. Its fate wasn’t settled until it ended up in the so-called West and its elite clubs, NATO and the EU, some two decades ago. Ukraine faces a similar predicament: It’s not clear where Ukraine fits, and the West hasn’t decided how hard to fight for it.

In its time, the “Polish question” tore Europe apart. When the Poles started an uprising against Russia in 1830, after partitions had erased their country from the European map a generation before, Tsar Nicholas I laid out the choice: “Poland or Russia must now perish.” Free Poland and authoritarian Russia couldn’t coexist. Nicholas put down the Polish insurrection, consigning Russia — as the Russian writer Peter Chaadayev, who saw the uprising firsthand, wrote — to “her own enslavement, and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” A century later, Hitler started World War II to enslave his eastern neighbors; after Yalta, Stalin got Poland and the region as his prize.

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