Poland Ties NATO Deterrence to Forward Forces and Ukrainian Resilience

Radosław Sikorski describes Russia’s confrontation with the West as a hybrid war already underway, not merely a threat that began with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Poland has faced arson, political interference, disinformation, espionage, an attempted attack on a moving train, and incursions by cruise missiles and drones, he says. The broader West accepted that the conflict was “for real” only after the invasion of Ukraine. Poland’s response rests on a more immediate premise: when Russia threatens, Warsaw has to take it seriously.

That judgment explains a defense effort that Sikorski says goes substantially beyond NATO’s familiar spending benchmark. Poland spent 2% of GDP on defense for two decades, he says, but now commits 4.8% to “hard defense.” Counting dual-use investments and civil protection brings the figure to 7%.

The buildup is not only budgetary. Sikorski says Poland has placed more than 120 contracts in the United States, worth $65 billion in equipment. He says Poland will have the world’s second-largest Apache fleet while acquiring hundreds of Abrams tanks and HIMARS launchers alongside F-16s and newly delivered F-35s. Poland is also building domestic capacity: Sikorski says its short-range anti-aircraft missiles have a better kill ratio than the Stinger, and that Anduril had just signed an agreement to produce deep-strike weapons in his hometown.

Polish and U.S. personnel are shown together near an Abrams tank, while F-35s taxi on a runway and self-propelled howitzers sit in a Polish industrial setting. The integration Sikorski describes combines imported capability, domestic production, and allied infrastructure.

The stronger point in Sikorski’s account is that buying platforms is the easier part. The demanding work is to absorb the lessons of the Russia–Ukraine war into procurement, doctrine, and training—to change how forces are organized and fight, not simply what equipment they possess.

Poland’s strategic argument therefore joins material investment to a continuing assessment of the war next door. Deterrence cannot be a fixed inventory of tanks, aircraft, and spending targets if the character of combat is changing in real time.

For Herbert McMaster, forward-positioned U.S. forces have helped prevent great-power wars since 1945. The logic is that capable forces operating with strong allies along a frontier make a potential adversary doubt it can achieve its aims through force.

Sikorski agrees with that premise. U.S. troops, he says, planted doubt in Soviet and then Russian leaders about the outcome of an invasion. That uncertainty is not incidental to deterrence; it is what deterrence requires. His geographical conclusion is direct: American troops should be where the threat is, and the threat is on NATO’s eastern flank rather than in Italy, Spain, or even Germany.

Poland already has a permanent U.S. missile-defense base and hosts between 6,000 and 10,000 American troops on a rotational basis, according to Sikorski. He says the United States appears interested in permanently stationing a brigade-sized force in Poland, which Warsaw would support with logistics and other facilities. Poland contributes about $15,000 per U.S. soldier each year, he says, making it cheaper for the U.S. taxpayer to keep and exercise those troops in Poland than in the United States.

The practical relationship includes joint U.S.-Polish forces, F-35 deliveries, an Abrams tank service hub, and U.S. equipment operated alongside Polish personnel. Sikorski’s case is not simply that the alliance should promise mutual defense. It should make the promise credible through deployed forces, shared infrastructure, and industrial integration.

His assessment of NATO connects that force-posture argument to a broader shift in European defense spending. Putin’s aggression revived the alliance, Sikorski says, but so did President Trump’s insistence that Europeans spend more on defense. He gives Trump credit for producing movement where previous appeals did not. Greater spending should improve Europe’s own defenses, but Sikorski also expects it to bring Europe more respect in Moscow and Washington.

Countries nearest Russia spend more because insecurity is not evenly distributed across Europe, he argues. He identifies the Council of Baltic Sea States, together with Romania and Turkey, as the core of countries most serious about deterring Russia.

Poland’s experience of sovereignty gives this posture political context. Sikorski describes a country partitioned by stronger neighboring autocracies, invaded jointly by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, and held under communism for 45 years before Solidarity helped restore freedom. In his telling, that history helps explain why Polish leaders treat defense as an immediate obligation rather than an abstract contingency.

Radosław Sikorski rejects the portrayal of the European Union as just a free-trade area or a regulatory obstacle. He calls it a confederation, comparing it to the United States after independence but before the Constitution. Its strategic value lies in collective leverage: a market of 450 million relatively wealthy consumers can negotiate more effectively with China and other large partners than individual states can.

Common rules matter as well. For American companies, the alternative to an EU-wide framework is not no regulation but 27 different national systems. The single market allows members to sell directly into one another’s markets with the practical ease of domestic commerce. Sikorski acknowledges that some regulations go too far and should be corrected through politics, but treats common standards as an asset in a continent that must mobilize economic as well as military power.

He also disputes the claim that the EU is inherently undemocratic. Sikorski says the European Parliament is elected, the Commission is appointed by member states, and the European Council consists of national presidents or prime ministers; all three institutions must agree for legislation to pass. European coordination, in this view, is political capacity rather than an alternative to sovereignty.

That capacity has become a security instrument. The EU began as a peace project intended to prevent Europeans from fighting one another, Sikorski says, but it now has a defense budget that supports Ukraine. European money, he argues, is sustaining the Ukrainian state and its defense budget, including the production of millions of drones. A recently transferred 19 billion was critical: after Hungary delayed it, Ukrainian pensions and salaries would have stopped without the funding.

Energy is part of the same deterrence architecture. Sikorski argues that Germany’s earlier belief in “transformation through trade” with Russia was mistaken. Becoming a large customer for Russian gas did not moderate Moscow; it created a potential channel of coercion. Poland had warned against pipelines that bypassed Central Europe, he says, because they would make subjugation and pressure easier.

Sikorski presents Poland’s purchase of American LNG as a response to that vulnerability rather than merely a commercial substitution. The warning extends beyond gas. A state that controls a strategically necessary input can turn that control into leverage.

China appears here as a supply-chain problem rather than a separate theater. Sikorski says Poland has a pragmatic relationship with Beijing and recognizes one China, but warns against naïveté about Chinese industrial policy and control over mining and refining of critical materials. He cites 4.6 billion small parcels annually reaching Europe and says the EU had recently imposed a charge on such shipments after a system intended for gifts was used to undercut European small industry.

His larger concern is that limits on access to permanent magnets, rare earths, or other critical materials could become blackmail. He welcomed a Washington meeting convened by Marco Rubio on the issue and said Poland planned a follow-up conference in Warsaw. For Sikorski, energy security, industrial capacity, and access to defense-relevant inputs all belong to the same question: whether allies can resist coercion without discovering their dependence during a crisis.

Radosław Sikorski does not describe the war in Ukraine as a linear sequence of victories or defeats. Russia held the initiative at the outset, Ukraine counterattacked in 2023, and Russia subsequently moved forward through the following year and winter at high costs in personnel and materiel. He now characterizes the war as a draw, with some hopeful elements for Ukraine.

At sea, Sikorski says, Ukraine can still export grain despite recent disruptions, while Russian forces have been hit hard by sea drones. In the air, both sides can strike into the other’s territory with drones and missiles, although Russia has greater ballistic-missile capability; he says neither side has air dominance or unrestricted access. On land, Sikorski says the frontline moves back and forth and that Ukraine has achieved fire control over the land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.

His central contrast is between Russian and Ukrainian deep-strike choices. Sikorski argues that Russia has targeted population centers, heating facilities, and electricity infrastructure. He calls those tactics illegal, cruel, and fundamentally mistaken because, in his assessment, they impose hardship without affecting Ukraine’s army’s ability to fight. Ukraine, by contrast, has struck refineries, he says, affecting both Russia’s economy and its army’s ability to fight.

The immediate test is Ukraine’s energy system. Sikorski says Putin has knocked out four-fifths of Ukraine’s electricity-generating capacity. If Russia cannot break Ukraine’s will through the coming winter, he sees reasonable prospects for peace in the following year.

That prediction is conditional, not a claim that a settlement is imminent. It makes Ukrainian endurance central to Sikorski’s wider European security argument. A Russia unable to compel Ukraine despite attacks on civilian infrastructure would face a different strategic reality than a Russia able to demonstrate that sustained coercion works.

For Poland, support for Ukraine is therefore not only assistance to a neighbor. In Sikorski’s account, it is part of the forward defense of the eastern flank: keeping Russia’s war from establishing a successful model of conquest, attrition, and intimidation.

Radosław Sikorski argues that the United States and Europe should not mistake disagreement for strategic opposition. Europe had catching up to do on defense, he says, and American pressure on burden sharing was justified. But he believes some transatlantic tensions reflect a misunderstanding of economic interdependence.

The United States may run a slight goods-trade deficit, Sikorski says, partly because its budget deficit means it spends more than it earns and pulls in goods from abroad. But the United States also has a large surplus in services. European payments for Netflix, Hollywood films, social media, and other American services return money to the U.S. economy. Counting goods and services together, he says, the relationship is roughly balanced.

He adds a capital-market dimension: European pensioners, he says, send $300 billion of their savings to Wall Street each year. The implication is not that either side lacks points of contention, but that the relationship is more mutually beneficial than a narrow accounting of goods trade suggests.

Sikorski’s preferred agenda follows from the areas where interests already converge: supply-chain resilience, energy security, industrial renewal, stronger defenses, and competition in critical technologies, including artificial intelligence. He also argues that allies should respect one another’s political processes rather than interfere in them.

His standard for leadership follows the same long-term logic. Leaders must listen to voters, keep promises, and attend to public opinion, he says. But they also have a duty to tell citizens “like it is” and to shape opinion over time toward what they believe is right.