The idea hasn’t hit the American papers — yet. But one of the things that President Bush will be hearing from the Polish prime minister, Leszek Miller, when they meet today is a more tangible expression of support than has heretofore been proffered from Europe. It seems that for the past 10 days or so Warsaw has been buzzing with talk that the right move for America in the face of creeping German neutralism is to start moving its military bases to friendlier soil. The idea is being discussed in the newspaper of record in Poland, Rzeczpospolita. Poland’s biggest daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, a leftof-center tabloid, actually took an Internet poll that found that 72% of Poles approved of stationing GIs on Polish soil.

A former deputy foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, who is now based in Washington as the head of the New Atlantic Initiative, has just published a piece in Poland’s largest news magazine, Wprost, in which he quotes a top Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle, as saying that if the pacifist movement succeeds in ending the American welcome in Germany, the Yanks will leave. Mr. Perle expressed confidence that friends would step forward. Poland has some of the finest exercise grounds in Europe, where American troops are already holding maneuvers. It might be expensive to move some units to Poland permanently, but the cost of maintaining them would be cheaper than in Germany. America currently has about 70,000 troops stationed in Germany. It wouldn’t take much — maybe the moving of a brigade or so — to send the kind of signal that needs to be sent right now.

For our part, we wouldn’t wait for the Germans to ask us to depart. The fact is that the message of hostility to America that is coming out of Europe at the moment is being broadcast by an opinion and political elite. It would be imprudent to assume that this reflects a diminution of the affection for America, and its role in World War II and the Cold War, that abides in large numbers of ordinary Europeans. France may now be robustly in the appeasement camp, and the Social Democratic government in Germany may be going wobbly (the big victories by the CDU in the state elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony signal this may not be permanent). But America does have other friends, and Mr. Bush will meet the premier of one of them today.