Europe Unforsaken

Countering the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, has become somewhat of a parlor game at Turtle Bay. Yet we rarely see as powerful a retort to the Kremlin’s set of false justifications, twisted historical revisionism, and anti-Western rhetoric as the speech that the foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, delivered Friday. The remarks by the democracy stalwart are masterful. “I’m amazed,” he began, “at the tone and the content of the presentation by the Russian ambassador.” Moscow’s ambassador “said we are prisoners of Russophobia,” Mr Sikorski averred at one point. “‘Phobia’ means irrational fear. Yet, we are being threatened almost every day by the former president of Russia and Putin’s propagandists with nuclear annihilation. I put it to you that it is not irrational — when Russia threatens us, we trust them.” That reminder — not only to Ukraine and Poland, but also to America and the Free World we once were proud to lead — is pertinent as Congress is about to decide whether to stay in the fight.Mr. Sikorski was asked Sunday about that fight and about President Trump’s remark that the Russians could “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that fail to pay their bills. Mr. Sikorski started by telling CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Mr. Trump was right about European deadbeats. Yet he also noted that Poland has long surpassed the agreement reached by the alliance members in 2006, to commit at least two percent of their national output to defense.Challenging the Europeans to honor that commitment was one of Mr. Trump’s most productive campaigns in his first term. Partly because of his nudging — and, of course, as a result of the jolt of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine invasion two years ago — the Europans are starting to up. Collectively, their defense spending for 2024 is $380 billion, up from $235 billion a decade ago. For the first time in decades Europeans will spend on average two percent of their GDP, up from less than 1.5 percent in 2014.Regrettably, though, the wealthiest Euros remain content with their welfare states. In 2023 France was still shy of the two percent goal, with 1.9 percent of its GDP dedicated to defense. Germany did even worse, promising to reach the goal at the end of the decade, but still shy of 1.5 percent. The old Soviet bloc and Greece, however, are ahead now, with Poland leading the pack. In 2023, Warsaw spent a whopping 3.9 percent of GDP on defense, surpassing America’s own 3.45 percent.The upshot is that Europeans finally see the utility of defending themselves — and none too soon. Mr. Trump was right to push our NATO partners to pay their share on their own defense. Yet, some Americans now risk overreacting by a retreat from global leadership. If Congress fails to pass the aid package to Ukraine, “some countries will start hedging, and others will be considering developing their own nuclear weapons programs,” Mr. Sikorski warned in an interview with Bloomberg. If free countries start suspecting that Washington is no longer interested in them, “that would have profound consequences for all of American alliances around the world,” Mr. Sikorski added. Back at Turtle Bay, the Pole said that one of the Russian ambassador’s achievements was “to remind us why we resisted Soviet domination and what Ukraine is resisting now.” The Russians, he said, “failed to subjugate us then, and they’ll fail to subjugate Ukraine and us now.”

Europe Unforsaken

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