A Defense-Spending Renaissance in Poland

Poland’s military expansion plans would make the country Europe’s leading military power by raising its long-term defense spending target from the current 2.4% to 5% of gross domestic product. Warsaw wants to increase spending to 3% of GDP as early as next year to kickstart an armament overhaul as well as a huge expansion in troop numbers to 400,000 from 150,000.

Europe’s cost-of-living crunch and looming recession, fueled by a Continentwide energy crisis, cast a shadow over these plans. Poland reported negative GDP growth in the second quarter of 2022, and most European politicians are more concerned with getting through the winter than making systematic changes to defense policy.

Yet beyond the acute economic pressures, Warsaw’s long-term military goals are the first signs of a necessary restructuring of the European security environment. Decades of neglect in military investments have become a source of regret among some European countries. The spending shortfall was high on the agenda at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Prague on Aug. 30. Czech Defense Minister

Jana Černochová

condemned Europe’s longstanding reluctance to invest in its own security, which she said relied on the false assumption that the end of the 20th century’s struggles had “ended conflicts in our region.”

Ukraine is now facing the costs of that complacency, as Europe’s dearth of defense investment limits the military aid it can send to Kyiv. Czech Prime Minister

Petr Fiala,

for example, informed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in June that his country had already exhausted its supply of available weapons.

Meanwhile, the EU’s own protection is again being outsourced to Washington. A beefed-up U.S. troop presence is effectively plugging the holes in NATO countries’ military capabilities. The number of American service personnel has increased by over 20,000 since February, with more to come in Romania and the Baltic states and a permanent base is to be established in Poland.

Yet as Mr. Kaczyński suggested, relying on American protection won’t be sustainable in an era of unpredictable international conflict. Mr. Putin’s accusations that NATO is an instrument of U.S. foreign policy must be countered by ensuring that member countries can fight independently for the alliance’s values.

This necessity is more pressing in Eastern Europe than anywhere else. It’s here that a military blow against the Continent would be most likely to fall—and where social divisions over alignment with the West are deepest. Many in countries such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia are uncomfortable with their governments’ pro-Western policies and pin hard economic times on the level of support they’re providing to Ukraine. In an antigovernment protest this month in Prague, 70,000 people called for the country to leave the EU and NATO. Mr. Fiala says the demonstration was motivated by “strongly pro-Russian attitudes.”

Celebrations of the collectivist impulse fostered by the war are offset by uneasiness about the claimed inability of these small Eastern European states to direct their own international affairs. Critics, such as Slovak opposition leader

Robert Fico,

suggest responses to the war prove that these nations have merely switched sides to become pawns of the West in the unending tussle for dominance waged by the world’s superpowers.

Continued dependence on American military protection is a manifestation of this alleged powerlessness. Even though the foreign security guarantee is in place precisely to preserve national self-determination in Europe, the dependence itself may be construed as a symptom of foreign dominance.

There’s a political imperative for Eastern Europe to become militarily self-sufficient without jeopardizing the international cooperation that gives NATO its strength. The region will remain socially riven between West and East as long as it labors under a sense of geopolitical dependency that molds old resentments into new forms. As the Polish government has realized, the creation of a powerful Eastern European military deterrent would establish a crucial pillar of regional self-respect within the Western alliance.

Mr. Nattrass is a British journalist and commentator based in Prague.