The Poland Paradox

How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe

It is difficult to imagine a strategic situation more precarious than that of Poland in 1918.

The newly-independent nation was led by Jozef Pilsudski, a skilled soldier and revolutionary who had been devoted to the cause of Polish sovereignty since his childhood. (He was born four years after 1863’s failed uprising against Russian rule, in which his father had fought.) As the twentieth century dawned, Pilsudski had the foresight to predict that the Russian and German empires would both be shattered in the next general war, and that if Polish radicals waited for the right time to strike, they could win their country’s freedom.

When World War I broke out, Pilsudski raised a contingent of soldiers to fight in the Austro-Hungarian army against the Russians. When Russia fell and the Germans realized Pilsudski’s true aims, they threw him in prison for the remainder of the war, but once Germany had fallen too, Pilsudski was released, arrived in Warsaw to a hero’s welcome, and immediately became Chief of State.

But throughout Eastern Europe, the years following World War I were extremely violent and chaotic. A bevy of newly-independent countries – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Finland, Romania, Jugoslavia, and the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic – all jockeyed for power, put down communist uprisings, and fought small wars amongst each other to settle territorial disputes. To make things worse, only two days after the Armistice, Lenin’s forces reinvaded Poland and several of its neighbors in an attempt to “spread the Bolshevik Revolution” to the former Russian subject nations, whose lands they had faithlessly renounced in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk just nine months earlier.

How was a country like Poland to survive in such circumstances? Jozef Pilsudski thought he knew the answer. He argued that neither Poland nor the other countries in Eastern Europe would be secure unless they joined together in a grand trans-national confederation, modelled after the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Pilsudski called this proposed country Międzymorze, or in Latin, Intermarium, since he hoped it would stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.

Pilsudski’s plan failed. Despite moments of unity when Poland and its neighbors fought off the Red Army, the differences ran too deep. Frequent leadership changes, conflict within Poland between nationalist and pro-Intermarium factions, and border wars – including a few offensives led by Pilsudski himself – combined to scupper the project. The smaller countries were too jealous of their hard-won independence to heed the danger that German and Soviet irredentism still posed. The Western allies refused to lend Intermarium their diplomatic support; too many of their leaders saw Bolshevism as a passing fad, and didn’t want to further weaken Russia, which had been a valuable ally in the Great War.

Successive versions of the Intermarium plan included different countries, as unfolding events brought changes in what seemed possible. But by the time Pilsudski died in 1935, his foreign minister, Jozef Beck, was trying to cobble together a military alliance of just three countries – Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Even that failed, and in the face of German rearmament, Poland at last rested its security on the frail reed of an alliance with the United Kingdom. The treaty of 25 August 1939 specified, among other things, that:

Should one of the Contracting Parties become engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by the latter against that Contracting Party, the other Contracting Party will at once give the Contracting Party engaged in hostilities all the support and assistance in its power.

That, at least, was the public version. The treaty also had a secret protocol saying that “European Power” meant “Germany.” And therein lay the rub – for as everybody knows, Poland was invaded by two European Powers in the month after the treaty was signed, and the second one – the Soviet Union – ended up ruling Poland after the war.

This outcome wasn’t apparent from the beginning, and tens of thousands of Poles, after escaping to Britain, fought in every branch of the British Armed Forces in the hopes of eventually liberating their country. Poles flew Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, escorted convoys through submarine-infested waters, and fought the Axis ground forces in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy. And while popular culture gives British scientists like Alan Turing all the credit for breaking Enigma, in reality these men’s work consisted mostly of building machines to speed up the decryption methods which Polish mathematicians like Marian Rejewski had already discovered.

As the end of the war neared, Winston Churchill had pangs of conscience about leaving Poland as a Soviet client state, and he ordered his general staff to draw up plans to enforce the Yalta Agreement (in which the USSR had promised, with its typical crossed fingers, to hold “free and unfettered elections” in Poland) by launching “Operation Unthinkable.” This was to be a surprise attack on the Red Army, using British, American, and Polish divisions, plus remobilized German POWs fighting for a non-communist Germany. Yet in the end Churchill abandoned the plan, after failing to convince others of its viability in the face of the much more numerous Soviet ground forces.

The fate of Poland was a bitter one, and that fate was shared by all the other Eastern European countries which had failed to heed Jozef Pilsudski’s calls for unity, and which had reaped the same reward – conquest by Germany and the Soviet Union, just as Pilsudski had feared.

If there are lessons to be learned from all of this, then I think that an important one is that small, vulnerable countries should not become too dependent on alliances with large, faraway countries, especially when it might not be in the large country’s interests to go to war on the small country’s behalf.

Have the people who presently set foreign policy for either the United States, or for America’s putative allies, learned anything from Poland’s experiences? Do they refrain from encouraging their putative allies to develop the sort of dependence on faraway saviors that was Poland’s undoing?

There is little reason to be optimistic. Whether one looks at Europe, the Middle East, or the Pacific, every tremor of unrest is met with calls to seek more security guarantees from the United States, or to at least to hold lots of meetings with Americans in order to “strengthen ties.”

It is a commonplace, in the less idealistic schools of foreign policy, to say that “ties” with countries like Finland, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Philippines aren’t in America’s national interests, and that the United States shouldn’t expend blood and treasure in futile attempts to keep rival great powers from dominating their own spheres of influence.

My own take on the situation is somewhat different – I think that America’s repeated decisions to encourage weakness and dependency in “allied” nations has made a lot of countries vulnerable to conquest which otherwise might be standing on their own two feet.

Last September, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources managed to simultaneously anger Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Japan, India, and Russia. How? By publishing a new map of China. This map includes the infamous nine-dash-line, by which China claims almost all of the South China Sea in disregard of the maritime zones of five other countries; it also includes China’s longstanding claims to all of Taiwan and pieces of India, as well as Japan’s Ryukyu islands and a small part of Russia (yes, Russia).

And while China has yet to go to war to enforce these claims, its coast guard routinely uses dazzlers, water cannons, and other not-quite-lethal weapons to drive off other countries’ fishermen from fishing grounds near their own coasts. One notable incident, just a few days before the map kerfuffle, left a Vietnamese fisherman with a broken arm, and sparked loud complaints from Vietnam’s foreign ministry.

Things like this are the reason that I think that the people who talk about the inevitability of Chinese regional hegemony (including “reunification” with Taiwan) are being too pessimistic. China’s bellicosity, and deep-seated inability to relate to other countries as equals, has left it with no real allies in the region. Meanwhile, pretty-much every other east Asian nation has a strong interest in limiting Chinese power. Nor do these nations lack the means to do so – just think about how, according to the World Directory of Modern Military Warships, the combined naval strength of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is roughly equal to that of China.

The fly in the ointment is the United States – specifically, the fact that nearly all of these countries (which are capable of shouldering their own defense burden if they really want to) have done little to coordinate amongst themselves, and have instead responded to each provocation by seeking material aid and friendly gestures from the Americans.

Nor have they raised their own defense spending to a reasonable level – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam each spend between 1.0 and 2.7 percent of GDP on their militaries, while America spends 3.5 percent. Just why the United States should care more about these countries’ defense than they care about it themselves is a question that’s going to be asked uncomfortably often if tensions keep on rising.

Which is not to say that America is an innocent victim of these countries’ freeloading. Rather, their weak and dependent state has been deliberately encouraged, at many key points, by US policy. After World War II, the victorious Allies’ decision to make Japan “renounce war” in its new constitution was motivated as much by plain old racism as by liberal idealism (just look at some caricatures of Japanese people from that time). And it made no sense at all in terms of realpolitik, since every thinking person knew by then whose side Japan was going to be on during the Cold War.

Then there was the decision, by the Reagan Administration, to bully the Taiwanese into giving up their nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. President Reagan justified this with rhetoric about preserving peace and stability in East Asia, but to believe this claim one would have to believe that (1) America’s leaders knew what was best for Taiwan and Taiwan’s leaders didn’t, and (2) contra all previous experience with nuclear weapons, Taiwan’s possessing them would make its enemy more willing to start a war.

I find it much easier to believe that (1) the Reagan administration wanted to appease China for reasons based in bloc geopolitics, and (2) American officials, in their poverty of imagination, couldn’t think forward to a time when the United States might be unable or unwilling to keep the peace in the West Pacific. (Nor was it long before China’s leadership, knowing gullibility when they saw it, had flagrantly broken their own promises not to help Pakistan develop a nuclear weapon).

The upshot of all this is that today, the whole security architecture of the Asian maritime powers is built around a hoped-for American intervention that may or may not arrive. If countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam ever realize that they share a much stronger common interest with each other than with the faraway United States, the stability of the whole region would vastly improve.

This is because everyone would know that if one member of the alliance, such as Taiwan, were attacked, the others would be constrained to join the fight rather than allow themselves to be picked off one by one. And because these countries would have parity with China in air and naval forces, and because China is heavily dependent on easily-interdictable maritime trade for vital resources like oil, the chance of China starting a war under these conditions is very small.

But at the moment, the maritime powers’ security depends on small, dilapidated militaries – for instance, the Philippines have no submarines at all, and two of Taiwan’s four submarines are antiquated American ships built during World War II. And it also depends on a rickety system of alliances in which some countries, like Japan and the Philippines, have explicit security guarantees from the United States, while others, like Vietnam and Taiwan, have to rely on friendly gestures and “strategic ambiguity.”

And we can know that this isn’t a safe or stable arrangement, because we’ve just seen the unravelling of a similar arrangement in Europe.

After the end of the Cold War, the United States began a steady eastward expansion of NATO, needlessly antagonizing Russia – needlessly, because after the breakup of the USSR, the combined nations of Europe (and even just the combined nations of Central and Eastern Europe) had more than enough resources to build a strong defensive alliance without US aid, had they chosen to do so. So the end result was that NATO expansion, instead of making Europe safer, made it more vulnerable by allowing nearly every new NATO country to neglect its military while expecting the far-off Americans to pick up the slack – even though America’s interest in defending Eastern Europe, if push ever came to shove, was dubious.

Then add in the US State Department’s decisions to repeatedly coup Ukraine, leading to a flare-up of separatism by Ukrainians who didn’t recognize the legitimacy of the new government, all culminating in the Russian invasion in 2022. (Installing or propping up a government that is widely viewed as a puppet, and which can’t stay in power without constant foreign support, is the ultimate form of encouraging dependency – a lesson which America’s experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan should have hammered home.)

All throughout this fiasco, America reassured the nations of Eastern Europe that it had their back. But when the day of reckoning came, it all turned out to be hollow.

Despite being the focus of so much material and moral support from the “free world,” not a single allied nation has actually joined Ukraine’s war against Russia.

That the Americans have not done so is no great surprise – after all, America has no strategic interests in that part of the world that would even halfway justify the spilling of American blood in the Donbass. Yet consider the case of nearby countries like Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, which have been even more enthusiastic than the United States in their cheering for Ukraine. This is no surprise, when you think about how long these countries have suffered under Russian and Soviet imperialism, and what a strong interest they now have in halting Russia’s advance before it reaches their own borders. And yet, these countries too have refrained from joining the war on Ukraine’s side.

After all, Poland and its allies have much smaller militaries than Russia does, and their own security depends on an alliance with the United States and the rest of NATO, an alliance whose benefits they would likely be casting away if they joined the war without America’s approval.

Had Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria refrained from joining NATO, and had they made as big a priority out of military readiness as Russia has done, then in all likelihood this war would never have happened. Under those conditions, Russia would have known that it was too risky to challenge the combined might of a united and well-armed Intermarium, a revival of the old alliance that Josef Pilsudski knew was the surest way to keep Eastern Europe free.

But instead, Ukraine, Poland, and their neighbors leaned on the frail reed of the United States and the United Kingdom, faraway allies which talked a big talk about spreading their brand of liberalism around the globe, but which didn’t think too hard about whether it was actually in their own interests to come to the aid of partners who seldom pulled their own weight. And in the end, Vladimir Putin called NATO’s bluff.

Isolationists, and the broader coalition of Americans calling for a more restrained foreign policy, have a hard row to hoe. Most Americans believe, at some level, that it would be a good thing if everyone on earth enjoyed the same freedoms that they enjoy as Americans. And the question of what, if anything, the United States should be doing to effect such a scenario has been a topic of heated debate since the Washington Administration.

For this reason, I think that the realism-and-restraint crowd would do well to replace the callous ‘cut-em-loose’ attitude, which proudly professes indifference to the fates of allied democracies in a post-American world, with a well-reasoned argument that other countries will generally be safer if they’re not permitted to shirk the burden of national defense, and if they’re not led to believe that an alliance with the United States is more important than alliances with nearby countries who actually share their interests.

The details of how this is to be done are beyond the scope of this essay, but the process would need to begin with the United States firmly (but at first secretly) telling its putative allies that they cannot rely on direct American involvement if invaded. At the same time, arms sales should be liberally available to countries like Poland, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Consultative meetings and joint military exercises are OK, but only if they’re conditioned upon more frequent meetings and joint exercises with the country’s immediate neighbors.

And at the end of this path, we may well reach a more durable world order based on national sovereignty, regional partnerships, and the preservation of democracy and human rights in those countries whose citizens are really committed thereto. It would be an order that both George Washington and Josef Pilsudski could be proud of, and one in which Americans contemplating military service would not need to fear that their blood would someday be shed in vain.